tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59736327335841205592024-02-07T03:10:52.232+00:00Nine Over FiveAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.comBlogger460125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-65659379236445865412018-12-31T17:45:00.001+00:002018-12-31T17:45:42.979+00:00Raincheck I am gonna make that post about my new productivity tactic, but I'm in a bit of bind with that.<br />
<br />
I want to show off the completed thing so far, but I'm waiting on something for it.<br />
<br />
So I'll make the post when I have the item I need to finish off the bits I've got.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-68910609247705595592018-12-07T17:50:00.000+00:002018-12-07T17:50:08.800+00:0020k/5 Days: An Experiment The structure of NaNoWriMo was something I really got into this year. I had tough points, but no matter the blow to my mood, or my word count, I managed to pull it back and get a win.<br />
<br />
Part of that, I think, was the method I developed (with great help from Sue, one of my region's Municipal Liaisons) of treating blocks of time as word wars, or, in my case, sprints.<br />
<br />
I learned that I can do five hundred words in half an hour pretty consistently, and with that strategy in use, I managed to do three thousand a day on my best solo days (Write In days were usually better because of writing in more than one place and in a social setting).<br />
<br />
With NaNo over, and a supplementary short story <i>and </i>my project from last year still unfinished, I felt a little bereft with no challenge.<br />
<br />
I was as Alexander, I wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.<br />
<br />
So I made my own.<br />
<br />
As it is my wish to be a professional writer, a daily minimum word count for non-NaNo times is something that I need to develop.<br />
<br />
With a successful NaNo behind me, I decided to think big, and so, I committed to spending the next five days, starting Monday, on writing twenty thousand words.<br />
<br />
Wish me luck, and do not weep for me if it all goes tits up.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Monday</h3>
<div>
<b> Day's Word Count:</b> 4063</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Log</b></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Phew, today was a hard start.<br />
<br />
I felt pretty good at the beginning, got an early start and had my first thousand words done by quarter past nine. (I woke up at five, these things happen.)<br />
<br />
I ended up taking a long break after, about forty five minutes, and I feel like this may have been a mistake. I felt like I was flagging pretty early on during my third block for the day.<br />
<br />
Block four forty five minutes later wasn't too bad, though.<br />
<br />
Blocks five and six came in rapid succession after lunch, that flagging feeling disappearing pretty fast.<br />
<br />
With the end of block six came the end of the last short story I wrote to fill up my NaNoWriMo 50k. So long Lesbian Witch Romance (working title, I promise.)<br />
<br />
Now, strictly speaking, I had a thousand words left for the day. It's the 500/30 method I mentioned above, after all.<br />
<br />
However, I spent the better part of two hours feeling way too intimidated to get back into the novel that had been my white whale since the end of last November.<br />
<br />
(Out of about sixty eight thousand words, forty six thousand were written in NaNo17. Twenty two thousand over eleven months is <i>pretty</i> dire, I think.)<br />
<br />
So my seventh block was just 250/20 to try and ease myself back into it, which worked pretty well, ended up with three hundred and forty, not too shabby.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, though, the last block was back to 500/30 and I under performed by about two hundred words.<br />
<br />
No matter, though, I made up the shortfall to the total 4k for the day shortly after.<br />
<br />
Not the most brilliant start, but a start it is. Hopefully I can continue to build momentum on TWoA tomorrow.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Tuesday</h3>
<br />
<b> Day's Word Count:</b> 4042<br />
<br />
<b>Running Total:</b> 8105<br />
<br />
<b>Log</b><br />
<br />
Why am I doing this to myself?<br />
<br />
Well, the good news is that I managed to get the first four blocks done with little trouble, under performed a little on block four, but not by enough to really put a dent into my progress.<br />
<br />
Block five is when I really started feeling the burn. I under performed slightly again, but it felt like a struggle in a way the previous four hadn't.<br />
<br />
Block six was an out and out failure, I put it off for hours and got less than half what I wanted to.<br />
<br />
Seven only came, with less of that burned out fog mind, after a half hour on my exercise bike. The blood being pumped a little harder helped clear the malaise.<br />
<br />
Since Six was a wash, I had six hundred words left over, and by this point it was five thirty, so I filled up the rest of those by starting something silly and indulgent.<br />
<br />
Finally finished that at about twenty past nine. I am a mess and want to go to bed.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Wednesday</h3>
<br />
<b>Day's Word Count:</b> 0<br />
<br />
<b>Running Total: </b>8105<br />
<br />
<b>Log</b><br />
<br />
I woke up today feeling exhausted and dreading getting up. I stayed in bed past the time I'd already written five hundred words avoiding the day.<br />
<br />
Now it's twenty five past one and I have failed to write a single word. If I manage to write anything, I will note it in an addendum, but my hopes are not high.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Thursday</h3>
<br />
<b>Day's Word Count:</b> 538<br />
<br />
<b>Running Total:</b> 8643<br />
<br />
<b>Log</b><br />
<br />
So I ended up sleeping in until ten. Apparently I was that tired.<br />
<br />
I wrote one block after brunch, but didn't really feel the need to push myself to write more. Instead I actually did some housework.<br />
<br />
After such severe burn out, I'm satisfied with that count for the day. I will, however, try to get more done tomorrow.<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Friday</h3>
<br />
<b>Day's Word Count:</b> 1623<br />
<br />
<b>Running Total:</b> 10266<br />
<br />
<b>Log</b><br />
<br />
Well, I woke up on time and got three blocks done in the morning (although a bit later than Monday and Tuesday to start and took a long break).<br />
<br />
Fifteen hundred was really what I wanted to do as a minimum today, and might have managed more if my Mum hadn't given me the change jar. So any possibility of writing died in the face of counting out well over a thousand coins.<br />
<br />
(It was a worthwhile exercise.)<br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Conclusion</h3>
<br />
Twenty thousand in five days was just far too ambitious.<br />
<br />
Just way too much to do.<br />
<br />
While I had achieved numbers higher than four thousand in a single day during NaNoWriMo, they tended to be spread out and at least partly done in a social setting.<br />
<br />
I think about a thousand a day is a good minimum for me personally (at least during a 'work day') and three thousand is a number that is definitely achievable on a day to day basis.<br />
<br />
Doing original writing in the morning and dedicating the afternoon to editing writing blog posts, or artistic pursuits may be the optimal method of organising my weekdays.<br />
<br />
Currently I'm not actively editing anything, so that will need to be tested in the New Year.<br />
<br />
Until the end of December, I'm going to take it easy.<br />
<br />
Despite NaNoWriMo being successful, I had a pretty rough time of it last month.<br />
<br />
Some personal issues, the DWP screwing me over, and the change of seasons laying me low as per annual tradition. all made my NaNo success a surprise to me.<br />
<br />
The New Year is something I'm particularly looking forward to because I'm going to be trying a new method to help organise my life and improve my productiveness (hopefully enough to get out of the hell hole that is the jurisdiction of the DWP).<br />
<br />
I plan to cover that at a later point in the month.<br />
<br />
As for now, have a nice weekend, everyone!</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-68058174409808721442018-12-05T10:00:00.000+00:002018-12-05T10:00:06.135+00:00National Novella Writing Month<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqMHSRMffAyfgAFAjQ7I_lCqkY_OyVPAqDMCAogDUw_g1m5hBNiGCK5-CNcehkoYskk0xYOom5rjhkZXL0bX_xtkDs1vJE-Js8pE9Llsgx5SrjLoQRDJVVP3ZcAsSUfk_wxOnHLk16Q_c6/s1600/mctg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1133" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqMHSRMffAyfgAFAjQ7I_lCqkY_OyVPAqDMCAogDUw_g1m5hBNiGCK5-CNcehkoYskk0xYOom5rjhkZXL0bX_xtkDs1vJE-Js8pE9Llsgx5SrjLoQRDJVVP3ZcAsSUfk_wxOnHLk16Q_c6/s640/mctg.png" width="449" /></a></div>
<br />
This is the first, unedited, line of my NaNoWriMo project this year titled<i> More Canals than Giza</i>.<br />
<br />
It's only tangentially related to the rest of the novel, as the story begins with workaholic Tonina Lagoria breaking out of her work groove as an illustrator in the wee hours of the morning.<br />
<br />
After that point, she is swept up in a story of aliens coming to Earth and running into a cute guy.<br />
<br />
My inspiration for this story was based entirely around my irrational worry that a pale face will pop up outside my window in the dead of night.<br />
<br />
Or rather, considering the somehow less terrifying thought of a dark skinned face popping up outside of that window.<br />
<br />
Attached to a person, not just a disembodied face. It's not like Idris Elba's visage decided to go for a post midnight walk without the rest of him.<br />
<br />
(In that instance I'd still scream like it was a pale face, but I'd also be charmed. He's very handsome.)<br />
<br />
So this entire plot was born of coming up for a legitimate (as in logically consistent <i>and</i> not crime based) reason for someone to be in your back garden at two o'clock in the morning.<br />
<br />
All I could think of was running away from some threat, and my brain supplied giant alien cats as said threat.<br />
<br />
Which I am so glad my brain supplied because writing this story was a lot of fun.<br />
<br />
I'm both seriously looking forward to January to begin revising the story, and dreading it, because I've never edited anything this long before.<br />
<br />
For my sins, this is the first finished draft of anything longer than a short story I've ever managed. Even though it's only about 35k long, it's still an intimidating length for a novice like myself.<br />
<br />
So, with the writing relatively fresh in my mind, here are things I want to address in the edit:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>Giving currently nameless characters names.</li>
<li>Improve the romance</li>
<li>Improve the humour</li>
<li>Improve the deeper social commentary (that there is. It's not much, tbf)</li>
<li>Improve the ending</li>
<li>More descriptive detail for Tonina and other characters</li>
<li>Drive home Stephen the Newsreader losing his goddamn mind</li>
<li>More horror elements</li>
</ol>
<div>
I'm pretty satisfied with the first draft and keeping these points in mind to improve it for the second.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I mean, honestly, if it had been a white guy in her back garden, Tonina probably would have assumed he was a ghost and left him there to die.<br />
<br />
I know I would.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-57663124076694063232018-12-03T10:00:00.000+00:002018-12-03T10:00:08.751+00:00Post NaNo Blues So, another year, another NaNoWriMo has passed.<br />
<br />
Same old, same old, right?<br />
<br />
Wrong!<br />
<br />
This year I actually managed to pull it off!<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjml38dduZQmgnXXvgc8DcOWgnx5Rfs30oXEu0EI6l35Uhyphenhyphen2PxBbvj-ThNqku1njnUBDD7mf_1W8AS4VfGymgJc98OibXhSeMOOyzCgv5D0ROeNISPgO6pNuWvXAe3P2e_cTa3aD0aIeDKV/s1600/Screenshot+%25283%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="318" data-original-width="503" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjml38dduZQmgnXXvgc8DcOWgnx5Rfs30oXEu0EI6l35Uhyphenhyphen2PxBbvj-ThNqku1njnUBDD7mf_1W8AS4VfGymgJc98OibXhSeMOOyzCgv5D0ROeNISPgO6pNuWvXAe3P2e_cTa3aD0aIeDKV/s400/Screenshot+%25283%2529.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A winner is me.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
I feel like a proud mother.<br />
<br />
And like any mother, not everything I did is worth a damn, but this is a risk of any creative process.<br />
<br />
Including making people.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately.<br />
<br />
This year I didn't do one long novel I haven't finished.<br />
<br />
No!<br />
<br />
This year I managed to create a complete story.<br />
<br />
More than one, actually.<br />
<br />
Yeah, my initial idea couldn't hold on for a full fifty thousand words, so I ended up having to supplement my word count with a few short stories.<br />
<br />
Three, to be exact.<br />
<br />
Two I have finished, and a third that still needs to be completed.<br />
<br />
In the spirit of sharing, I shall leave the first lines of each of these four stories below in a suitably <i>aesthetic</i> manner.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<br />
