The Power of One, I admit, holds a personal interest to me as a novel (as does Tandia). I'm not exactly sure how the relationship works, but I am given to understand Bryce Courtenay is my grandfather's cousin (I should probably confirm this before I spill it across the Internet, but there it is).

I read both The Power of One and Tandia at an age comparable with Peekay at the outset of his story, so...-

Expand this post » Amy Bear @ Google+

I'm not even a fan of Doctor Who and I think this is utterly awesome!

Do you remember the first time you saw this? I sure do.

Original Guild Wars Trailer!

Found it in a dark and dusty folder.

I admit it, I got misty-eyed.

Sorry, should have uploaded it to youtube instead, then I could have embedded it.

The creative component of my thesis is 'only' a chapter long. That means a reader going through the branches will only experience about one chapter worth of text - hopefully ~11-12k of words, or the equivalent in reading time.

But what I'm writing is probably several times that, because I need to account for every possible path through the chapter, beginning from four starting areas with four different...

Expand this post » Amy Bear @ Google+

Random photographs taken randomly walking the dog on a nice, sunny, cool, winter morning. Amy Bear @ Google+

My best mate - Andy - and I want to start playing Magic the Gathering, only neither of us has even seen a deck, nevermind played the game. For my part, I'm really excited about building my own, but I think we'd both be better off starting with some kind of intro deck, or a 'duel' deck(?).

So, knowing at least half my LJ friends have either heard of or played it, does anyone have any suggestions for a couple of beginners? We're talking playing a game over coffee, or making an evening of it once a week, not prepping for tourneys.

I was eyeing a nifty looking toolkit, but without much experience building a deck, I might only frustrate myself trying for a first time.

Also, there's a million questions ranging from 'land cards? wtf?' to 'do we both have to have decks from the same 'lot' (ie Dark Ascension or Innistrad) or can we play from different decks (ie DA Vs Inn)?'

Of course, there's always initial outlay. We're both broke, so if we can avoid spending $200x2 on some sort of epic battle pack(s), that'd be nice. :D

Comments from Twitter/Facebook welcomed and encouraged!

Edify me, people!

All my plans for the day were summarily dashed through the course of a 30 second phone call.

Two weeks ago (not three, as I thought) I called to make an appointment with the new psychologist, and it was set for today. I called to make sure I had the right time, but somehow my appointment was erased from the system. For the last few months I've kept my mental state in check with the promise that I'd have access to a psychologist 'soon', but having all that fall apart made me and my mental state fall apart too.

So Spirit and I went for a walk. A shame I can't do that all day every day, because Spirit is the most soothing and comforting presence in my life. Even my cats pale in comparison, and I do love their fuzzy butts dearly.

I feel better now. Andy and I will go out for lunch where I'll grouse some more about my bad day, then I'll see what I can salvage of my afternoon.

Also, I took a couple of pics.

We girls, out and about:




ETA: It really should be a Monday.

I was just at the supermarket doing my shopping. I got the check-out with my re-usable bags carried in my basket, when the lady pulled out my cold storage bag and declared it was 'all wet!'

My heart sank as I took it from her and gave it a sniff. My blasted cats have decided their new kitty litter isn't good enough and started using my shopping basket for a litter tray.

I got a smear of cat pee on my nose. :(

(Bought some more of the old [and expensive] litter and 're-educated' them on litter manners).

Noah's one of three horses currently chewing down the grass on my parents' new property, though actually he's a very friendly, in-your-face dog who looks like a horse.

Andy and I went down for a soup-lunch at a camp site by the river, where my folks have set up their Oka and started imagining their new house. It would have been really nice if I wasn't all achy and miserable with fever, though having a horse nibbling my ear kinda made up for it.

I feel like shit when it's about to turn white, y'know?



I got nothing more to say, too tired and meh. Aside from being nibbled by a horse, the most exciting thing I did today was buy lozenges.

...a pile of cats.





Yes, I've done a lot of far more important things today, like watching gamification-related lectures by the ever-so-awesome Jane McGonigal, and stripping my bed to wash all my bedding. But as any cat owner slave can attest, one cannot do anything with one's bedding without an impromptu cat infestation.

Still, I'd like to draw your attention to Jane's (yes, we're on a first name basis now that she responded to one of my random tweets >_> ) 'lectures' over at TED. It's worth the 20 minutes, especially for anyone whose ever either played a game, or accused gamers of wasting their time playing games. :p





Time to fold my knickers and level up my domesticisty before I return to Azeroth.

I've been away from PHP/MySQL for too long. I know I'm reliving the same frustrations from before, because I'm almost certain I've had this problem before, but for the life of me I can't remember how I fixed it.. before.

At some point during my l!ve.fic frustrations I encountered a strange bug where only the last entry from a while loop would update the database. Now, I have three 'while' loops, and again, only the LAST loop is registering in the $_POST array to then update the table.

It's been pissing me off for over a day, and I don't like being pissed off for over a day when I can't even ask Google to help me. Every search query turns up something else entirely. Or worse, I get sent to that stupid php.net site that requires an effing PhD in PHP just to understand. Oh sure, it tells you what stuff IS, but not what it's FOR. -burns php.net admins-

So, if there are any PHP gurus out there who'd like to point out exactly which piece of punctuation I have in the wrong place, please take a peek at my [GOOGLEDOCS LINK REMOVED]. I've stripped it down to bare essentials, and yes, my protect() and text() functions take care of sql injection.


ETA:
A game of forum-tag with a very helpful individual resulted in a fix that isn't at all what I wanted, but may work better.

I'm looping the post data with the form data, which results in an update button for each form. I'd dismissed this out of hand because it's messy - and I hate messy - but in truth it makes more sense than me updating empty fields or forcing the database to update existing data. So, it's fixed.

Until next PHP catastrophe... I'll be sitting in my fridge cooling down with some chilled whine wine.