Monday 22 November 2010

Harry Potter and Disturbed

Two things have happened since last time. Two major things anyway. First was that I saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt 1 at the premiere on November 17th and I must say it was incredible! I've disliked all of the other Harry Potter films but this one was special. They had managed to make it so much like the book and they managed to fit so much into those two hours. Probably because they split the book in half and made two films. Too bad they couldn't do that with all the other ones :P Ofc there were things that bothered me, details, but the good parts overwhelmed the bad parts. I'm really looking forward to the next part that premieres in May. For this film I had almost no expectations, but now for the second part I have very high expectations and I juts hope it will be as good as the first part :)

Second was that Love and I went to see Disturbed live in Copenhagen! Except for the train being late and thus we arriving a little late everything went fine getting there. The first band on stage was Halestorm, a, to me, unknown band that didn't manage to convince me they were worth continue to listen to. Next up was Papa Roach. I knew about them but I haven't listened to them before and they were awesome. They managed to get the crowd going and already before Disturbed got on stage we were sweaty and tired and thirsty :P We had got ourselves places really close to the stage and as to not lose them I snuck out of the crowd and bought us some water and then snuck back in again (I think I'm good at that). The crowd went crazy when Disturbed got on and then they started performing. In total three songs off of their latest album; Asylum, two from Believe, two from Indestructible + Stricken, Land of Confusion, Ten Thousand Fists and Down with the sickness. All in all it was an incredible time. Although it wasn't as good as a live usually is. I think it has something to do with them just having an hour to play so they played as many songs as possible and didn't interact much with the crowd. If they had had more time to interact with the people it would have been a better live I think. But they were still awesome and I don't regret spending all those money at all.

Sunday 14 November 2010

Three days at a castle

This Friday my gran had invited me, my family and Love to a goose dinner at Svaneholm's Castle. It was a fancy dinner with all us girls in dresses and my dad and Love in suits :) The food was great, except for maybe the dessert that I (for once!) didn't enjoy very much. But I thought it was all very solemn. That evening I was the chauffeur for the first time and it felt nice knowing that I really could drive the car packed with people :P

Yesterday I worked with my dad at the first Christmas display of the season at Svaneholm's Castle. All those other times when I've worked during autumn or winter it's always been awfully cold so this time I came prepared dressed in three layers of clothes. I hit the jackpot with those three layers. Spent the whole day outdoors without wearing a coat :P Except for working I also visited the display of course. I really like walking around in castles or at historical sites, because to me it seems like I can feel history. If I had walked through that castle in my dress on the day of the dinner, in my head I would have been wearing a delicate 18th century dress and moved graciously through the halls. But this day I wore jeans, boots and a wool shirt so I felt more like a horse boy tip-toeing through the halls peeking at all the fine folks :P The most awesome thing of the day was this:


Today was the last day of the Christmas display and it's been a very interesting day. Around noon it started raining and it kept on raining all day. It's very ineresting selling sugary sweets, sweets wrapped in paper and non-waterproof helium balloons while it's raining. But that makes it fun and interesting. It's fun to be challenged by the elements. But nothing yet has been quite as crazy as the time when I was selling sweets at a farm auction in early December a few years back and it started snowing and was real windy at the same time. I was hanging on to the ceiling so it wouldn't fly off and Dad was packing away all the stuff in a hurry - that was a lot of fun xD
The evening turned even more interesting when it was time to pack up. We got all the stuff away, closed the trailer and put it on the car. Dad was going to use the tractor mode on his SUV to pull the trailer out of the swampy lawn. It worked for about three meters. Then there was a mud puddle and we got stuck. Dad decided to leave the trailer behind and pick it up tomorrow when they were moving the small cottages of the Christmas display away with the help of a truck. The staff at the people agreed to move his trailer with the help of the truck. Good. So we took the trailer off the car and then we were going to drive home. Nope. The car was stuck in the mud and despite the car's tractor mode and four-wheel drive Dad couldn't get it to move. So he went to fetch some planks and put them next to the wheels to help the car move. Didn't help. More planks. Didn't help. Try to push the planks further under the wheels. Didn't help. Fetched the rubber mats from the floor of the car and put them close to the wheels. Didn't help. Went to get a friend and his car to pull our car out of the mud. While waiting Dad tried to turn the wheels, give full gas and still have all the planks and rubber mats by the wheels. The car moved a little out of the mud. The friend showed and they put the towline between the cars and started up. That pulled our car out of the last of the mud and we could be on our way home. Half an hour later. What a thrilling evening :P

