Weekend report back

I'm afraid there wasn't much in the way of pop culture consumption this past weekend. The reason for this is that I spent half of the weekend working. For those of you who don't know, or don't remember, I was retrenched at the end of September, and in the months since then, when not working on personal projects, doing some freelance, sending my CV out to interested individuals, and going through the painful 8 hour+ process of applying to claim for unemployment benefits, I've been earning a bit of cash helping out as a facilitator at team builds once a week or so.

Facilitating is easy, it requires continual problem solving and it's a fantastic opportunity to people watch, as corporates have their staff doing everything from painting to puzzle solving, to kayaking to spear throwing, to simulated crime scene investigation. From a facilitator's perspective, team building also involves a decent amount of physical labour (a nice change from being desk-bound for the past 5 years) - the result being I'm usually tired by the time I get home. So yeah, after a Saturday of being sand blasted all day by a gale on a gloomy, cold beachfront, my energy levels were depleted.


For the record, my plan is to try and re-enter the job force properly from January next year i.e. I'm not currently going all out to sell myself. I'm treating these 3 months as a kind of a sabbatical, which, let's face it, so few people are ever able to take - especially once there's dependents and a mortgage to worry about. This is my chance to work on what I want, and work out what I really want to do. And right now that's looking like becoming an online content specialist - more specifically a writer for blogs, websites and online publications, whether full-time or on a freelance paid-per-word basis.

Right now though, I'm struggling quite a bit with feeling isolated and unwanted. More so than any actual physical object, what I'd love for Christmas is a trip away to someplace exotic; different, with pampering and someone to share the experience with.

Anyway, this weekend I finally made a start on Season 13 of South Park, although I only managed to stay awake during the hilarious premiere episode, entitled The Ring, which pokes fun at the confusing and contradictory sexual messages sent by Disney and the Jonas Brothers to little girls.


This weekend I also got the latest Girlz 'N' Games comic sketched and inked, for online debut later this week. I actually ended up starting an entirely new strip on Friday, having already half completed another one. You see I came up with a second idea for a comic that would be completely irrelevant if it was only published in a fortnight's time, so #2 leapfrogged the initial strip.

Anyway, the only other bit of pop culture news was that our rescheduled Dungeons & Dragons session went horribly wrong on Sunday. Facing off against evil god Veckna for a second time, he managed to wish three-quarters of the party away to another plane (I used up 5 Fate Points to resist the teleportation, and didn't roll above 9 on my 20-sided die once!). Our battlemage, Micah, was left on his own to fight both a god and his rapidly regenerating dragon lich companion. Having used up all his spells already, Micah was quickly defeated, and without us knowing what happened, we suspect the worst - namely that Veckna has transformed him into a loyal commander of his undead army.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party ended up stranded for 7 days on a demiplane populated by refugees from other war-torn planes. We did eventually get back to the empire - with 20 or so alien refugees in tow, newly converted to the One True Faith by my paladin - except now we are in a terrible predicament. Veckna has had a full week to grow even stronger, we've lost our chief tactician and teleporter (allowing us to cross continents in the blink of an eye), and my paladin has lost all his spells since his deity left. Things do not look good for our heroes...