I had the good fortune of being born his brother

My older Bro is not only my best friend, but the person i’m closest to and want to spend my time with.

   

I just answered this Featured Question; you can answer it too!

Not had time to write the more wordy Blogs i’ve got planned so i’ll just pop some more pics up.

My mum came in today very excited and dragged us all out to see a wonderous flow of mist that was comming over the Loch near our house.

And these other shots were from yesterday…(i think) when the sun was out and everything was sparlky

And also from two days back a lovely but bitterly cold walk into town resulted in these amazing sunset shots

(me and my bro had to go 10miles into town to feed a bunny, someone couldn’t get to :S…i kid you not)

I also (and this is mainly for RockstarJuiceNStarburs) uploaded a video that sort of captures the lovely snow sparkles when it’s sunny and your walking.

 

 

{Not!}

Okay I can exactly say that i’ve added a huge ammount to the world thus far but i have
invented an interesting way of basically twiddling your thumbs (though the thumbs are
only marginally involved)

Here’s what you do:
First off hold both your hands or one hand in front of you and try to bend the tip of
your middle finger, it’s a bit tricky depending on your dexterity but can be done (you
can hold the rest of the fingers in place with your other hand if need be)

Once you’ve done that a bit and felt the range of motion, follow these instructions:
Touch the tips of all of your fingers and thumbs together apart from you middle fingers.
Then let your middle fingers bend forward and touch along thier central section, (the bit
between the second and last knuckle).

Now making sure to keep the middle fingers joined try to bend or move the tips of your middle fingers, somehow this arrangement should paraylise your middle fingers at the tips.

I promise i’ll find something more interesting to blod about soon……but now no matter what it is it’s bound to seem facinating in comparison lol

Okay first off it’s very cold here, perhaps not as cold as some really extreme places but our house has not central heating and with only two fires (one small one in the front room and a big Arga in the kitchen) most of the upstairs is arctic.

The computer room usually has to rely on the computer for warmth and when it’s winter thats just not enough. Right now i’m sitting here with FIR fingerless gloves on, while wearing a Ponch over a Kruta (someking of mongolian over jumper thing, it’s thick and woolen) and a t-shirt and shirt. And although my hands are pretty much numb the rest of me is just about fine.

My bedroom is in a sort of extra bit stuck on our house that has thinner (by half) walls than the rest of the building, And it’s above the bathroom, so it’s basically like a fridge most of the time in there. I can literally see my breath most nights.

All that combined with the fact that up here it’s dark at about 4:00pm (even 3:00 later on) makes it hard to be comfortable when winter decends…..but I still love it

 

And here are a few reasons why, First and foremost the insects are gone and you don’t have to worry about getting savaged if the wind drops during the evening. also it’s much quieter, not that it’s exactly heaving with people up here anyway but still having been used to almost no-one the summer time flood of tourists and geneeral activity is less enjoyable.

But the main reason by far is the clear crispness of a still cold winter day, when the snow has a slight covering of ice and crunches under foot and the low cool yellow sun shines and shimmers off the pale ice blue water.

You can wrap up in many comforting layers of gear and just head out into the stillness, and become enraptured by that magical sense of being the only warmth in a vast landscape, then sense that if you were to stay out over night that your life would be in danger awakens that awe and respect for nature that can often be over looked.

The cold air is clear and bright and as snow covers the usual places and transforms them your imagination can run wild taking hills and walks that you might have walked a hundred times and makeing them new and wonderful all over again. Storms arrive with greater ferocity and make you grateful for your warm house and close family, as you curl up near the fire and are lulled to sleep by the howling of the wind.

And at night when the clouds fade and the sky is filled with stars and the snow glows silver with the moon, you can walk along frozen roads without seeing another soul untill you feel like you’ve passed into another world.

 

A bit rabling perhaps but there are a few good thing about living in the fridge

I woke to the strange grey light barely comming in through the curtains and fridge like cold that could only mean one thing….