Some pictures from today. The castle, our counter and our stuff and the last one is just a cool picture :P




Thursday 11 November 2010

Current fandoms

A few months ago I did a post about my old fandoms. Well, some stuff has happened since July and now I feel it's time for an update :)

Pokémon: Love bought Pokémon SoulSilver version for my birthday. Just when I had stopped obessing over my Pearl version he gives me a new one. What's more to it is that it contains the new Pokéwalker, which is almost like a Tamagotchi but with a Pokémon that you transfer from the game and then take for a walk. I'm having a lot of fun with it! SoulSilver and its twin HeartGold are remakes of Pokémon Gold and Silver and that means loads of old Generation 1 and Generation 2 Pokémon. From back in the day when I actually collected the trading cards!!! ^_^ And look what I found!

Firefly: As much as I dislike Sci-Fi I love this series. I have the last episode left to see and most of the episodes have been great. Although all my friends seem to be completely in love with Kaylee, my favourite is River.

Vampires: Don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about urban fantasy, sexy, pale, glittering (or whatever) vampires. I'm talking about the legend. The legend of vampires is one of the most enduring legends of history. When I found this book I got interested, then I got it and started reading it and now I'm even more interested than I used to be. I mean it's a guy from National Geographic that's written it and apparantly the book is based on some program that was broadcasted on that very channel some time ago. It's really interesting. Strongly recommend!

H.P. Lovecraft: Love bought Necronomicon for my birthday last year but I hadn't got around to actually reading it until after his Call of Cthulhu RPG. That was the spark I needed. The day after I made my research on Lovecraft himself and started reading his copy of Necronomicon. I really like his way of writing and his cosy stories. They're supposed to be horror, but I find them more cosy than actually goose-bumpening :P And I that made me read this web comic called Hello Cthulhu as well. It's very cute. Cthulhu is a demon god and he arrives to a world to destroy it. There he meets Hello Kitty and he falls in love with her. Then the evil thing walks around with ribbons in his tentacles all the time! xD

Avatar: Not the film with blue aliens. The anime with elementals. Love made me watch it during summer and then it escalated from there. I've seen all the episodes. I'm looking forward to the next series and I really really wanna watch the live action movie M. Night Shaymalan did this year to see how badly it sucks.

Harry Potter: Love wanted to re-read the series before we watched the first part of Deathly Hallows. All this re-reading and looking forward to the film has made me re-live some of my fandom :) It doesn't help that this video is a masterpiece!

Grey's Anatomy: Yup! We've been watching a lot of series recently and I made Love interested in this one. We have now watched the whole first season (third time for me) and that first season just keeps getting better and better :P

Hello Kitty: If the Lovecraft part didn't reveal it... I bought a Hello Kitty scheduler when I was in Tokyo. The year is coming to an end and I need a knew one. So I bought one from eBay :P I also love the evil Hello Kitty that shows up in Hello Cthulhu :)

That's about it for now :P

Wednesday 10 November 2010

Writing

So since I have so much free time nowadays I have taken up writing again. It's pretty fun and it's going well. In two days I've written two chapters :) I feel proud. If I keep writing in this pace I might have a book finished pretty soon. I don't think it's great but it's better than some other stuff I've written and it's obviously a book for youths. I didn't want it that way, but it's hard to write like an adult when I'm a youth myself :P That's where it is. I'm trying to sound more adult-like, but I guess I usually don't?