(I'll make a separate post about the novella that I ran out of thirty five thousand words into the month on Wednesday.)<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcHodOoZBjhXIc4VMZxVsyOVUeHw1Xj86d0ZbBTmMXuBSh62DFcJFMIiSEcxlbK2LKL9UMx-lh1NXb0SZSRh69qp2G6iDUTbraRp5N3bUzRzgvoINEDv7OW0XYHCFyndt1Qhe0ccH-fUyb/s1600/mctg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1133" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcHodOoZBjhXIc4VMZxVsyOVUeHw1Xj86d0ZbBTmMXuBSh62DFcJFMIiSEcxlbK2LKL9UMx-lh1NXb0SZSRh69qp2G6iDUTbraRp5N3bUzRzgvoINEDv7OW0XYHCFyndt1Qhe0ccH-fUyb/s640/mctg.png" width="449" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Novella</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBqgpGMcQ2d4HLuyTT-VF0cN54rd-xT3tnjeq-EUZjEBX1MlLaKNMjDW9C2JzhKIsNkXW_zfpGISC8eEZXpXrJwlpBubkwVvDj5LFcV6IOsOiWsRhXsZ1UILIuDR-L25dRntU4tVecopt3/s1600/dcbs.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="685" data-original-width="800" height="547" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBqgpGMcQ2d4HLuyTT-VF0cN54rd-xT3tnjeq-EUZjEBX1MlLaKNMjDW9C2JzhKIsNkXW_zfpGISC8eEZXpXrJwlpBubkwVvDj5LFcV6IOsOiWsRhXsZ1UILIuDR-L25dRntU4tVecopt3/s640/dcbs.png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Short Story One</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQVxL5e4hwrS1xA8db10GR_-XyAvVSPGARGBLB3DAfHwQ_3U0SabDwpPvDdVb8MitYbzJv5_-vh_2At-FDESUgPscdXAX4VGqk6058LGZUByVez5pMmfN_XTv1w6xQcoJO-OtJBWI56jXY/s1600/MSR3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="975" data-original-width="800" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQVxL5e4hwrS1xA8db10GR_-XyAvVSPGARGBLB3DAfHwQ_3U0SabDwpPvDdVb8MitYbzJv5_-vh_2At-FDESUgPscdXAX4VGqk6058LGZUByVez5pMmfN_XTv1w6xQcoJO-OtJBWI56jXY/s640/MSR3.png" width="525" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Short Story Two</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqmYpa_o9wl0akkicGpHaPee9xZrFKSlhcwi8dML94Q917s-SOJSddhdwlPtrfUQ_5pHgtUK1WG40q_YWRjNAalFUViZ_J-KMsBEQx53hBQekuK4XLEEz9Eiu2kwbZ2_uvUvTiJbnrUdr5/s1600/LWR.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="800" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqmYpa_o9wl0akkicGpHaPee9xZrFKSlhcwi8dML94Q917s-SOJSddhdwlPtrfUQ_5pHgtUK1WG40q_YWRjNAalFUViZ_J-KMsBEQx53hBQekuK4XLEEz9Eiu2kwbZ2_uvUvTiJbnrUdr5/s400/LWR.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Short Story Three</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Honestly, I was going to write about how I felt like I had no direction any more, but doing these <i>aesthetic</i> images has really kept me occupied for the last two days.<br />
<br />
Especially that first one.<br />
<br />
So much tiiiime.<br />
<br />
It was fun, though.<br />
<br />
I suppose what I'm really planning to do next is work on creating a sustainable work flow.<br />
<br />
A daily word count, a work day, as working week.<br />
<br />
That sort of thing.<br />
<br />
This last NaNoWriMo was not only successful in terms of getting the full 50k, but also in that I felt like I had a productive workflow. I didn't have that ideal of a work day every day, but for a few days, i really felt like I did, so that's what December is all about, creating a sustainable working life.<br />
<br />
And part one of that is an ambitious project to achieve a further 20k in five days.<br />
<br />
(I didn't manage to finish short story three, and last year's NaNo project is still hanging over my head like a harpy waiting to punish me for my sins. So those are currently a priority.)<br />
<br />
My thought process is that I can work my way to establishing a pair of schedules where I write every day in both, but one gives me more time to focus on editing extant drafts and the other is about creating the dreaded first draft.<br />
<br />
(Also, finishing those fan fictions I started forever ago. Whoops.)<br />
<br />
I'm going to keep track of my progress on this 20k/5 days project (also the name of a Tetsuya Nomura game, btw) on a day by day basis and report my experience at the end of day Friday.<br />
<br />
So, this is an ambitious first week coming back to blogging.<br />
<br />
They don't call me the Slytherin of Blogspot for nothing!<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> They- they just don't call me that at all...</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-8199801042010366682017-09-27T12:42:00.001+01:002017-09-27T12:42:55.626+01:00Manderlay - A Review It occurs to me that I should probably put links to my <a href="http://fissionmailure.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Fission Mailure</a> Reviews up here.<br />
<br />
Last week's review was late, due to hanging out with Doug during the period I should have been watching the film, but it was of <i>Manderlay</i>, the 2005 sequel to a film I previously reviewed called <i>Dogville</i>.<br />
<br />
Here are yon relevant links.<br />
<br />
<h4>
<a href="http://fissionmailure.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/manderlay-2005-sorry-this-is-late-doug.html" target="_blank">Manderlay (2005)</a></h4>
<h4>
<br /> <a href="http://fissionmailure.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/dogville-2013.html" target="_blank">Dogville (2003)</a></h4>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-7846535679928060832017-06-02T01:58:00.000+01:002017-06-02T01:58:28.005+01:00The Lake House Review Supplemental Review here <a href="http://fissionmailure.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-lake-house.html" target="_blank">(x)</a><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAXCvba2uNFPVB50unrrd3dh0lmiuvl_Jpc688OTYunHhE71MWBWKHVSPqhKgjQXuZhC0rUz-tMM3JYxQfNyhASjnJiyNVXbykqP3gHUYJf7zolEzO8yE60pM2gd7EARNvV9pQYVZVHC8w/s1600/70043303.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="405" data-original-width="284" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAXCvba2uNFPVB50unrrd3dh0lmiuvl_Jpc688OTYunHhE71MWBWKHVSPqhKgjQXuZhC0rUz-tMM3JYxQfNyhASjnJiyNVXbykqP3gHUYJf7zolEzO8yE60pM2gd7EARNvV9pQYVZVHC8w/s320/70043303.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>
<br />
You know, the one thing other than 'Keanu Reeves isn't <i>that</i> bad an actor' that was going through my head while I was watching this film was 'this just straight up wouldn't work in Britain'.<br />
<br />
The entire concept of the film is dependent on the two main characters being able to find letters that they leave for each other.<br />
<br />
The letterbox for a British house is in the front door, not on a stick outside of the house.<br />
<br />
Alex would find that first letter from Kate on the doormat and that would be the end of proceedings, because he'd have no way to reply unless the Royal Mail was in on it.<br />
<br />
While I think we can all agree that the addition of time travelling posties would only be an improvement to any film, it's beyond any normal level of suspension of disbelief that everyone in the sorting office would see a letter from the future and not return it to sender for being a bullshit merchant.<br />
<br />
Look, we're British. We don't do that lighthearted quirky shit unless kids are involved.<br />
<br />
And I think it needs to be made clear that Alex would <i>have </i>to put his replies in the postal system. The idea that you could leave a letter for someone else near your house and expect it to be delivered is some weird foreign nonsense, unless you have some blackmail on your postman.<br />
<br />
Even if the Royal Mail did deliver time travel letters (which they wouldn't, mostly on principal and because of cuts), these cutesie conversations between the protagonists would take much, much longer.<br />
<br />
In film, it's instant messaging with real paper, in the British version, they're glorified pen pals. Which wouldn't last for long because they'd both be spending a fortune on stamps.<br />
<br />
Which would be an interesting way to raise revenue, if nothing else.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-83404975485373588812016-11-02T11:01:00.000+00:002016-11-02T11:01:17.288+00:00NaNoWriMo Extract So my sleep patterns been playing me right up these last ten days or so, and I just couldn't think of anything to post about. My apologies for both of these things.<br />
<br />
However, not what the post is about, this post is an extract from yesterday's NaNoWriMo efforts that I fancied showing off.<br />
<br />
It revolves around one of the newer characters in the story, Carwyn.<br />
<br />
(For reference he calls his sister Padi)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><u>In the Shadow of the Stonehearted King</u></span></div>
<br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> He'd decided to name it Padikin.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> It was barely the height of his palm, standing in the awkward arms held straight out from the shoulder position that was depicted in the book on his desk.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> A small sculpture of a girl with pigtails and a long dress made from clay he'd taken from the arts rooms. Padikin didn't have much detail, except for little dot eyes and a smiley mouth on her face and tiny snakes of a necklace and bracelet.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> He'd made her small so she'd be easier to fire, but it made her harder to paint. She had a big black splodge on her right cheek from when he was painting her hair.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> Carwyn thought it made her cuter.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> He re-examined the pages concerning the ancient rites of golem animation. It was complicated, with many glyphs and a strange chant that the book was determined could not be sung.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> He was certain that the T'schdem had streamlined it since the book was written, as it did not need to be as complicated as it was.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> He drew one glyph on the desk in chalk coloured with the blood of a ram. The book called for fresh billy blood, but he couldn't get his hands on that at such short notice. The long dried blood of a similar looking male would have to be enough.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> He placed an inverted plate on top of it and carefully wrote the chant in a circle around it.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> With a knife he wedged the plate up so he could remove it without smudging the chalk.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> A few careful curves and curls to fill in some space and the cirle was finished.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> It didn't look much like the diagram, which was designed to give a general idea and not the actual circle of magic used, that was all straight lines, glyphs and the suggestion of vines. Carwyn's was all organic looking shapes that reflected no actual living thing caught between a glyph and the carefully written chant in the alphabet of the Lords.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> He admired his handiwork and gently placed Padikin in the centre of the circle.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> "Gentle Padikin, sweet child of clay," he sang trailing his finger around the circle before spiralling through it, "to you I give the gift of life."</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> Once his finger reached her feet her turned her with his free hand, causing the chalk on his finger to leave gradually fading marks on her dress. At her shoulder he stopped, pressing his finger tip against her little smiley mouth.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> "As once the gods granted it to man. I wish you a duty of nothing but joy," he crooned before blowing gently into her face, some of the trace of chalk he'd left with his finger blew away.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> Her arms fell to her sides.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> "Padikin?"</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> She tilted her head at him before nodding.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> He smiled widely.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> "Welcome to the world little Padikin, and thank you, I'll be able to revive Southern soon thanks to you."</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> Padikin pushed out her chest and put her little mitten hands on her hips in pride.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> Her pose of triumph didn't last long though, as she started trying to brush off the chalk the second she touched some with her hand.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> Carwyn chuckled and handed her a tiny scrap of cloth.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-90172777562213542252016-10-20T23:07:00.000+01:002016-10-20T23:07:02.508+01:00The Slangebarn (Part Two - Cultural Narrative)<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Long ago in the time before the Lords, there was wise king in the lands of the north.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> She ruled well and protected her people from both invaders and the villains from within.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Her people loved her and the gods blessed the name of King Slange.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Like many powerful monarchs, she struggled to find a suitable helpmeet, a man who would support both her and her kingdom and be able to provide her with an heir.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Many men approached her, but none could be what she and her people needed from a consort. Some were good commanders but little else, some were lovers who lacked the skills to rule, many sought to take her power, and many more were entirely unqualified.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> A sad few, though, they were good men with strong spirits and warm hearts, but could not provide the heirs Slange and her people needed.