So i opened the curtains and…..The world’s gone white. Most times all we get is wet or ice up here but sometimes (and more so thanks to climate change) it snows and usually turns all nice and christmasy overnight.

Here are some shots from today

I’ll write more when it’s not 1:40AM!

For a while now i’ve been messing about with the awesome site Squidoo.

For those of you who don’t know Squidoo is a brilliant idea for a site, that basically lets users build a one page website for Free.

The great part of the idea is that the Squidoo guys are working as affiliates for Ebay, Amazon and Google and for every click they sned and sale those clicks generate the Squidoo company gets a very small payment. Now think about what they’ve got going on with all their users making pages and putting amazon links and google ads.

They even let the users of Squidoo get a share so if you manage to send a customer to Amazon from your Squidoo Lens then you AND the Squidoo guys get a tiny cut, now multiply that to several hundred thousand lenses…..and wow! i wish i’d thought of that business model.

 

But regardless of the ingenuity making Lenses is actually quite fun, and if your goo and make enough of them could be profitable…in a very tiny way.

Here are some of my recent Lenses:

Sam And The Plants (Lovely Hippy Music)

Prince of Persia (A Review of the Games)

FIR Gloves (gloves to save cold hands)

Ho’oponopono (Healing)

e-binauralbeats (My attempts at affiliate marketing)

Blood PC (An old dos game i happen to love)

10Million Clicks for Peace (Changing the world)

Really don’t want to sound ‘salesy’ here but….If anyone is tempted to join Squidoo follow this link and I’ll get $5 Thanks for the 5 Bucks!

And if your already a Lens master yourself post me your Lenses as i always like to check out other cool ideas.

It’s my first picture post!

I sometimes take photos and then mess about with them in Photoshop, particularly photos of my and others shadows. This can create some pretty cool effects but the problem is once you’ve done your own shadow a few times you’ve kinda used it up (shape wise) so if anyone like these effects and is willing to send me a pic of thier shadow i could make one up for you….and also get some different shapes to play with

White Marine: Reminds me of Warhammer the Imperial Guard

LoneFallout: Named after the Fallout games, but it also looks a bit lost in the deserty

Heat: Lovely sense of warmth from this one, in a lonely sort of way.

 

Glowman: Taken on a bumpy road, makes a nice texture.

FirstWave: Makes me think of Nam

FalloutMonsoon: Classic Fallout style image

EnergyLemming: Reminds me of the very early Lemmings dos game, it sort of looked like that in some levels

CyberMan: Very digital feel to this one

Collosus: This one turned out A bit creepy.

Atomic Trooper: Apart from looking pregnant i really like this one, very wasteland.

Aspect Warrior: Named because it looks like an Eldar Guardian from WarHammer

 

Bit misleading title perhaps….

But this is a short post about posts and the ‘do something interesting’ pressure.

I’m really quite new to Xanga and weblogging in general, and i’ve only just managed to aquire some nice Xangans willing to subscribe to be. But along with that lovely warm feeling of seeing those little weekly visits numbers grow, comes a sensation of sadness and concern that anyone comming to my page will be disapointed with the offerings (or lack there of) available.

I’m sure as i get more confidence and manage to come up with something i can go on about i’ll feel better about it but at the moment anyway i sort of want to say sorry for not having ‘more’ to offer.

I also realise much more just how impressive the big Xangans are. If i saw over a hundred visits per week i’d freak out! and i’m sure that many of you must have pasted 100 ages ago, so basically 1 i’m sorry my post have yet to take any coherant form and I hope that in the future i shall come up with something of value to share, but either way I am very grateful to everyone who has taken the time to visit.

And 2 (and most importantly) a BIG well done for comming up with all the awesome content! And that goes for all the big Xangans that keep up comming back for more, You Guys and Gals Rule! 

There were three major high points this weekend…oh maybe four.

