#53

Whoa!

I went to see The Maze Runner on the Finnish premiere night, last Friday. I was expecting good things because some fan accounts I've followed on Twitter/tumblr. and elsewhere were happy with the movie, and it got semi-good critic ratings online as well. I went with 8 friends to a showing that started at 11PM.

It was  s o  g o o d. I just... what. I'm super glad about the postponed release date (from February to September 2014) if it led them to be able to make it this good. My neck and leg muscles were actually sore the next day, because I was tensing my muscles like 90% of the runtime. And I already knew what was going to happen. Some of my friends were super into it too - the movie was just really intense all the way through. I don't know, probably some fans who are more "purists" at nature when it comes to film adaptations probably were a bit disturbed by the differences between the movie and the book, but I think it was a working, whole storyline. Sure, I missed the amoeba-like Grievers I'd imagined in the books, the "floating Maze" illusion, the surveillance critters (and the goddamn telepathic connection between Thomas and Teresa, what happened to that?) but I was still really impressed with the movie. I left the theatre feeling really mindblown, and I really want to go see it again! We also received some discount coupons for movie tickets, I'm internally debating whether to use them for Dracula Untold or another run of TMR.

Here are some pictures of the Gladers because why not.

Also, just saying, I thought the casting all around was really good. I was expecting the main cast to be good, but they actually did deliver really well. Especially Blake Cooper (Chuck) and Ki-Hong Lee (Minho) were super accurate to my character headcanons. I obviously enjoyed the other main Gladers' characterisations as well (Aml Ameen as Alby, Thomas Brodie-Sangster as Newt, Will Poulter as Gally, Kaya Scodelario's Teresa etc.). I just still can't get over the fact that Thomas was supposed to be "ugly as a piece of fried liver on a stick" and he's played by Dylan. AHAHA. I mean, don't get me wrong, Dylan is great, so was his performance, and obviously Hollywood isn't going to put an "ugly" person in the lead of this kind of hero-lead YA franchise. But still. Still.

I literally have nothing else to talk about, to be honest. This week we have the elections for our church council representatives, and I'm gonna vote for someone I know (surprise). I'm not that knowledgeable about how much sway the council members actually have over real issues, but at least I'll know that if they get to vote on some issue that I care about, I've tried to put someone in there whose stance on major issues I can be semi-sure of. 

What else is going on this week? The first half of my work placement will be past by the end of the week (5 weeks down, 5 to go!) and I'm feverishly trying to get my latex horns ready by the time Halloween comes around on Friday. We still don't know what we're going to do, though. Oh well. 

Tip for people who are planning on making latex prosthetic pieces: don't just mold it how you like according to your face and imagination. Make sure that shit can stand up by itself, because having to paint latex alternatively between two sides of the clay support fucking sucks.

This has been a PSA. 

Bye! 

#52

Hey!

I'm writing from work placement again, surprise surprise. It's just that since I'm on my laptop 8 hours a day most of the time and I also have to carry it back and forth whenever I come to work, I don't really feel like setting it up at home in between...

The Maze Runner finally premieres in Finland this Friday. I'm so pumped, you would not believe. I mean, even Rotten Tomatoes gave it 60%+ rating consensus, which is pretty good for what is essentially "another YA dystopia trilogy". I mean, the critics decide if it's rotten or a tomato and they tend not to be the biggest fans of the more teenager-y franchises. (I don't know what the terms for "mostly good"/"pretty much horrible" categories are on RT but whatever.) From the limited amount of tweets and things I've not managed to avoid about TMR, I have the impression that fans liked it but some people thought the directors etc took a little too many artistic liberties? Pretty par of the course for a book-to-film adaptation, to be honest. So the movie might be great or might be horrible. I really want to give the novels another read, but right now I have a ridiculous pile of fantasy books from the library, so I kind of need to read through those first... damn.

I updated to iOS 8.1 and I got the Camera Roll back! Hashtag happy camper. Also what on earth is up with the "recently deleted" folder? When deleting pictures is such a pain to do manually on the iPhone, did it really make sense to Apple to literally keep any deleted image or video for 30 days before it's automatically removed from the phone's memory? I actually had 2Gb's worth of deleted videos and pictures in there, because I hadn't realised that everything actually stays in that folder. Sigh. Oh well, at least there's a "delete all" option for that folder, so you don't really have to do the same process twice. So there's that. My kaomoji shortcuts still refuse to function in most of my social media apps, though. DEVELOPERS PLEASE FIX THIS I NEED STUPID KAOMOJIS LIKE I NEED OXYGEN.

Okay, I know I try to stick to proper grammar on this blog but I feel like the struggle merited a Caps'd sentence, so bear with me on this exceptional day.

I still have no idea what I should do about my thesis. Oops. I'm hoping I can get some tips from teachers the next time I'm going to be on campus... Last year, they had a table available for download with various research subjects that different parties had asked for the school to commission for them. It had all the information - what kind of resources and/or possible pay or funding would be available, when they wanted it done, what they wanted the researching student to be specialising in - and you could contact the people commissioning the research directly. But the only interesting subject on that iteration of the subject table was due the end of this year, which is obviously much too soon considering my thesis schedule. Also I'm pretty sure most of the represented subjects had already found students to do or compile research for them.