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Heart broken after turning away another of these suitors, Slange petitioned the gods of her people.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> She asked not for the perfect helpmeet, but for heirs, resigned as she was to that man not existing and wishing to no longer have to turn good men away.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> The gods listened, and two descended in the form of animals, offering to give her children to bear.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Both wished for the child they granted to be her heir, but Slange was as fair to gods as she was to men, she asked to bear both children as twins and would choose her successor from between them.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> The gods agreed, each confident that their child would be fit to rule Slange's kingdom.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Using their magic, they granted Slange the gift of motherhood.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> The people rejoiced the announcement of her quickening, and a great feast of many days was prepared for the birth of the twins.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> When they blessed day came, the first born of the twins was a son Slange named Svan, and she named his sister Alga.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> The children grew to be healthy and strong, and Slange was happy in her motherhood.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> As the twins learned to read and write, a man came to court who caught Slange's eye.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> He was a handsome man who was also wise and caring, and saw no issue with opposing Slange when he did not agree with her.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> She grew more attracted to him by the day, and one day she invited him to her private chambers for a meal.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;">As they ate and drank, she confessed her interest in him, and he replied that he too was attracted to her. He'd come to her court out of admiration and had since, he believed, fallen in love.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> The two began a short and passionate courtship and it seemed to all that knew them that they would be wed within the year.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> The seasons changed, and much sooner than before, Slange felt the quickening.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Before the sun set, the father gods of Svan and Alga descended in animal form once again to confront the pair.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> They spoke of betrayal and lies, not of Slange, but of her paramour. For he was a god in disguise.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> The lie cut Slange deep.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> The father gods of Svan and Alga presented the god with an ultimatum from their king, either the god was to return to heaven and never return to Slange's side, or he could give up his godly powers and status to live along men.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> In a heartbeat, the god gave up everything, becoming the man that Slange had believed he was.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> This act of sacrifice proved to Slange that he never wished to hurt her and she felt that she could forgive him.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> The father gods of Svan and Alga left them, their task completed.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Once the pain of the lie had faded, the pair wed, their honeymoon blessed with Slange's third child. A son she named Earn.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> For many years the family lived happily, until the twins showed signs of adulthood, it was then that they began to compete for their role as heir. The following years saw their competition turn to rivalry and then to fighting.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Slange and her husband tried to stem their conflict, but by the time Earn had earned his manhood it had become irreconcilable.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Svan and Alga could barely stand the sight of each other and their skills in war and rule were evenly matched.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Slange could not choose either of them to take her throne, and her promise to their father gods prevented her from taking the suggestion of Svan and Alga themselves and select Earn as her heir.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Instead she split the kingdom between them, into the land of Alga bordered by Svan's kingdom.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> With no land of his own, and wishing not to choose between his beloved brother and sister, Earn struck out his own path west.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Over the sea he found an island of two nations, with kings who fought and warred constantly, with his experience gained from serving his mother and the fights of his siblings, Earn began to create his own kingdom. He took lands as payment for fighting the northern king for the western one, and his people prospered as they claimed the land.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Before long, he rose and army of his own and pit the kings against each other enough to take as much land as he could before he began to push them back to the north and the west. His success continued until the terrain prevented his expansion to the north and the sharp bite of magic to the west.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> His mother, father and siblings were proud of his accomplishments, and Slange lived out her life the mother of three kings.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Her fate was not the one she had wished and hoped for, but she could not have been happier with it.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> This story is incredibly old, it was old even at the time of the arrival of the Lords, an event recorded as happening two and half thousand years ago.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> The scholars of the Slangebarn believe that the spirit of the story is true, that there was a group named the Slange and it split into the Svani, Algmen and Earnmen, with the latter striking out to establish a kingdom between the borders of Damhtir and Maharentir.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-30393880954832736532016-10-19T21:58:00.000+01:002016-10-19T21:58:22.918+01:00I am a terrible person But aside from that, I'm gonna have to post the cultural narrative of the Slangebarn tomorrow because writing it is surprisingly hard and I am absolutely shattered.<br />
<br />
I also don't have a series name like I hoped.<br />
<br />
I've been really tired so far this week, I'm a bit worried that I've got another case of the old insomnia.<br />
<br />
I'm pretty confident I'll be able to get the post done tomorrow, though.<br />
<br />
I'll also make sure to put up another post this week to make it up to you guys.<br />
<br />
Suggestions are welcome, <a href="http://areeceyafterlife.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">tumblr </a>is the preferred method for those.<br />
<br />
Sorryyy...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-16188397275012885892016-10-18T15:02:00.000+01:002016-10-18T15:02:25.290+01:00Writing Eyes: My Experience With Dilated Pupils So I have a nevus in the retina of my right eye and it showed up there sometime in the last four years.<br />
<br />
Nevi are basically freckles in the eye, they can appear on the front of the eye, like in the iris, or they can be like mine and show up inside the eye. Like freckles, they are usually benign, and also like freckles, they can turn malignant.<br />
<br />
Due to it appearing recently and the fact that it's very close to the macula (vision centre) of my eye, my optician wanted to have a better look at it to make sure it was benign.<br />
<br />
This meant that she put tropicamide drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils to make it easier to see my retina.<br />
<br />
Yes, this stuff has the same basic function as belladonna, the fancy name for deadly nightshade.<br />
<br />
Since this was a thing that fashionable ladies did once upon a time to make their pupils look larger, I thought it would be a good idea to write about my experience of having ridiculously large pupils.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwf1E4H2as06tP33KtTXTtAqSxn_1Li6Gwh3bDa9eQ_3F3XS_88GRig31mK1k-UFucjOuPZoRCmxbh9hf0gtgEg-3JjgnMFKhMG7MTb7o3twM7jiC8VXtjJR5lBZvuyfpfxAc30aM7txQx/s1600/dilated+pupils.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwf1E4H2as06tP33KtTXTtAqSxn_1Li6Gwh3bDa9eQ_3F3XS_88GRig31mK1k-UFucjOuPZoRCmxbh9hf0gtgEg-3JjgnMFKhMG7MTb7o3twM7jiC8VXtjJR5lBZvuyfpfxAc30aM7txQx/s320/dilated+pupils.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Is this pretty? I don't know.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It doesn't kick in immediately, so when it started I was in Boots (regular Boots, not the Opticians Boots who put the drops in) buying vitamin pills and a new hairbrush, and the thing I noticed first was that everything between one and two arm lengths away was incredibly and unnaturally clear.<br />
<br />
Everything else was intensely blurry.<br />
<br />
I'm short sighted, so I'm used to things at a distance being blurry, but not my own cleavage being blurry and difficult to make out.<br />
<br />
Yes, I could not see my own boobs clearly.<br />
<br />
It was really weird.<br />
<br />
This also meant that I had a really hard time taking the picture above because I couldn't see what was on my phone without holding it at arm's length and my eyes look really dark when they're photographed in anything dimmer than direct sunlight. (I had to expose the shit out of that picture.)<br />
<br />
So I took about five pictures while unable to see if the camera had picked anything up.<br />
<br />
For the first half hour or so, I had this weird relationship with light.<br />
<br />
If I kept my eyes open for too long, I started getting a headache that was centralised in what I like to call 'the migraine warning area'.<br />
<br />
No wonder migraines show up in oldy timey fiction if people were doing this to themselves.<br />
<br />
The other thing that happened was that I kept getting after images of the weirdest things.<br />
<br />
One thing this happened with was a poster advertising half price frames where the frames themselves would singe themselves onto my retina for a few seconds. Which is odd as they were by far the darkest thing on the poster.<br />
<br />
I'm also pretty sure I got an afterimage of a large mirror at one point. It was very strange.<br />
<br />
After my appointment was over I had some shopping to do in my local town centre, which is a mid range activity most of the time, so I was too busy to really notice much for the next few hours.<br />
<br />
Well, apart from how weirdly difficult finding stuff in Lakeland was. Which was the first shop I went in and has been rearranged for Christmas stuff.<br />
<br />
Once I got home though, I found that sitting at my computer was giving me a mild headache and felt really uncomfortable for my eyes. I was about half way through the life span of the effects, so I chickened out and took a nap because everything was really bright.<br />
<br />
So bright, in fact, that I had to use a long sock as a makeshift blindfold because my room is white and closing my eyes only made it so that I couldn't perceive my surroundings but I could still see a lot of light.<br />
<br />
By the way, it doesn't look like my nevus will cause me any problem in the short term, but I have an appointment for proper eye doctors to look at it. Which may or may not change my lens prescription depending on if I need treatment and what that might be.<br />
<br />
So sadly I can't get new contacts for up to three months.<br />
<br />
Eye based drama aside, I hope this comes in handy if you want to write about Georgian era ladies or women from Italy back when this was in vogue.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-53434264073475454802016-10-16T16:47:00.002+01:002016-10-16T16:47:45.405+01:00The Slangebarn (Part One - Etymology and Inspiration) The Slangebarn (Slanguhbarn, with slan rhyming with slam) as an ethnic group in the world of my Epic Fantasy Story came about due to two major factors.<br />
<br />
One, as I set the story in a country based on medieval Wales, I wanted to use it as an opportunity to represent Mercia. For those of you who don't know, Mercia was the kingdom that occupied most of England north of Bristol and south of Liverpool and had Tamworth as its capital.<br />
<br />
Like most of the kingdoms of the period, it changed borders a bunch over time, growing larger until it was eventually absorbed into the Danelaw.<br />
<br />
I wanted a representation of the Anglo-Saxons prior to the Norman conquest, because things changed fast and hard after that invasion.<br />
<br />
Two, as part of that representation of the Anglo-Saxons I wanted to concentrate on their cultural ties with Scandinavia and Germanic groups.<br />
<br />
These ties were essentially severed by the Norman conquest. (Personally I attribute a lot of England's cultural isolationism to this, as the Norman ruling class dragged it into line with a country with a fundamentally different language structure and different religious and cultural roots. Yes I <i>am </i>saying that if the Normans hadn't invaded then Brexit wouldn't have happened.)<br />
<br />