First on Saturday I went for a lovely walk to a forestry close by, (i took some pics that you can see in my album ‘autumn’) it was a beautiful day and the walk was nice after spending several days infront of a computer.

Second was enjoying the wonderful silence of Sunday, where i live it’s very rural so on sunday there just no sound atall it’s like being the only human on the planet.

Third was having a really nice convo with my dad about music and various interesting things.

And the fourth only just happened, while i was listening to Computer Love by Kraftwerk for the gajillionth time and making a website, it started to go really well and i managed to make some good progress.
   

I just answered this Featured Question; you can answer it too!

For almost all my life I have had various different imagined worlds that I spend many hours inhabiting depending on my mood or the situation.

Usually I’ll have maybe 2 or 3 on the go, at the moment I have 3 major ones which are:

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First and longest running is a Fantasy Medieval world with magic and monsters where a character very similar to me but not the same (I’m never sure just how much impact the regular visualization of these things would effect me if it were me in them) is brought through from ‘this’ world to the fantasy world to come to the aid of a hero (who is of course a beautiful woman) The woman is a hero with a quest and heroic party who are just about to depart on a grand adventure, an adventure that the woman’s father a very famous hero died trying to complete.

So her and her brother are going to take up the quest of their father and complete it in his name, but this is a big task as their father and mother where great adventurers and they are comparatively inexperienced.

But that’s all just the long setup. This Story has gone on for ages and there are several detailed characters with history and various flaws and abilities, I’ve so far completed the first quest and been on at least two follow on quests, of course the heroine and the summoned character have fallen in love and there have been various tribulations.

But the main plan for this MindGame was to do it as slowly as possible and imagine every detail even mundane ones like walking, I sort of have stuck with that but not religiously.
This one I usually only do when I don’t have other distractions and I can really put some attention on it, or when I’m going to sleep.

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The next one is a Sci-fi story set on the Black Stone Space Salvage Station:
It’s a pretty standard Firefly sort of feeling space drama with a small group of characters 6 in total and charts various events and interactions.

In this there’s no-one similar to me, in fact the main character (not that there really is one) is a woman.
This Game is quite different from others that I’ve done in that it’s very dream like and stylised and really only works if I’m listening to music, which is pretty much the only time I do it.

When it dose go thought it’s really quite good and flows really well. The theme of the world is loneliness and trust between a small group.
It also has some long running intrigue as one character has some kind of alien technology that basically makes him a god which he is hiding from the government.

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And the third is a slightly sci-fi (mostly alternate reality)  post-apocalyptic story:
In this world the entire environment has been devastated by chemicals produced by rampant over production by super corporations, and as they grew bigger and less and less resources were available they began to fight each other, and now there are only two left.
The world is dead everything is covered with various harmful chemicals, it rains acid, the rivers flow with acid. And worst of all the companies have re-animated corpses with cyborg implants to create zombie soldiers to fill out the dwindling human ranks, these creatures now swarm the world and are barely controlled they will attack anything (but do have vague sides) and can transform humans into more of themselves (they are just a sci-fi zombie basically).
In this world communication is hard and not very long range so they use message runners who are pretty much unaffiliated with the war because they struggle enough with the day to day living in the wastes, but they do have sides and are very careful when venturing between lines, they are often blamed for spying and can be targets for both sides.

The characters in the game are two of the runners a man and a woman who are from different sides and meet while delivering a rare and unusual message between the two corporations.

The story is that a meteorite is going to hit the ea rth and kill everyone so the two corporations decide to work together to use some of the last remaining technology powerful enough to launch something at it and deflect it (or something not got to that bit yet)
The action follows these two runners as they first of all meet then deliver the message and then follow and guide one of the corporations to meet up and save the world!

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Well that’s all of the detailed ones I’ve currently got going, not sure why I’ve written them all out I suppose that’s the most interesting thing I could think of sharing lol

Anyone else do this sort of thing in their spare time? Or do other people actually have real lives?