Anyway I write in Swedish and if anyone wanna read the finished product and give me some feedback, just give me a nudge at facebook or msn or IRL ;)

Saturday 6 November 2010

Children of the Night

I hid them under the floor
for them being here made me sore
And on that day I felt kind of hazy
Now they still gotta be there
cause they are not going anywhere
with severed limbs - or call me crazy

But there are voices in the darkness
in my house, everytime I close my eyes

In the dead of night I hear 'em sigh
The children of the night are calling
Hear 'em cry, they still defy
endlessly
I feel like falling
Now they're all
my children of the night

These skulls are so small
There are seven of them in all
I swear to God, now they're deadly silent

But still there's voices in the darkness
Getting louder all the time

In the dead of night I hear 'em sigh
The children of the night are calling
Hear 'em cry, they still defy
endlessly
I feel like falling
Now they're all
my children of the

Now little feet tap at the end of my bed
Remorse I seize
I feel there's someone leaning over my head
Seven breaths, they freeze

In the dead of night I hear 'em sigh
The children of the night are calling
Hear 'em cry, they still defy
endlessly
I feel like falling

In the dead of night I hear 'em sigh
The children of the night are calling
Hear 'em cry, they still defy
endlessly
I feel like falling
Now they're all
my children of the night

Friday 5 November 2010

It's that day

Since it's that day as well...
Remember, remember
the 5th of November
The gunpowder treason and plot
I know of no reason
why the gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot

Too bad I don't have the film V for Vendetta or I would definately have watched it tonight.

Monday 1 November 2010

Role-playing Call of Cthulhu - a horror story

So I thought since I do role-playing almost every week I could blog about it :P Gives me something to blog about and it's pretty fun :)

As you all know yesterday was Halloween. So Love thought he'd do a one-shot horror role-play Call of Cthulhu with us. That was his first time leading a role-playing game but it went really well :) Since it was a Sunday and people had work/school the day after we started out early and met up at 4.30 pm. After being given one character sheet each from Love we started making our characters and setting our skills etc after his command and with the help of our dices. When the characters were done our group consisted of two scholars; one professor researching the occult and one university gymnastics teacher (so he was our Mr. Muscle), one doctor; he was also a scholar (strictly speaking) but more of a pharmacist and one priest.

In Call of Cthulhu everyone gets a specific sanity level depending on what the dices show, and as supernatural, occult or simply weird things show in front of our characters the dices will decide if that level gets lower. The lower it gets the closer to a complete mental breakdown is the character. Ofc the characters also have hit points and the more times a character gets hit in a battle the lower health it gets and the closer to death it becomes.

After our characters were finished it was time for dinner and then the game itself kicked off. By then it wwas dark outside and to create the appropriate atmosphere we used no electricity and simply had big lit candles on the table. And then: the story.

We were all assembled by a landlord who had bought himself a house really really cheap, because no one wanted to live in it. Reason for that was what had happened to the family who had lived there. The father had gone insane and now lived at an asylum 4 miles off town, the mother weren't very stable either and she stayed with her mother. The two sons were doing pretty okay and all lived with relatives. This was all the landlord knew and we set out to find out some background information to our case. Our job was to "fix" the house so the landlord could rent it to someone. The priest (that's me) and the doctor went off to the asylum, since the priest was the only one who could drive (the game takes place in 1920's Boston). Mr. Muscle went to The Globe's news paper archives and the professor went to the city archives.

What the priest and the doctor found out was that the family had all had dreams of a man with burning eyes and both the mother and the father had felt an evil presence from the bedroom furthest from the staircase on the second floor of the house. The evil presence seemed to dislike the father the most and had used cuttlery and religious symbols to throw at him. The family was strongly Catholic, the mother even more so after her experiences in the house, the father on the other hand had abandoned his faith as a consequence to his experiences. He was considered gravely schizofrenic. Both parents talked about the man with burning eyes. The mother had only seen him in her dreams but the father had had hallucinations of him after he had awokened and in mirrors. They had both seen bleeding walls and had objects thrown at them.

What Mr. Muscle and the professor found out and the different archives were that the house and been built by a man who had soon after fallen sick and sold the house to a Walter Corbitt. That's why the house was also called the Corbitt House earlier, but now no one knew of that name. Walter Corbitt had been sued by his neighbours for being weird and involved in the occult. In his will he wrote that he wanted to be buried in the basement of the house. In 1880 he had disappeared after a raid on the church he was involved in and a priest had been sentenced to prison. The priest had escaped said prison in 1917 and no one had seen him since. The church that Corbitt was involved with had meetings in a chapel not far from the house. In his will Corbitt had also written that he wanted the house to be empty for as long as possible, preferably forever. But despite this people had lived there and they had all gone crazy, become invalid or died.