As I'm trying to streamline my real life inspirations to stop me from making hundreds of different countries with thousands of different ethnic groups, I've decided on two different countries to ally with my Mercia expy, those being a Denmark expy and a Sweden expy and I'm going to fold various aspects of other Nordic and Germanic countries into all three.<br />
<br />
Why Denmark and Sweden?<br />
<br />
Well, I started off wanting a Denmark because a. the Danelaw and b. I know a few Danes on social media and have swiftly learned that Danes love being included in things, so why not do so?<br />
<br />
As for Sweden, before the modern period Denmark and Sweden were constantly getting into fights, and that makes for good drama and political machinations.<br />
<br />
So, let's name these countries.<br />
<br />
I've decided on an animal theme for all the countries, with most countries being some variation on animal-land and most ethnic groups being some variation on animal-people.<br />
<br />
For Mercia I went with a silver eagle, a bird that doesn't exist in the real world but does in the fantasy one, I did this because I found it as the symbol for a regiment known as the Mercian Regiment and I wasn't sure what else to go with so I went with that.<br />
<br />
The Anglo-Saxon for eagle is earn (which I pronounce as 'airn', I believe this is accurate. A Danish friend says it this way too so I'm sticking with it) and Mercia itself is the Latinised form of a a name that means 'borderland' and shares a root with the 'mark' in Denmark (Hjaalmarch in <i>The Elder Scrolls </i>and The Free Marches in <i>Dragon Age</i> are also derived from this root).<br />
<br />
Combine these two elements and we get Earnmark.<br />
<br />
For a citizen I went with Earnman and for plural we have Earnmen. I did this as the word 'man' has been used as a gender neutral term for centuries and only started to not be after, you guessed it, the Norman Conquest.<br />
<br />
<i>Thanks Bill</i>.<br />
<br />
Why not go with a lion? you may be wondering.<br />
<br />
Because the golden lions on a red background you see in the royal coat of arms is, you guessed it, a <i>Norman</i> symbol.<br />
<br />
(This means that Godric Gryffindor has the same iconography as the group who invaded England and fucked over all the Anglo-Saxons about fifty years after he helped found Hogwarts, which makes the association of Slytherin with the simpering Norman descended upper classes really damn confusing.)<br />
<br />
Denmark, luckily has a national animal that I could find instead of flailing around for any animal I could latch onto like with Mercia.<br />
<br />
Denmark's national bird is the mute swan, which in Danish is called knopsvane. Since Knopsvanemark sounded weird, I went with just Svanemark (Svaynuhmark). Which is also useful because I can call the people Svanes and the people as a whole the Svani, which I derived by smashing Svane together with the name of the people Denmark is named for, the Dani.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Sweden's national animal is the elk, in Swedish this is älg. Which is a pain in the neck for me because I don't know how to put accents on letters using keyboard shortcuts.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Combined with the word landa (guess what <i>that </i>means), we get Älglanda (My Danish friend sounds like she's saying Ilglangda, but neither of us know for sure. Swedes? Some help?). I went with the Earnmen scheme to get Älgman and Älgmen. I just guessed that man is used similarly in Swedish, and if I'm wrong I'll justify it by it supplying a cultural connection between the Earnmen and Älgmen in the way Earnmark and Svanemark suggests one.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> Coming up with the name for the ethnic group as a whole was more difficult.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> For starters I needed to decide if I would go with an animal theme again for this, which in this case I decided to (it's different for the Cr<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">ύbdoine).</span></span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Our animal of choice is the snake.</span></span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Why the snake?</span></span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> Because of a guy named Sigurd Snake in the Eye (or </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Sigurðr ormr í auga in Old Norse), he was said to have been born with a mark in one eye that resembled the Ouroboros. Science of today insists on ruining our fun by telling us it was likely a common or garden mutation.</span></span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Thanks, <i>science</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> I decided to go with Norwegian for this name, but it's basically in Danish too. (See what I mean when I rant about the Normans?)</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> So Slange means snake, and barn means children.</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> So, why are they called the Snakechildren?</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> Well, this ties into their cultural narrative of their history, which I'll have to put into a separate post because this post is already over nine hundred and fifty words long.</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> Look out for that on Wednesday! (By which time I'll hopefully have a working title for the series as a whole.)</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-35672517440762586062016-10-12T18:43:00.000+01:002016-10-12T18:43:25.326+01:00Electrics is surprisingly tiring. On the plus side, I know how to do a ring main and a two way lighting circuit now.<br />
<br />
I can't do it without an actual electrician to sign it off, but it's still something, right?<br />
<br />
When I'm not on my course I'm mostly playing <i>Stardew Valley</i> or staring at yWriter trying to write the Epic Fantasy Story.<br />
<br />
It's at over twenty thousand words at the moment, which is encouraging, but still, I'm more than a little stressed out on it at the moment.<br />
<br />
Mostly because my villain hasn't shown up yet.<br />
<br />
Is that normal?<br />
<br />
To be honest, I've not read all that much epic fantasy.<br />
<br />
I've not had much desire to.<br />
<br />
Let's be honest, it hasn't had the best reputation over the decades.<br />
<br />
The best of the genre has strong themes and/or characters and/or settings, and the worst are generic and overuse violence, misogyny and hamfisted racism metaphors.<br />
<br />
I've asked my friend, and he says that I should really put villain stuff in earlier, which is fine, but writing this novel has been much more up in the air about what I'm actually doing than any of the others I've tried writing in the past.<br />
<br />
<i>Herd</i>, <i>My Name is Medea</i> and<i> Silver Crosses </i>(NaNoWriMo projects in reverse order) all had clear antagonists from the outset.<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i> In the Shadow of the Stonehearted King</i> has swapped antagonists during these first twenty thousand words because the way my story is set up means that, while the original antagonist is still totes evil, I can't use him as the villain for this book.<br />
<br />
So I have a brand new antagonist, who I do really like, who has not even been mentioned during the first twenty thousand words and likely won't show up for the next five to ten thousand because I have other shit I need to set up in those words.<br />
<br />
I know this is what rewrites are for, but it still punches me in the metaphorical gut.<br />
<br />
Bah.<br />
<br />
And I'm also intensely worried about how to work the new villains in without undermining the idea that all the shit that's happening is because of the Stonehearted King and his impact on the world around him.<br />
<br />
But on the other hand I love the idea of my villains not being intimately involved with the Stonehearted King, like they don't even have the same goals as him.<br />
<br />
Working all this out is hard, man.<br />
<br />
Oh, well.<br />
<br />
I'm going to try and get a post up about one of the ethnic groups from EFS up by the end of this weekend.<br />
<br />
It's either going to be an overview of the Cr<span style="background-color: #f2f2f2; color: #444444; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", HelveticaNeue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">ú</span>bdaoine (including a guide on how to pronounce that), or an overview of the Slangebarn (also explaining how to say that) including a 'folk story' about how they view their own origins.<br />
<br />
Probably the latter, but I may change my mind.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-10312157213562858012016-09-01T21:00:00.000+01:002016-09-01T21:00:09.712+01:00Writing and Streaming (along with some life stuff!) I've not had another editing crack at that longer story yet.<br />
<br />
I was kind of worn out on the whole editing thing after I finished the last edit, so I need to get back to that.<br />
<br />
Lately I've been working on an epic fantasy story. There's a lot of information about it on my tumblr, I'll be tagging it all with the same tag to make it easier to find at some point. I'm not sure what the tag will be, but I'll post when I've done it on this blog as well as my tumblr.<br />
<br />
It's about thirteen and a half thousand words at the moment, and I have a hefty cast of characters planned for it. A lot of them are quite minor, but you need bit part characters, otherwise you'll find yourself with a small cast who are all inexplicably related to each other (cough<i>OnceUponATime</i>/cough).<br />
<br />
I should probably post on here about it.<br />
<br />
I've got some worldbuilding notes that would make sense to go up here, and I'm planning on posting the full short story here about how one of the characters ended up in his current position.<br />
<br />
At the moment I'm slowly building it scene by scene on my tumblr account, but once it's done there I'll edit it and have the final polished version up here for you all to read.<br />
<br />
So my short story to do list consists of:<br />
<ol>
<li>Finish editing Two Thousand Lenses for submission to a literary agent</li>
<li>Finish and edit The End of Holger's Military Career</li>
<li>Come up with a snappier title for that</li>
<li>Finish that <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/3366629/chapters/7363043" target="_blank">Lois Lane/Batman story I posted up the first half of up on AO3</a> last year because I see people giving it kudos and I shouldn't leave it unfinished. Seriously, I got Kudos on it today, <i>and</i> three weeks ago, that means there's at least two people who want to read it.</li>
</ol>
<div>
I've got a lot to pack into my schedule, especially since I'm starting an introduction to electrical work course the week after next.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I'm pretty excited.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The only downside is that I need to get there by half eight two days a week and that's intimidating to the vampire that I am.<br />
<br />
I've started getting up at 6:30 and going to bed at 22:00. I'm not used to it yet, so I'm really tired during the day.<br />
<br />
I'll get used to it soon enough, though.<br />
<br />
Finally, I've started streaming. I did some a while ago, some yesterday and some today, and I'm going to stream once a week from 19:00 GMT on a Thursday. Which is also a challenge, 'cause that's one of the days my course is on from 8:30.<br />
<br />
I'm trying to challenge myself more because the only way I'm going to get better and be able to support myself is by being able to handle hard work and more of it.<br />
<br />
Part of that is starting to post on here more often, so expect some world building posts on that Epic Fantasy Story.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-56072446519802141282016-07-26T20:03:00.004+01:002016-07-26T20:03:43.481+01:00Editing and some other stuff So, in a previous post I talked about editing a pair of short stories.<br />
<br />
The shorter of the two I did actually manage to finish editing, and I'm happy to send it off to a literary agent in the near future.<br />
<br />
The longer one, however, was indeed a complete pain in the proverbial. I didn't just need to clean up the prose, I needed to change huge parts of the story.<br />
<br />
I managed to drop one and a half thousand words because I took so much extraneous crap out.<br />
<br />
This presents me with something of an issue, though.<br />
<br />
With such big changes, I feel like I do need to give this another few rounds of editing. Which is an issue because I'm challenging myself to submit to a literary agent by the end of August.<br />
<br />
So these big changes are making me even more nervous than I was previously about doing that.<br />
<br />
I suppose I should stop being such a coward and start a new edit of it.<br />
<br />
I've heard changing fonts can help with this, so I'm going to try that out. I just need to decide which one to go for. Hmmm...<br />
<br />
In other news, I'm in the process of tidying the office (it's saddening that I won't have this when I move out, but I needs to be freee you guys), so I'm going to start painting again, and finally finish this thing:<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEUwHBWhzFRvG5zvJkfJO1Ll1V_z2rRFwM0yE2hwD9ypEfWalr0cTj8kruJrSPRliYGI7f9yraw9MGqHX8FQrYJvo_1f3ohxtWpMfF1Qj5OJy5ZvnVZjYfoeiAJozszTWdtpt49URjTzjR/s1600/IMG_20160726_193134815_HDR.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEUwHBWhzFRvG5zvJkfJO1Ll1V_z2rRFwM0yE2hwD9ypEfWalr0cTj8kruJrSPRliYGI7f9yraw9MGqHX8FQrYJvo_1f3ohxtWpMfF1Qj5OJy5ZvnVZjYfoeiAJozszTWdtpt49URjTzjR/s640/IMG_20160726_193134815_HDR.jpg" width="358" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Other brands of cider with fruit flavouring are available</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I'll also be able to fit my exercise bike in here, so my dream of playing <i>Dark Souls</i> while on an exercise bike will finally come to fruition.<br />
