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Lets start with a quick picture of the fabulous holiday nails I had done yesterday at the Sparkle Nail Salon at the bottom of World's Square. In the end it took 4 people to do them, with one girl tugging at me for gel layers while another did the 3D acrylic application.  Sadly the search for coffee at Sydney airport was a bit of a failure, even the Starbucks seems to have gone so I couldn't even have shameful Christmas drinks. Sadly despite being promised it would open on Thursday the new airport Danks Street Depot was not yet open for business.  The plane ride to LAX was mostly uneventful; the food was tolerable but not great, the drinks selection is a bit awful on Qantas so I settled on Scotch and Dry which is a rarity indeed. I finally got around to watching District 9 which while gory was *amazing* and left me breathless in parts. To recover I watched Up! again and then plenty of Stephen Fry in America which I thought was awfully fitting. The rest of the time I slept which was quite useful really. On arrival at LAX I was a little weirded out at the lack of grating American accents, and then I realised why. Every service staff member in the entire airport was either African American or Hispanic and the standard accent of LAX appears to be Mexican. On the other hand I was also delighted at the ease at which we cleared customs and immigration, the line was fast and quick and the man checking our paperwork very polite. I suspect that being white and middle class may have helped in this regard.  I also had my first run in in ... a very very very long time with American fast food, coffee that was entirely undrinkable and meat that I could not recognise the supposed source animal. I'm not sure I shall be attempting either again. I had intended to watch more movies on the flight from LA to New York however my body had other ideas and I fell asleep before take off. I did wake up to an announcement from the pilot that we were flying over the grand canyon so I got some lovely shots out the window.   After another mediocre Qantas in flight meal my body put me back down again for the rest of the flight; meaning what with my standard insomniac sleeping patterns I had slept much like normal and landed in New York refreshed as any day. At the end of it all Qantas people did not bring me cake or sing as promised, however really, any 36 hour birthday where you get to wake up in another country is pretty fine.  We were informed towards the end of the flight that it was snowing in New York and would be until Christmas (yay!!) but that this likely meant we would be delayed in landing (boo!!). However on landing we had no problems whatsoever, landing on time and smoothly; amazing travel luck continued as I had no wait for my luggage and no wait for a cab.   On arrival the Mount Morris House B&B is even more beautiful than the website gave in. My 'room' is really a suite including a walk in dressing room about the same size as my Newtown apartment sized bedroom. The whole house is a classic brownstone filled to the brim with beautiful antiques and artworks, with a delightful owner. There were already rave reviews online I will be adding to them. At $250 a night for a 4 room suite on a picturesque edge of Harlem, this sure beats staying at a chain hotel, and for NYC? Much much cheaper too.  The owner recommended some local restaurants so we rugged up and went for a walk in the neighbourhood, laughing and stomping in the snow which was now several inches deep all around us and giving everything a clean white and festive feel. Eventually we tumbled into the Soul Food restaurant we were looking for and by god it was everything I needed. Warm fried food, birthday cake and decent strong coffee, good enough to waddle home in the snow satisfied.  All in all I've been very lucky with my travel today and stepped out into a fluffy white winter wonderland. It's everything I wanted for my birthday, hoorays. 
Merry Vacationmas to me! I am about to embark on a 36 hour birthday owing to crossing the date line on the flight Sydney to New York. Hoorays super excited! .... Even if there was no Danks Street Depot or Breakfast Birthday Cake :o( Expect silly amounts of blagging and photos! Posted via LiveJournal.app.
It's my birthday, and it will be for about 36 hours as I get on a plane to New York via Los Angeles. Excitement! ...Even if there was no Danks Street Depot or Breakfast Cake :o( Expect pictures and blogging ago go!
Despite all the drama and the less than exemplary group marks my lecturer seems to have decided to adjust my marks and ergo I have been given a High Distinction for both IT Research Methods and IT Strategic Investments. Hoorays team me. Means I maintain my GPA and am a much less crazy person :o)
Murray moved in today, and the house now has strange furniture around the place. Last week there were strange teenagers around the place. Sharehouse living certainly does provide that touch of the unexpected or unknown that you just don't get from living by yourself.
This makes me happy:
What delightful little creatures! They're scooping up coconut shells dropped into the sea by humans, running off with them, using them as shelters, even rolling along inside them. I love octopuses.
LOST is back in February. These promos are going to kill me.
I've started wearing a pedometer at work. Yesterday I clocked up thirteen thousand steps. I don't actually know how many steps a typical person makes during a day, but that sounds like a high number.
I've been doing a lot of stuff really and not blogging because.... well I've been off doing stuff.