After the characters had met up and told each other what they had found out we decided to go to the ruin of the chapel and see what we could find out. The priest drove them all there and on the waywe bought lamps and spades (shovels). When we entered the area the first thing we see are two walls on each side of the pathway. They are both washed clean and there's a symbol carved into them. When we walk past them we all get the feeling that were being watched. We let Mr. Muscle stand guard outside the ruin and the three of us enters, when we do that we all get a headache (except Mr. Muscle who is still outside). The doctor is very sure to try the floor with his umbrella before we walk on it and thanks to that we didn't fall through the floor into the basement. In the construction papers of the chapel there was no mentioning of a basement so ofc we all go down there. Down there we find a room with to victims from the fire caused by the raid and also some old journals from meetings and one old mouldy book in Latin with description of the churches believes etc. This book the professor brings with her. Then we leave the chapel.

After that we have a discussion whether we should go investigate the house as well although it's already dusk or wait until tomorrow. We decided to go to the house. When we get there we take a walk around the house to see it there are any alternate entrances. The coal cellar as well as all the windows are covered with boards and the back door can't be opened from the outside. So we enter through the front door using the key we've been given by the landlord. When we enter we see a lot of closed doors and a staircase leading down. We decide to first investigate the first floor and enter the first room. It's a storage room with old bicycles and a cupboard. The cupboard is covered with boards as well and we all find this strange so the doctor goes out to the car to fetch a crowbar. We open the cupboard and in there we find three journals belonging to Walter Corbitt. The priest, the professor and the doctor all start looking through one each (and as a consequence lose some sanity points). The professor keeps the journals and we keep on going to the next room, by now we all start to hear a loud thumping coming from above. The thumping continues as we investigate the rooms on the first floor. When we get to the living room we find the staircase going up and we all see how one wall starts to bleed (and we lose some sanity points) and then the loud thumping stops. We go upstairs and start looking through the bedrooms. Nothing interesting until we get to the furthermost bedroom. We open it and the doctor walks in to open the only openable window in the house, but he never makes it cause the bed rushes from the wall and into him. The professor and the priest start to investigate the wall the bed came from and at that time Mr. Muscle sees how the doctor tries to hit the priest in the head with his umbrella. Mr. Muscle stops him but the doctor has no recollection of what he was trying to do. We finish the last bedroom and decides to go down the basement to find Corbitt's grave. Down there Mr. Muscle finds a beautiful, but dirty, dagger and picks it up. When he does that the dagger flies out of his hand and hits the professor's leg. The doctor takes care of them both and then we walk into the last room of the house. This room is completely empty save for a bench in the middle. On this bench is a dead body and above it hangs the same symbol we saw carved into the walls at the chapel. The whole room stinks and the doctor moves forward to take a closer look on the body. When he does that the body wakes up and looks at him. The doctor throws his umbrella at the corpse and the final battle erupts. We manage to defeat the corpse with not too many casualties, except for the priest accidentally shooting his gun at the professor and making her faint and Mr. Muscle being controlled to attack the doctor once.

In the end all the characters survived, which isn't the standard of Call of Cthulhu RPGs :P The upside is that we can keep these characters and reuse them in another game. Maybe a fullscale campaign of Call of Cthulhu if it comes to that :)

During this game we were all affected in different ways by the scary story, but the atmosphere was definately perfect and I love the catharsis horror gives when the tensity is released at the end of the story.

The most positive upside about this game is that it made me genuinely interested in reading H.P Lovecraft's work. Something I've been planning to do for a year now but never had the motivation to. When Love and I got home I borrowed his copy of Necronomicon and read the short story that he ahd recommended; The Rats in the Walls. And it was... cosy :P It defeinately caught my attention and I wouldn't want to put it down but the story didn't really scare me. It was cosy and interesting. I think I like his way and I will start reading Necronomicon from the beginning this evening :)