<br />
My friend Doug suggests turning up the resistance every time I die, but I reckon that's going to put me on the highest setting in about fifteen minutes.<br />
<br />
Prepare to die, indeed.<br />
<br />
I'll keep you updated on the progress of that short story editing, and I'll be sure to blog the horrors of searching for an agent (although I won't name names, that'd be a dick move.)<br />
<br />
I'm looking forward to when this longer short story is done, it's been a long time coming.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-91938587998444039122016-07-22T14:24:00.001+01:002016-07-22T14:24:30.713+01:00A Drabble from a Rabble - Twenty Nine Thanks person who thought it would be a good idea to drag a Tumblr argument over to my writing blog, you reminded me to do this.<br />
<br />
Our theme today is <span style="color: #3d85c6;">The Sea.</span><br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><u>Where Worse Things Happen</u></span></h3>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> You’re not made for
this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> You can’t support
your own weight, you gasp and pant as you slither around, attempting to push
yourself around on land with limbs made to push through water.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> Your eyes are dry,
you fear that they’ll split and crack, but you can still see as you turn back
towards the world you were meant for.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> A blue green blur gently
lapping against the shore, looking so calm.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> If you could sigh, you
would as you slither back. Back towards where you can breathe and move freely.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"> Where the monsters
live, and where you will die.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #660000; font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-51635848494939903772016-07-08T19:44:00.002+01:002016-07-08T19:44:49.037+01:00I should be writing... It's been so long since I wrote a drabble that I've kind of forgotten how to do one.<br />
<br />
Inspiration has been severely lacking, so here I leave my apologies.<br />
<br />
As for right now, i should be rewriting a short story, but I'm so bored and it's so pretentious that I'm doing this as a method of procrastination.<br />
<br />
(Okay, it's not that bad, but looking at old work is always pretty cringe inducing.)<br />
<br />
I've been on a course at a local mental health charity, and one of the goals I've come up with while there has been to finish editing two of my short stories and submit them to literary agents.<br />
<br />
Of course, I would like my tutor to read my short stories, so I've given myself a pretty tight deadline of a week to do this.<br />
<br />
This seemed like a fine idea at the time, and a pretty good one while writing notes on the shorter of the two short stories, but this longer one is a complete pain in the proverbial.<br />
<br />
For starters, it's over twice as long as the first one, and for seconds, it's older and less well written.<br />
<br />
I hate looking at this thing, I swear.<br />
<br />
I'm going to have to accept the distinct possibility that I might not be able to get a final draft worth sending out by next Wednesday, but be happy with the fact that I can at least finish another draft of this story.<br />
<br />
Being a writer is difficult.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-89189287878710246392016-06-12T16:27:00.000+01:002016-06-12T16:27:04.797+01:00Has it really been five months? Wow.<br />
<br />
It feels like it should be less <i>and</i> more at the same time.<br />
<br />
Do you ever have that feeling? I hope not, it's confusing and not very nice.<br />
<br />
To be honest, I'm not really sure what I should be doing with this blog if I bring it back properly. It's pretty awkward with the <i>Breath of Fire IV</i> lp log. I feel like I should continue that, but I'm not sure if I can get myc save file back after changing computers.<br />
<br />
I'm pretty sure I saved it to an external drive, but I don't really remember.<br />
<br />
Then there's the fact that I never finished writing up the latest play session.<br />
<br />
I've got to be in the top ten of least competent people in the world.<br />
<br />
As for what to do aside from that, I'll probably write a drabble or some poetry for you guys in the next few days.<br />
<br />
I'm trying to get into a good writing pattern, but I'm finding it really hard to do that. I have a short attention span, so of course I've started two more projects since my last post.<br />
<br />
I'm also having major regrets on <i>Herd</i>. Which I'll just have to get over at some point (at least for this first draft) but for now I'll work on these two other projects.<br />
<br />
Honestly, getting <i>The Sims 4</i> has made pinning down character appearances a lot easier for me. Particularly for relatives of characters thanks to the play with genetics feature.<br />
<br />
Though I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I find the faces of certain characters kind of samey. I have preferences and they are interfering with my creativity and work. (I'd also be lying if I didn't admit that I got one of the Herd characters dead on in <i>TS3</i> and have a hard time replicating him in <i>TS4</i>.)<br />
<br />
I might write a review of <i>TS4</i> for this blog for its use for story telling.<br />
<br />
Especially considering the new gender customisation update, which has been a long time coming admittedly, but is very nice nonetheless.<br />
<br />
Oh, and I have done a bunch of youtube videos, on and off. I'll probably do a post dumping them all on you at once.<br />
<br />
If you'll excuse me, I have beans on the boil.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-17061480526311970062016-01-25T19:25:00.001+00:002016-01-25T19:25:18.990+00:00My God, I Never Thought I'd See Them With My Own Eyes (And Some Bowls) I needed to deposit a cheque in my bank account, but unlike a sensible person, I don't live anywhere near a branch of my bank, so I needed to go into town.<br />
<br />
While I was there, I decided to do some some shopping.<br />
<br />
First of all, I needed to go into Muji for a couple of bits and bobs, but instead of leaving with just bits and bobs, I ended up buying four rice bowls I don't actually need.<br />
<br />
Muji's selling these rice bowls made with traditional methods from various parts of Japan, and there are six altogether.<br />
<br />
I originally saw these online and I actually wasn't expecting to see them in store, so when I did I found myself compelled to buy them.<br />
<br />
Well, some of them. Four of them were about the same size and shape, one was the about the same shape but noticably smaller and one had straight sides and was noticably larger.<br />
<br />
I didn't like them as much as the four about the same size, so I didn't get them.<br />
<br />
These are the four I did get:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPXdst0-gsmb48hYRYgX7aA1Ju6ShrJ8moMJw_9U32zhHwYAu0p-Wt9MbzcBV-bfBSTHePRgv6on-BeynNlJSPyVDAGWV05FvmfW4oufoW8mD2R6PDGSrIQ-MJts5tK7qYB0DveIOTF8Mv/s1600/bowls.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPXdst0-gsmb48hYRYgX7aA1Ju6ShrJ8moMJw_9U32zhHwYAu0p-Wt9MbzcBV-bfBSTHePRgv6on-BeynNlJSPyVDAGWV05FvmfW4oufoW8mD2R6PDGSrIQ-MJts5tK7qYB0DveIOTF8Mv/s320/bowls.JPG" width="137" /></a></div>
<br />
These are, from top to bottom, from Hagi, Banko, Mashiko and Iga, which was the first one that caught my eye.<br />
<br />
The Hagi and Iga ones are my favourite because they have that cracked glaze I like so much (well, the Banko one has two cracks in the glaze, but I'm pretty sure I did that when I bashed it into the side of the bus when I was climbing up the stairs).<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJY4MyQi5r3n_PwxQYd-m7NMAxhsqFzcWhax3uts4DTjlPicMBdK2kXlPpkFmnD0FQAd6v6WQpRZMy6O5aNQTRK-rs9RMXAUjDnt9T7D4_XwEbPoqqFtxioJMD9mRlzKozZjvEkxO0KNYo/s1600/bowl+3.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJY4MyQi5r3n_PwxQYd-m7NMAxhsqFzcWhax3uts4DTjlPicMBdK2kXlPpkFmnD0FQAd6v6WQpRZMy6O5aNQTRK-rs9RMXAUjDnt9T7D4_XwEbPoqqFtxioJMD9mRlzKozZjvEkxO0KNYo/s320/bowl+3.JPG" width="270" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hagi</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGKj0v0-ZOah8qVlJEiZ0tFUAcMTihIoE3jrzQCVWczl3giM4HGdJUHOXPTKH2I4EQ1jPXajS3dfF1kFW4LckPbieaYkn_Rn0GxobiF8mXrDAZ0QXEfx2K6fKeC8UaIEUUcZluMSuUjoU_/s1600/bowl+4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGKj0v0-ZOah8qVlJEiZ0tFUAcMTihIoE3jrzQCVWczl3giM4HGdJUHOXPTKH2I4EQ1jPXajS3dfF1kFW4LckPbieaYkn_Rn0GxobiF8mXrDAZ0QXEfx2K6fKeC8UaIEUUcZluMSuUjoU_/s320/bowl+4.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Iga</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
They also have interesting bottoms, the others had pretty standard unglazed feet, but these two have something a little more going on.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpPk6aPyH6PF4TrhRG6W2JadvWYHpjekIaHDv6I4G3UE7cPjO_5p_q_ruoKgIDBu9G4968lF9SdVveEnbCNhiZZYZxtZdmYAKYm3oLnDP0_uBVAtT7p89a1uOjPGOWAzi8jhmWWXWIILfy/s1600/bowl+one.JPG" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpPk6aPyH6PF4TrhRG6W2JadvWYHpjekIaHDv6I4G3UE7cPjO_5p_q_ruoKgIDBu9G4968lF9SdVveEnbCNhiZZYZxtZdmYAKYm3oLnDP0_uBVAtT7p89a1uOjPGOWAzi8jhmWWXWIILfy/s320/bowl+one.JPG" width="233" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKbSBfaQITZoUN9fcKUvQZat45frwpPOkCbcswnx2wAb0ba1OTgCmlNe4rccKyZkTlqOYo86JAppQ8gkS4FFkBCz4LDAhunVOz6ajclFNbHlyb9UTozqe_jTuYosoweSHKkPy9B0lC4CsC/s1600/bowl+2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKbSBfaQITZoUN9fcKUvQZat45frwpPOkCbcswnx2wAb0ba1OTgCmlNe4rccKyZkTlqOYo86JAppQ8gkS4FFkBCz4LDAhunVOz6ajclFNbHlyb9UTozqe_jTuYosoweSHKkPy9B0lC4CsC/s320/bowl+2.JPG" width="223" /></a></div>
<br />
I initially thought the notch on the Hagi bowl was a chip, but in closer inspection revealed them to all look like that.<br />
<br />
According to the Muji website, the notch is a traditional aspect of the pottery dating back to when the potters of Hagi had to damage their own wares in order to be able to sell them and not be forced to give them as gifts to the Mori clan. Proving that posh people have always been dicks everywhere.<br />
<br />
Now, for the most interesting part of the shopping trip, for those of you who have not watched <i>The Great Pottery Throwdown</i> and like short grain rice as much as I do.<br />
<br />
I went into a Christian Learning Centre.<br />
<br />
Some of you are thinking, 'why, Harriette, why did you do this thing? Why would you risk life and limb going into that hive of scum and villainy?'<br />
<br />
Well, I have a good reason.<br />
<br />
See, while I'm not let's playing, knitting a scarf, hating myself for not working on Herd like I should, or playing Skyrim, I'm slowly working on a novel about the Christian hell.<br />
<br />
Very slowly.<br />
<br />
Honestly, what I just said makes it sound like I'm working on it way more than I am.<br />
<br />
One of the things I'm slowly trying to do is gather resources for it, I'd like most of the descriptions of hell to be based on Christian literature about hell.<br />
<br />
Normal bookshops don't seem to be swimming in books on the subject, so I thought that maybe the CLC would have some of the resources that I'm looking for since it's a specialised bookshop. (I was hoping for the works of a Father Furniss, but they're quite old, so I wasn't holding out a whole lot of hope.)<br />
<br />
I'm not saying I was <i>expecting</i> a section in the CLC titled HELL, but I was idly hoping that it <i>might</i>.<br />
<br />
It did not, and although my initial plan the first time I meant to go in there a couple of months ago was to ask them, I found something that made me change my mind on that very quickly and very permanently.<br />
<br />
Books on evangelism are one thing, but these are a different kettle of fish.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt42WpJ2oCnLN7lZ8vw6LKau4zUkWlZ4LVIsv8tnILPoOE0kHf91mIYwNePhdiBOB7ydObcVjcnnxC2uY7Klg2YsUwPqLjDqPIYtPF-QxBV0rv1TVDLztoi-M04yl-NVBjlNXOQyCdk3ZC/s1600/chick+tracts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt42WpJ2oCnLN7lZ8vw6LKau4zUkWlZ4LVIsv8tnILPoOE0kHf91mIYwNePhdiBOB7ydObcVjcnnxC2uY7Klg2YsUwPqLjDqPIYtPF-QxBV0rv1TVDLztoi-M04yl-NVBjlNXOQyCdk3ZC/s320/chick+tracts.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<br />
<a href="http://nineoverfive.blogspot.com/2014/12/damn-thats-one-whacked-out-chick.html" target="_blank">I've touched on Chick Tracts before</a>, but I never expected to see them in real life. We have a much lower tolerance for this style of evangelism in the UK, and these things are amongst the worst examples of American evangelism you can find.<br />
<br />
Yeah, I'm not going to talk to people who sell these things, asking for a set of writings by a Catholic priest.<br />
<br />
I misinterpreted 'Christian' as Christian, not 'crazy ass Protestants who openly hate people like me and Catholics along with everyone else who isn't one of them', clearly, I was a fool for taking the name of this bookshop at face value.<br />
<br />
It also had a section entitled 'spiritual warfare', which I had a cursory glance at. It might have some of what I'm looking for, but I'm doubtful and not keen on going back in there after I found those Chick Tracts.<br />
<br />