I'm looking forward to Halloween a lot this year as well! We sort of have costumes that go together with J & J. I need to start working with the latex to make my horn prosthetics, though! I'm probably going to do a mini-tutorial of a blog post about that here, too, at some point. Probably won't be early enough for anyone to use it this Halloween, but learning about building latex pieces might be useful for someone? Who knows.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. I'll go back to pretending I'm working now, ha ha.

Bye!

#51

I'm so weirded out that there are at least some views on my posts right now, what even.
Thanks for being interested, I guess? I'd thought this blog was public since almost a year ago, but apparently it wasn't - so the Star Lord Post of Doom also changed that, in a way.

I'm still at my work placement/trainee office, but now I've actually got some projects underway.
I've worked with some clients and we're fleshing out a plan for how to reach the clients that need the work the Multicultural Women's Association is doing. We're going to be visiting Finnish language courses and maternity clinics around the Helsinki Metropolitan area, and introducing the kinds of help and support you can get through the organisation. The clients still show up kind of unpredictably, because the Resource Centre / offices moved to a different part of what is essentially the central area about a month ago.

I bought Shadow of Mordor but I couldn't play it - fail! I didn't even realise it had a mandatory requirement of a 64bit Win OS. Oh well, my dad's upgrading his home office computer soon, and the old one has a 64bit Windows as well as a better graphic card than my gaming PC, so I guess SoM is going to be on my roster within the next month or so. We might end up having both of the computers running simultaneously, so that we don't have to do as much file transferring, though. Ha.

Before I knew there was this kind of easier solution to the gaming PC crisis, I researched a bit about gaming PC builds. I found one that seemed interesting - I think that when I get my own apartment fo' reals, I'm going to build one from scratch. I don't know yet, probably I'll have to prioritise my spending at that point even though I have some money saved up.

Also it might be super handy that J's ex-boyfriend is an electronics technician and he figured out her gaming PC build which is badass so... maybe I can recruit him to help me with my build, too. 

I really have no need to buy the latest, most expensive technology - in most cases, the benefits of the latest model in comparison to the second- or third-latest versions of graphics cards and other components is pretty minimal when you take into account the amount of extra money you have to pay for them. Electronics "age" quickly so even a minor decrease in efficiency and a period of, say, a year after release, will significantly decrease the components' price.

Okay, /lecture. Anyway, I'm going back to trying to figure out what I could do today before a functional/practical group session this afternoon.

Bye!

#50

Wow, making post 50 seems so anticlimatic after the epic madness of that last cosplay post, to be honest.

Also I'm actually at my work placement right now, but I don't have anything else to do at the moment so that's that. 

This field of work is super interesting to me - the clients are mainly women with immigrant backgrounds who have been or are victims of violence. I just feel pretty inadequate on most days. Oh well, I've barely been here a week and I'm a trainee so I'm sure I can live with myself even after this. Being that I'm studying to become a social worker, essentially, I can still help the English and/or Finnish-speaking clients to communicate with the social welfare office, fill out forms and stuff. That's basically what I'm educated for, anyway. Also, as a trainee I probably couldn't join the actual workers here for the more crisis-heavy client meetings anyway, since a trainee's position shouldn't include those kinds of responsibilities. I'm learning a lot too, even though not all of it is related to violence, exactly. Ha.

Usually our work placement consists of 7 hour days at the work placement location and 1 hour of independent work a day. Since this Resource center is open 8 hours a day, I'm usually here for the whole time. Because my work placement is going to last 10 weeks, I'll gain enough extra hours that I can take some whole days off to do school assignments and such things.

I also need to figure out my thesis subject, whoa. I need to start asking around everywhere, basically. I'm supposed to present a plan for how I'm going to execute the thesis work this fall, and so far I have no idea. Again, since I'm not particularly interested in any subject or have any really good expertise for a certain portion of the social work field, it's kind of tough to get the process going. I suppose I'll have to start consulting with teachers, eh.

What else... oh, my Only Lovers Left Alive DVD arrived! Haven't had time to rewatch it on that, yet. According to the DVD cover it got really good ratings! I'm not surprised, really. I really enjoyed it even though I was rather sceptical when I originally went to see it. With this newcomer, I now have 7 full movies for our upcoming Hiddles marathon - and that's without counting his Marvel Cinematic Universe films (which, duh, I also own).

Also, something that arriving packages reminds me of - these arrived for the Star Lord cosplay! The walkman isn't fully functional (neither of its headphone jacks actually enables you to hear music) but it'll do just fine for a Star Lord prop!

Sony WM-F1, circa 1979 and some random
orange headphones.

The Walkman I bought is actually a bit different from the Sony Walkman TPS-L2 model that Star Lord has, but seriously? Marvel/Disney/Sony (I don't really know who's making them) is selling custom TPS-L2 Walkmen for completely ridiculous prices so I ordered a similar model and will be looking into painting it light blue and doing the decals on top. I found this one person who makes vinyl stickers for this exact purpose, so maybe I'll order those from them. 

Anyway, I think that's all for now! I might update here about how the work placement and thesis business progresses. Hm.

Bye!