- Last week I attended a very eventful dinner/blogger meet at Danks Street Depot where I didn't crawl home until somewhere after 3am drunk as a lord and wishing death on work the next day. There will be photos on
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) goth_gourmande ... sometime. Accordingly I didn't make it into work until late the next day and was a little scattered though awesomely not hungover. If there's one thing I've learnt in life it's to ignore people who give you grief for drinking water with your boozamahol.
- On Fridays after work I've been attending #SHTBOX which for those of you who aren't Twitter obsessed is the Surry Hills Twitter Meet/Beer exchange. We keep infiltrating a bit with Mid Week Geek people plus Scott, Matt, Helen and Rez.
- Jonathan from Red Oxygen has also been in town on a project so there've been meet ups and dinners and drinks oh my! He was basically refusing to go back to Umerika and had extended his stay by an additional week; even still we spent most of the time together plotting his eventual relocation back to Australia. I must say Ching-a-Ling's the bar we went to on Oxford St definitely deserved to be in Melbourne far more than Sydney, I couldn't find it until I'd asked 3 bouncers where it was and when I did eventually find it was a sammiched bar in dim lighting with funky furniture and bare brick walls.
- I stupidly accepted an invitation from Scott and his fag to go adventuring on the Sydney tourist bus, very trashed. Fun time was had and I'd recommend it as an outing, but we did see people shagging on Elizabeth St in broad daylight and got weirded out by some creativity festival down at Darling Harbour.
- Finally made it out to Canberra for Chrome. It was a lot of fun and I think well worth the drive, particularly with Joseph and I nattering at each other terribly the whole way. The club itself was great fun, full of energy and really filled with the vibe that's missing in Sydney at the moment. Also cheesy dancy tunes that really make me grin. Wooyah.
- More importantly for many I went to the beach! I know! It was fun and I hid in the shade and the sunscreen with berym our resident red head but we had fun, and fish and chips, and I think I would even do it again. Miracle to me is that I still fit into my swimsuit despite having not worn it in ... I want to say 4 years?
- The Optus Christmas Party was on last week also, but with 6000 people served by 3 bars the wait got stab inducing even after the sort of 'marketing brochure' perfectness of the entire hustling laughing campus and its Australian themed food and activity stations. So I toddled away and spent the time with far better company than the usual band of ratbag sys admins I hang out with.
- Also I've been "dating" which is ... well it's odd after years of serial monogamy. Flattering though and I've spent a lot of nice time with some lovely nerd boys; which we all know I like really. I will say though that by the time you accept a couple of dinner invitations into an already overloaded time table your time really backs up!
- Worn Wild was on the weekend so Joseph and I headed out early in the morning and were glad to just have a table full of magazines after watching carload upon carload of fashion and mannequins arrive. Still we made the best we could of a working Sunday and had some fun chatting and gossiping.
Don't forget also that I'm off to the US on Saturday so expect endless blogging and pictures for those of you who I know enjoy my travel stories.
From http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcdream/reign-enchiridion:
The Reign Enchiridion is an inexpensive, digest-size paperback book that contains all the rules for the roleplaying game "Reign" by Greg Stolze. It also includes a few rules elements from the first and second years of Reign ransoms, such as the extended rules for homegrown spells and schools of sorcery.
The text for the Reign Enchiridion is finished. When this project succeeds, we will lay out the book, print it, and mail it to backers. After all contributors have received their copies, the remainder of the printing will be made available to other gamers.
FOR THE PDF ONLY: If you make the minimum bid of $10, you get a copy of the PDF without a physical copy of the book.
FOR A PHYSICAL COPY -- BACKERS IN THE U.S.: You get a one physical copy of the book for an initial backing amount of $15. For each additional $12, you get another copy shipped to the same address. You also get the PDF.
FOR A PHYSICAL COPY -- BACKERS OUTSIDE THE U.S.: You get one copy for an initial backing amount of $25. For each additional $12, you get another copy shipped to the same address. You also get the PDF. Please note that due to the high cost of international shipping, the minimum bid amount to ship outside the U.S. is $25. If you provide less than that for an international shipment, you will get the PDF but not the physical copy, or of course we can refund the bid amount if you prefer.
161 Backers
$4,828 pledged of $5,400 goal
6 days to go
This is an interesting publishing model, intended to take out the financial risk of publishing a book in a niche market such as roleplaying games. I hope that it succeeds – not just because I want a copy of the book myself, nor because REIGN is an excellent roleplaying game that I've been enjoying over the last year. I'd like to see this publishing model succeed and become the norm, rather than companies taking a huge risk on books that fail because there isn't a market for them.
... but Tori can win me over. One religious, and one secular:
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