I think my best option is to seek out second hand book dealers and see if I can find copies of what I'm looking for that way.<br />
<br />
Most of these are going to be out of print, so it's not going to cheap or easy.<br />
<br />
On a more fun note, I found a shop near the Arcadian that sells East Asian cosmetics. Well, Japanese and Korean cosmetics, at least.<br />
<br />
It's nice to have somewhere I can buy sheet masks from nearby instead of having to order them on the internet all the time.<br />
<br />
I would have bought some mascara and eye liner, but they didn't have a card reader, so I just went for a sheet mask instead.<br />
<br />
next time, though, I'm definitely getting those things, I really want new mascara and I do need to practice with liquid eye liner, so it's a good chance to try something new.<br />
<br />
Besides, it's the mascara with a seventies Shoujo heroine on the packaging and I just can't turn down that kind of genius marketing.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-5311853117088936592016-01-04T20:20:00.002+00:002016-01-04T20:20:56.979+00:00Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E11+12 (Final)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvkpBcC9ntTFzVP3cxUKt2kOfIO_ydSOI9Pa2go0MaBWfzZvlmFx74TZAuJkJysAhWYV28bEUTaB5Ig93juEP8zkj3RazOlncDcla-J8HL9tVx1dVsDrTSagz4iWkI05tWrOhsIjvo-zG/s1600/apprentice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvkpBcC9ntTFzVP3cxUKt2kOfIO_ydSOI9Pa2go0MaBWfzZvlmFx74TZAuJkJysAhWYV28bEUTaB5Ig93juEP8zkj3RazOlncDcla-J8HL9tVx1dVsDrTSagz4iWkI05tWrOhsIjvo-zG/s400/apprentice.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, let’s just get this out of a way first: The interview episode was, as always, a complete and utter shambles. People were screaming, things caught fire, loads of people were caught out in lies.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-018a4b2d-0e44-a827-c2e8-0cf290f19b30" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">None were more shambolic than Richard and Gary’s interviews, though.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Gary, whose business idea was ‘Celebration Disco’, a mobile disco, yes you read that one right, was caught in several lies right off the bat. First, he said he had been in charge of a one-billion pound budget, which was actually totally untrue, and he said he’d been in charge of a team of six-hundred people, when his team actually only had three people in it.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Worse, when caught in these lies, he didn’t just own up to them. He tried to hedge, saying that he’d been de facto in charge of these things, but nobody fell for it. As one of the interviewers pointed out, Gary liked to exaggerate his importance, and also his business idea was absurd.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Richard may well have done even worse. His business idea was basically a marketing agency, but he wrote his business plan in flowery, purple prose that nobody could understand. Claude said it read like a ‘1980s marketing manual.’</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Worse still, he was caught in a bigger lie than Gary: Having said his idea was entirely unique, it turned out that it was an identical copy of another business he owned. A business that would be in competition with the won he’d have with Lord Sugar. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Also, everyone - everyone - hates Richard. The other candidates were talking about how he was an inveterate liar and would definitely come back and say that he’d aced his interview even though it wasn’t true, and they were right. That is literally exactly what happened.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By the end of the interviews, he had just been beaten down. He had no fight left in him.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vana’s business idea was an online dating app involving games, and while that sounds like my idea of hell, the main problem the interviewers had with it was that dating apps having massive start-up costs and don’t turn profits for a very long time.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was a problem that Vana didn’t really have an answer to, which is a shame, since she’s otherwise a pretty credible businessperson.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Charleine had much the same problem: As a businessperson, she’s fine, but her business idea - a franchise of haircare salons - was immediately called out as being impractical. All of the interviewers did like her, however.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Joseph, meanwhile, also had a franchise idea, of plumbing and heating businesses. This fell flat almost immediately when one of the interviewers pointed out that any franchised business would lose money because of it.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In general, that was the viewpoint of many of the interviewers: Joseph was considered a credible businessman, but the franchising model was generally seen as doomed to failure in this instance.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surprisingly, Joseph was all set up to get caught in a lie (“I’ve read Alan Sugar’s autobiography three times, it’s really inspired me, he’s my idol,”) only for one of the interviewers to try to catch him out with a quiz on Lord Sugar’s life and fail. Joseph answered every question correctly. He really is that much of a Lord Sugar fanboy.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a rather sad moment, he talked about how you had to ‘sacrifice your youth to be successful’, which is just - really sad.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the end, Richard, Gary, and Charleine were fired, leaving Vana and Richard to go on to the final.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The finale opened on an interesting note, with Vana claiming that her business idea was inherently more morally worthwhile than Joseph’s, which seems a bit of an odd claim, given that there’s no shortage of dating apps, really anywhere.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As ever, the challenge was to create a pitch for their business idea, using a team of former contestants. Vana picked Richard, Charleine, Ruth, and Natalie, while Joseph picked Gary, Brett, Elle and Mergim.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In Vana’s team, the brutal snark against Richard was out in full force, with Vana immediately noting that while he was good at marketing, she didn’t like Richard as a person. It only got worse when they were making the television advert, where Charleine outright said that Richard was the perfect casting choice for a ‘lonely old man’, before remarking that it’d take ‘all of [her] acting ability’ to pretend she was in love with him.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I actually really enjoyed watching Charleine in this episode. She was doing her best to help Vana win, but it was also totally clear that she was delighting in the chaos around her. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Vana’s business plan ran into many of the same ideas it did in the interviews - namely, the owner of the biggest dating app in the world saying it would never work, at least not for turning a profit or even breaking even quickly, and her at first deciding to ignore him, and then trying to find other ideas for funding to cover up this problem, thinking it would spare her from awkward questions.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Needless to say, it did not.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Joseph’s team, meanwhile, was terrible, because he picked people he liked rather than people who were good at their jobs.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a strange parody of Vana’s problems, all of the experts thought that Joseph’s idea could very easily be massively successful, and they thought he was pretty personable to boot. Even better, Joseph took the time to give them his card, get their cards, and generally network with them, which will be invaluable.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But rather than focusing on his unique selling point - the most important part of the task - Joseph instead had an almost laser focus on things like logo, television adverts, et cetera, all of which turned out pretty poorly.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Part of that is that none of his team are any good at advertising, and part of that is that Mergim is almost cartoonishly terrible at acting, and was cast in the television advert nevertheless. </span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nevertheless, in the boardroom, Joseph won, and I’m not even sure it was that close, either. Vana’s idea was - and is - kind of a non-starter.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-34181489082887169362015-12-15T22:02:00.000+00:002015-12-15T22:02:26.757+00:00Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E10<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvkpBcC9ntTFzVP3cxUKt2kOfIO_ydSOI9Pa2go0MaBWfzZvlmFx74TZAuJkJysAhWYV28bEUTaB5Ig93juEP8zkj3RazOlncDcla-J8HL9tVx1dVsDrTSagz4iWkI05tWrOhsIjvo-zG/s1600/apprentice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvkpBcC9ntTFzVP3cxUKt2kOfIO_ydSOI9Pa2go0MaBWfzZvlmFx74TZAuJkJysAhWYV28bEUTaB5Ig93juEP8zkj3RazOlncDcla-J8HL9tVx1dVsDrTSagz4iWkI05tWrOhsIjvo-zG/s400/apprentice.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This week, we had a health snack challenge - it’s a lot like every other challenge where the contestants have to make a product and then pitch it, except in this instance, they’re making a product for a niche market. Also, a market that is at least fifty percent tosspots.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Charleine was made project manager of Connexus, while Brett was made project manager of Versatile, and the game was on. In this case, it seemed to be a game of ‘who could screw up what isn’t, actually, a tremendously complicated challenge the most.’</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Versatile decided to make energy bars, called ‘Rejuvenate Bars’, which is a solid idea, actually. I’m not even a big health food nut, and I still buy Nakd bars and Trek bars whenever I can, because they are legitimately delicious. They then quickly decided to have a superfoods focus, which is where things got frustrating.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let us be entirely clear here: Superfoods aren’t a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">thing. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not a single reputable scientific source backs up the idea of ‘superfoods’ being a meaningful term, because most of the supposed health benefits are total bullshit. Acai berries, for example, are not actually better for you than blackberries, but grocers will market acai berries as a superfood and sell them for three or four times the cost. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And Versatile just never seemed to get this. As various snake oil merchants rambled total nonsense about superfoods, Versatile then went and clumsily repeated that nonsense to other people.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, for a time, at least. Due in large part to a failure to measure anything by Charleine, they ended up not having enough of the ‘superfoods’ in their bars to actually market them as that - something which did not get translated over to the packaging, as when relaying information to her team, Charleine just rattled off the data in a rapid-fire staccato that nobody could keep up with. They had to adjust the packaging with felt tip. Felt tip, guys.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Gary suggested that if anybody asked, they just be up front and honest about it, marking the first and last time an Apprentice candidate has ever advocated honesty.)</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the pitching, none of the retailers were especially impressed, and all of them were dubious about the product.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Connexus, meanwhile, decided to make dehydrated vegetable crisps. If that sounds disgusting to you, then congratulations! You have taste. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">They decided to market their product as ‘gluten free, vegan, and raw’, which made me roll my eyes, but if they had pulled it off, might have actually worked: If there’s anything that you can definitely say about vegans and raw food advocates, it’s that they’re wealthy, gullible, and slightly desperate.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not to mention that Richard was actually pretty good on the branding and marketing side. They fell down when Vana, faced with a recipe that called for a little bit of olive oil, put three times the recommended amount in, something that might not have happened if Brett had bothered to actually lead his team.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The result was something that might be the oiliest, wettest thing ever described as ‘dehydrated’. I actually didn’t realise until we were shown a shot of them in the boardroom: They were dripping with oil. They didn’t look like crisps, they looked like chunks of red onion that had been soaked in a vat of oil. They looked horrible.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">None of the retailers liked the product, and in the case of the first retailer, Brett’s absolutely terrible pitch (during which Richard looked like he wanted to garrote the man) didn’t help.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When the two teams got to the boardroom, Lord Sugar hated both products as well, describing the bars as being like ‘soil from Chernobyl’ and the crisps as being ‘impregnated with oil.’ In an Apprentice first, as well, both teams lost, with each team getting exactly zero orders for a sum total of zero pounds.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wondered if maybe Lord Sugar would fire someone from the team that spent the most, or whether he’d fire someone from both teams, but instead he asked Charleine and Brett to both bring back one person each.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Charleine brought back Gary, and Brett brought back Richard. These were both terrible choices: Gary wasn’t stellar, but he made the best of a bad situation, while Richard was the only competent member of his team.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Brett was fired, but Lord Sugar did say that he was honourable, so there’s that. That means that going into interview week, we have Charleine, Gary, Richard, Vana and Joseph. </span></div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-23429032341455294842015-12-13T19:33:00.000+00:002015-12-13T19:33:08.389+00:00NaNoWriMo 2015 Roundup Yeah, I know this post is a fortnight late, I know I only put up one NaNo post this year, I know I've basically been letting Doug run my blog with his <i>The Apprentice</i> posts lately. I know, I <i>know</i>.<br />
<br />
But enough about that, let's talk NaNo.<br />
<br />
In the end, I managed to get twenty five thousand words done during November, which is still pretty good. It's brought my total word count up to forty seven thousand, which is almost halfway to my minimum word goal for the novel.<br />
<br />
Yeah, I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't manage to get the fifty thousand, but I don't seem to take the transition into winter particularly well.<br />
<br />
During this NaNo I had to change my plans, especially when it comes to the protagonist's relationships.<br />
<br />
There is only so long you can have a character be oblivious to someone else's feelings before, well, I'm sure it'll be annoying to at least some readers regardless, but before it becomes so ridiculous that it's really infuriating to <i>everyone</i>.<br />
<br />
Besides, this is a first person novel, there's only so much she can <i>see</i> but not <i>notice</i>.<br />
<br />
Especially when a scene like this happens:<br />
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that it’s a personal matter that killed it?” Tracey asked, putting a hand on Pankaj’s shoulder.</span></span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-eb7c6390-9c9e-7eb5-cbec-0841928a080e" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Pankaj nodded.</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> “Yeah, man, I do not blame you. Somebody being a dick about that is gonna kill any friendship.”</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> </span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> “You are my brother in suffering Tracey.”</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> “You’re my sunbae in suffering, Pan.”</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Pankaj laughed, deep and throaty.</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> “You know, that’s really cheered me up, Tracey. Thank you.”</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> “No problem, sunbae.”</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> Pankaj shook his head with an affectionate smile.</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> “I think we should talk about this later.”</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"><br /></span></b>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="color: #660000; font-family: "courier new" , "courier" , monospace;"> “Yeah, probably a good idea,” Tracey agreed.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Tracey likes Jane, this has already been established, so you can see the problem.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Yeah, I suppose that I could cut this stuff out, but having written it, I realised that my original plan was going to be difficult to pull off, so it was best to change tack.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> I don't think sticking slavishly to an original plan is a good idea, you've got to be able to change your mind when the draft organically throws up issues with that plan. Unless your plot is heavily dependent on whatever it is that's changed, don't feel like you need to get rid of it.</span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> The other reason to change tack is that it adds more conflict.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> Wonderful, delicious conflict.</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> It's a writer's bread and butter and dessert all in one.</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> As it stands, I'm not going to be able to get the first draft done by the end of the year, which is sad, but I'm still doing quite well, I think, all things considered.</span><br />
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> Oh well, I should get some writing done.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-79158239198807034552015-12-08T21:28:00.000+00:002015-12-08T21:28:52.376+00:00Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E9<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvkpBcC9ntTFzVP3cxUKt2kOfIO_ydSOI9Pa2go0MaBWfzZvlmFx74TZAuJkJysAhWYV28bEUTaB5Ig93juEP8zkj3RazOlncDcla-J8HL9tVx1dVsDrTSagz4iWkI05tWrOhsIjvo-zG/s1600/apprentice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvkpBcC9ntTFzVP3cxUKt2kOfIO_ydSOI9Pa2go0MaBWfzZvlmFx74TZAuJkJysAhWYV28bEUTaB5Ig93juEP8zkj3RazOlncDcla-J8HL9tVx1dVsDrTSagz4iWkI05tWrOhsIjvo-zG/s400/apprentice.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Okay, I’m going to level with you all here, for most of this task I had no idea what was going on. It was a real estate task, and they’ve never really done one of those before, and nearly all of it flew straight over my head, so I can’t really blame the candidates for not doing too well. It was a bit nervewracking to watch too, as the teams handled vastly larger quantities of money than they ever had before.</span></span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-08a77eb4-7eb9-916f-6346-947a5443bbb1" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Joseph, who has a stupid moustache but has done well on several tasks, was made team leader of Versatile, while Richard was made team leader of Connexus, which seems like an absolutely terrible choice to me.</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Weirdly, though, this challenge was Richard’s time to shine, along with Vana. The two of them, it turned out, were really good at wooing developers, at one point covering their lack of a show-flat and floor plans (logistical errors on their part) with a relentless charm offensive that actually worked. </span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Scott and Brett, also on Connexus, did less well. Brett was fine, but Scott was constantly screwing things up, with one memorable moment involving him flailing at a map and declaring “Everyone’s enjoying the Clapham!” in slightly angry, desperate tones. Brett had to bail him out of sticky situations at multiple points, and by the end of the challenge, I’m pretty sure he was considering defenestrating Scott.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For Versatile, meanwhile, 90% of their problems came down to Selina being pretty terrible. Joseph had a bit of a screw-up near the start when he tried to push for 4% commission, only to be flatly told that he was getting 1.5% and that was the end of the matter, but Selina was like a wellspring of terrible decisions and interpersonal drama.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Most of that drama seemed to come from Selina really not liking Charleine. Charleine was doing a great job selling loads of middle-end properties, only for, during every team meeting, Selina to start browbeating her about being ‘unpolished.’</span></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bear in mind that Selina hadn’t seen any of Charleine’s sales, and that the ‘unpolished’ remark was actually a criticism made by a client about Joseph and Selina, so the whole thing was just a little bit bewildering, and came off as Selina trying to desperately save her ego by pretending that her clients weren’t unimpressed with her, but with Charleine, whose activities they knew of via psychic powers.</span></span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Selina wasn’t getting along any better with the rest of her team, either, with Joseph describing her as ‘manipulative’ several times.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the boardroom, Connexus won with £79k to Versatile’s £29k - only for Scott, who was on the winning team, mind, to immediately announce that he was leaving the process. This was largely due to Lord Sugar having basically said outright that Scott would have been fired if he’d not been on the winning team, but people were shocked. Charleine audibly gasped. Connexus fled, with Brett herding them out like they were evacuating a room with a bomb in it.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> After Scott left, Selina was fired, and it was really never going to be anyone else. Still, with a triple firing a few weeks back, and someone dropping out this week, the numbers are getting thin on the ground. Only Brett, Vana, Richard, Joseph, Charleine and Gary (I always forget Gary) left for the remaining three weeks of the process.</span><br />
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</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-33417194929890642882015-12-02T20:05:00.000+00:002015-12-02T20:05:29.615+00:00Guest Post: Murphy Rants About ... The Apprentice S11E8<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiJIz39KDXH4xYFbOohyMY_n0q8bbondEQG7lZreNX0-rQyYqp4ekdRTi_F84H6MfgxmqmOr-0tUKZDLEVR9j55H6_iCDqvi5z0GEr_k7xfFxLg7Gs7Dp_Wkth43hc5sWxICr9OoHP00EW/s1600/apprentice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiJIz39KDXH4xYFbOohyMY_n0q8bbondEQG7lZreNX0-rQyYqp4ekdRTi_F84H6MfgxmqmOr-0tUKZDLEVR9j55H6_iCDqvi5z0GEr_k7xfFxLg7Gs7Dp_Wkth43hc5sWxICr9OoHP00EW/s400/apprentice.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I feel like this series is the one with the most collateral damage. Not long ago we had the disastrous handyman business, and now we have this one, a party-planning business: Usually, that means a high-society garden party or a tour group. This time, it meant a child’s birthday party. The parents had volunteered £2000 as a budget, with the stipulation that they could ask for a partial or total refund, which is kind of the epitome of ‘a race to the bottom,’ because it’s essentially a challenge to see who can piss off the parents the least.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-24f03836-6448-2dc1-ab70-397c5eca720f" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I do have to wonder what kind of parents have two grand to use on a kid’s birthday party, but apparently care so little that they’d leave it in the hands of Apprentice candidates. That’s an odd mix of rich, involved, and apathetic they’ve got going on there. Then again, possibly it came with an offer to have Lord Sugar pay for a second, better party for their kids. Or maybe it was neither of the kids’ birthdays at all, and their parents were just like “Hey, kid, find nine friends and invite them to a fake birthday party, this is going to be fuckin’ hilarious.”</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyhow, Selena became the project manager for Connexus, and Gary once again became project manager for Versatile. Selena also got to choose someone from Versatile to join her team, and for some baffling reason, chose Richard. This would turn out to be a mistake.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The fun immediately started when Versatile was told that the mother of their party childling had a severe and deadly nut allergy, because it was obvious, from the moment she said that, that they’d end up getting food with nuts in it. And what do you know, they did! Well, nut traces - the kind of warning that gets put on most things as standard, if only because traces of nut might have ended up on factory workers’ hands or suchlike.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This moderate but salvageable fluff was then exacerbated dramatically when Gary was asked if he’d brought Nutella - which might I remind you is made out of nuts and has the word ‘Nut’ in its name - and replied that yes, he had. This wasn’t actually true: The team had bought Cadburys’ Chocolate Spread, but by the time he bothered to check and find out, the damage had already been done, and the poor mother had spent about half an hour sitting three-hundred metres from the party, terrified of actually attending her own kid’s probably-not-actually-birthday party.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But the fun doesn’t stop there! Putting together a set of party bags, Versatile then tried to sell them back to the client for fifteen quid each. They were eventually pushed down to nine quid, which is still an extortionate amount, especially when the party bags were not actually very good. One thing they had in them were these glo-stick necklaces, but it wasn’t long before the candidates were talking about how they could just use the glo-sticks and forcibly place them around the throats of the young boys and girls in their care, and then demand that the parents pay for them and the rest of the party bags.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(They did, in fact, try that plan, but forgot to actually perform the racketeering step, instead just using up the glo-sticks from the party bags and then limply failing to even try intimidating the clients into paying for them, which is a failure on their part, but also probably better than the alternative?)</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Versatile did have some great ideas, like an outdoor adventure park and a barbecue, but ruined those ideas by a) Being the most boring people in the known universe, literally draining the hope and joy out of the children with every passing moment, and b) Failing to barbecue things promptly.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Connexus didn’t do much better, starting with a disastrous interview with the client where Selena took her enthusiasm to terrifying levels, pretty much talking non-stop and at one point wheezing “I KNOW HOW TO FIRE BREATHE,” at them. Things got steadily worse when Connexus decided that theri clients’ birthday party would be hosted at a gym.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A gym.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Connexus was rather insistent on calling it an ‘athletics centre’, which I suppose is somewhat apt since it also had a running track, but it was, nevertheless, essentially just a gym. They decided this based on the party child mentioning in passing that she was interested in sports. I mean, dear god, people, there are other ways to use that: Go to a water park with skiing and tobogganning or something. Have a swimming pool party. Endless possibilities.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Connexus also forgot to take their clients’ phone number, which meant that when they decided that they too were going to put together ridiculously expensive party bags to sell to the client, they didn’t have any way to gauge whether the client would be even remotely interested, and so just bought a bunch of stuff hoping they could sell it.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The client did (I think, it was a little confusing) buy the party bags for ten quid each, but she was visibly irritated at being put in that position at all.</span></div>
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<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Picking Richard also turned out to be an absolute failure as, after being put in charge of the food, he was only starting to get burgers out by the time the first girl was leaving; and he had not only failed to come even remotely close to finishing the cake by about half an hour before the party was due to end, he screamed at Vana like a spoiled child when she asked him about it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Richard really needs to go.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br style="font-family: Tinos; font-size: medium; line-height: normal; white-space: normal;" /><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; line-height: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">In the end, Versatile lost, largely due to the party bag fiasco, which means that Richard survives another week despite everybody hating him. David was fired instead.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-5800616526543369712015-11-24T13:55:00.000+00:002015-11-24T13:55:12.326+00:00Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E7<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu1dL2PiNa7atUEyb3XX9EaBZXlttqE9iMu6o3gMWnUEV953Q8y_zXu54VeSZRYL6plpNQ-2_3g9xMoq4SbMUn_vqefDz4O0XB5kMUOBL0h02Eo8Km86DnXdRxK_d0rycwrCx2owgHC3YF/s1600/apprentice.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu1dL2PiNa7atUEyb3XX9EaBZXlttqE9iMu6o3gMWnUEV953Q8y_zXu54VeSZRYL6plpNQ-2_3g9xMoq4SbMUn_vqefDz4O0XB5kMUOBL0h02Eo8Km86DnXdRxK_d0rycwrCx2owgHC3YF/s400/apprentice.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This week’s challenge was the discount store challenge, where contestants have to set up a discount store in the vein of Poundland and its many imitators. Scott, best known for his hardline views on hair replenishment, became the team leader of Connexus, while Gary, who is so bland that I was unaware of his existence until this week, became team leader of Versatile.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-bf9ebcc7-39c3-339f-4c80-f745da32b10f" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, apparently half of the candidates don’t know how wholesalers work. One went in asking for a buy-one-get-one-free deal, which a wholesaler would never do since they make tiny margins and profit from selling in bulk, and a fifty percent discount would mean they were making a loss.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sam, meanwhile, revealed once again that he can’t do numbers at all. Not complicated numbers or anything: Basic mathematics with the aid of a calculator. It was horrible and embarrassing.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, they got their stuff, tested them out on street stalls, and then bought more of the biggest sellers to sell in their actual shop - that, actually, all went pretty well. It was when they’d actually set up in physical shops at a shopping centre that things started to go really wrong.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For Team Versatile: Richard. Tasked with bringing in shoppers to their store, he decided his primary method of doing this was going to be to scream ‘I AM ICE-SKATING’ while chasing people around the shopping centre. It was horrible and embarrassing to watch, and only made worse by the fact that this is the only thing he seemed interested in doing: If he tried any other tactics for getting people into the shop, we weren’t shown any of them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For Team Connexus: Everyone. You had Sam meandering around the shop being unable to work tills and apparently unwilling to sell; you had Brett and Vana protesting that being sent out to bring in shoppers was all part of some kind of diabolical political game plan meant to make them scapegoats for an eventual loss; and you had Scott trying and failing to keep everyone under control. At one point, tensions in the team got bad enough that Scott and Brett had an out-and-out, highly aggressive argument.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(This would become somewhat relevant in the boardroom.)</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When they got into the boardroom, Connexus had actually brought in more money than Versatile - but since victory on this task is calculated both by sales made and the total value of the stock they had left, Versatile, which had almost three times as much stock value, won. Scott brought Sam and Brett back into the boardroom - Sam being a no-brainer, and Brett having been quite aggressive.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Quite aggressive, but not as aggressive as Scott tried to claim. Scott tried to tell Lord Sugar that Brett had threatened to assault him, only for Brett, Sam, and Karren to all respond that literally nothing like that had ever happened. I’m not sure why he thought it would be a good idea to tell a lie that blatant, but he did, so here we are. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Probably the only thing that saved Scott from being fired for that was Sam’s tremendous incompetence with everything, and the fact that the previous week had been a triple firing already. Sam was fired, and while Lord Sugar seemed to really, really want to fire Scott, he refrained from doing so.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Some tabloids are reporting that shortly afterwards, Brett and Scott did indeed have an actual fight, so that’s a thing.)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline;">Next week, we apparently have party planning, which will surely be an unmitigated disaster.</span></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5973632733584120559.post-50971688854838673532015-11-18T21:47:00.000+00:002015-11-18T21:47:34.975+00:00Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E6<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSkgMdx6-HIRaCSA7s7gQiZZWdgAkCXG_VC9RL9q_9ChSLNirmVq60NKOdy2hAFnSODXKhSt8mhFwGoZnykuD2GxLq1W-rf6af5HA6srwPAVA44IBkGa2-3de6X1D7SFD9vxCDNTFAAOTc/s1600/apprentice.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSkgMdx6-HIRaCSA7s7gQiZZWdgAkCXG_VC9RL9q_9ChSLNirmVq60NKOdy2hAFnSODXKhSt8mhFwGoZnykuD2GxLq1W-rf6af5HA6srwPAVA44IBkGa2-3de6X1D7SFD9vxCDNTFAAOTc/s400/apprentice.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, this week’s challenge was for the teams to set up handyman jobs and go around doing ‘odd jobs’, which seems like an even worse idea than the children’s book challenge, because it’s possible to actually seriously screw up someone’s home or business if, say, you’re washing their windows and you accidentally set fire to the building.</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-42863010-1c8c-6d76-c99e-bf205c17376c" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or if you try to put up a shelf and instead put a massive hole in the wall, we’ll talk about that in a moment.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Lord Sugar picked the team leaders for this one, putting construction executive Elle in charge of Versatile and builder Brett in charge of Connexus. Obvious choices there, the teams would probably have chosen the same way.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Things kind of went downhill immediately, though, when it came to putting together the fliers. Connexus decided their slogan would be ‘connexing people together’, which sounds like the slogan of a telephone company owned by Genghis Khan; while Versatile spent so long discussing whether it should be ‘Minor DIY and window cleaning’ or ‘Window cleaning and minor DIY’ that they missed the deadline for fliers entirely.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Mergim decided to make the best of a bad situation by scribbling notes on pieces of paper and putting them up in shop windows, and was roundly mocked by the team for this, despite the fact that his logic was completely solid: They didn’t have any fliers because their team were fucking about, and it was better to have horrible sub-par advertisements than nothing at all.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mergim would also be mocked for completely different things later, but we’ll get to that soon.)</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Connexus, in an odd turn, didn’t manage to make any money on the first day of the task, because instead of doing handyman jobs, they were doing market research, which basically consisted of wandering around asking if anyone knew anyone who needed work done, to which the answer was always ‘No.’</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Versatile did manage to get jobs on the first day, but it would probably have been better if they hadn’t. Apart from sub-team pricer April’s ridiculously low price point (ten quid a job), the sub-team also had Mergim, who, it turns out, is an actual walking disaster area with the most terrific case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome I’d seen in a while.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The man insisted that he was a brilliant handyman. He insisted on that so hard, even as he was putting up a shelf and having to be gently told by Karren, in the manner of a beleaguered primary school teacher, that you don’t </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">screw in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nail. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Instead of putting up a shelf, he instead made a gigantic hole in the wall of a poor woman’s shop. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“That’s pretty bad,” you might be saying, but guess what? Mergim also doesn’t know how to paint. When asked to paint a shop front, he instead painted the shop’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sign. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He painted over the sign. That shop has no sign now.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Connexus, meanwhile, did surprisingly well, scoring a lucrative job cleaning a football stadium - which they then failed to complete, something team leader Brett said was due to how professional he was, because apparently Brett takes a homeopathist’s approach to professionalism. Surprisingly, they still got paid almost the full amount.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the board room, it was revealed that Connexus had brought in nearly twice as much money as Versatile, with £1050 to their £530. Since Elle, the team leader, has yet to ever be on a winning team despite having been in the process for six weeks, she was fired on the spot - leaving Mergim to bring back two people with him.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He brought back April, because she was responsible for the pricing, and David, who had just kind of blended into the background. April was fired shortly thereafter for the catastrophe that was the ten pounds a job pricing, followed shortly by Mergim, because </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">oh my god you can’t put up a shelf or paint. </span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which is good news for the rest of the candidates, since a triple firing means one less double firing means some lucky person is going to get to stay in the process for longer than they otherwise would have.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.666666666666666px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Also, Mergim dreams of being a millionaire. I just thought I’d throw that one out there. </span></div>
<br /><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He doesn’t know how to paint.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04777043599523393197noreply@blogger.com0