I went to a Supernatural convention last weekend, which was actually the first weekend hotel con I've ever been to. It was so much fun! Jared was supposed to be attending, but he cancelled a few weeks earlier and we were kinda upset, but then the whole weekend we forget he was even supposed to be there. I got my season 1-5 boxset signed by lots of lovely cast members, we had our photos with Misha and Jim Beaver, and we also got very drunk at the parties and ran around giving alcohol to people. I do have photos, but they are not off my camera yet so you're going to have to wait! We're so up for the one next year already.

This week I have been attempting to run and trying to eat well. I've stopped going to Weight Watchers meetings as my Saturday mornings are pretty full up at the moment, but I'm still tracking my food and doing well. I'm doing a 5K tomorrow morning with my mum and some friends in aid of Cancer Research so I'm hoping I don't totally crash and burn! It feels good eating healthily and trying to improve myself.

Jewellery wise I have paid for my table at the London Film and Comic Con, and I'm also doing a market at Old Spitalfields on the 9th June so I'm trying to get together some non-geeky things to appeal to the tourists.

Gigs; there have been lots. Once I edit all the photos off my camera I'll make a separate post with some highlights or something.

Oh also I've seen Avengers a silly number of times by now, and it continues to be fucking awesome. ILU Marvel. My lego Thor and Loki minifigs have taken pride of place on my work desk.

Back to work tomorrow after an awesome 4 days of drinking and eating chocolate. At least it's only a 4 day week now. I pretty much restrained myself until my weigh-in on Saturday morning, and then I drank all the cider, ate all the cake and all the chocolate. Weight watchers has been going well though; I've lost 4kg (9lbs) since I started, so I'm now down to 90kg which is the lowest I've been in about 6 years. My next mini-goal in mind is 85kg so I'm hoping I can get there before the Supernatural convention in May.

As I'm currently doing 3 uni courses at once (why, oh dear why) I had three assignments due within a few days of each other. Luckily I didn't fudge them and got 87% in the level two ones, and 66% in the level three. I'm actually doing third year uni work! Who'd have thought it?

What else? My friend that split up with her boyfriend has now found herself a new one, and he's fucking terrible and we're trying to think of nice ways to break it to her. She's seriously got an awful taste in men, and we're pretty good at spotting the bad ones. I got my tattoo, which was awesome and took literally five minutes. Work has been boring, j33_3 came to stay for a few days which was fun, I'm considering dying my hair blue over the summer and I've been reading a buttload of library books. That's about it I think!

( Now for massive amounts of photos )

I have rejoined Weight Watchers, although this time I'm actually going to the meetings. I've been hovering around the same weight since Christmas so I need a bit of ritual weekly humiliation (aka the weigh in) to kick my arse into gear a bit. I'm going with a friend at the moment so I have some company which is nice, although she only has about a stone left to lose so I can't imagine she will be there for long. Fingers crossed for success! It would be lovely to get down to a 12/14 before I go on holiday.

I've been pretty busy with my jewellery and uni work recently. I made a Supernatural necklace which has sold really quickly, and at the weekend I experimented with photosensitive emulsion for screen printing. My first attempt came out really good, considering so many things can go wrong, so hopefully I'll get some bags printed up this weekend.

One of my friends has split up with her boyfriend of 3 years and has moved back home with her parents, who live just down the road from me, so we've been going on outings to keep her busy. Lot's of pub trips, art gallery visits and cinema excursions. It's been fun! We should be going to Colchester this weekend as well for a drunken night out which I'm looking forward to. I feel like at the moment I just go to work, then sit in my room watching films and making jewellery, so it's a refreshing change to get out and about and do different things.



I've got some photos left on my camera from the NME awards and some random weekends, I'll see about uploading them tomorrow. Also I'm getting my next tattoo done on Saturday (small Triforce on my left wrist) so no doubt there will be photos of that too.

LJ finally purged one of my wanted usernames. I was uhming and aahing for a few days as it's kinda expensive, but someone just bought one of my more expensive necklaces so I did it :P

The user formally known as placebobitch is now evil_duck :D Woop! (Now it's only my damn last.fm that's not evilduck or something related)

LJ! I renewed my paid account in January and then I don’t bother posting anything for a month. Clever me. I’m afraid Tumblr is taking over my life with its gif photosets and instant gratification. I still read everything on here though; I just don’t bother posting anything. (Although if you do have a tumblr and haven’t added me, go go go evilduck.tumblr.com. Warning: Contains mostly british comedians, supernatural and star trek)

Anyway; life. Myself and my friends have now paid for our apartment, flights and festival tickets for Benicassim, so all we need to do now is wait and save our spending money. The lineup is not amazeballs incredible or anything, but I’m very happy with The Horrors, Crystal Castles, Bombay Bicycle Club and Noel Gallagher, and I’m sure when it’s 2am and I’ve been drinking sangria all day I won’t mind dancing along to Dizzee Rascal and David Guetta. I need to lose some more weight before July though.

We’ll all be going back to Reading festival again this year (of course) and Foo Fighters and Kasabian are pretty much confirmed as two of the headliners which shall be nice. I think my mum wants to do the whole weekend as well seeing as there's no Glasto this year, although she'll camp over the river in White, away from all the rowdiness!

Also being the amazing sister I am, I’ve managed to get two standing tickets for Blink 182 at the O2 Arena for me and Joe in July. His face when I told him! I think he’s a tiny bit excited.

What else? The Sherlock finale, another fantastic 90 minutes of television. I cried and yelled at the tv when it ended. I thought the cliffhanger last time was bad enough. Been loving reading all the theories online, and I’ve already got my blu-ray for copious amounts of rewatches. All the Mark Gatiss has made me want to go and rewatch all of The League of Gentlemen so I may start that soon.

Me and the wife went to the cinema yesterday to see This Means War (aka we stare at pretty men for an hour and a half), and it was actually pretty decent. I've still got no idea why she would pick either of them with their creepy stalky ways, but we focussed on the pretty instead. Lots of popcorn, pick 'n' mix and rum too :D

Uni is still trudging along. I actually got 97% in one of my level 2 assignments the other week which I was pretty excited about. I'm currently taking 3 courses at the moment, as one is ending in May and two have just started, so it's meant a lot of planning and actually reading ahead instead of doing it all the night before. Seems to be working though.

I'm currently in the middle of refreshing my website and installing a new shopping system. It's been a work in progress for about 2 months now so it's slow going, but I'll get there eventually. This is the new home page at the moment:



The big banner in the middle will show about 3 or 4 of my favourite designs in rotation, with links to the buying pages, and the album cover below is generated by my weekly most played album on last.fm. I coded that one up myself and I'm pretty damn pleased with it! When you roll over it shows the album title and artist as well, with a link to the relevant last.fm page. The bottom scroller contains the 15 newest images uploaded to my flickr stream (with the relevant website tags) as I'm going to use a photo system that pulls in images direct from my flickr to my website. It will be easier than uploading photos to flickr, then resizing and uploading them onto my own server as well. I'm very pleased with how it's going so far anyway.

This weekend was absolutely crazy, it was just mental.

I filled out my tax return. :P
I also wrote a letter to HMRC trying to get off paying national insurance contributions for my "business". See I made the stupid mistake of registering as self-employed last year but telling them I had been trading since early 2010, so they promptly sent me a letter demanding 2 years back payment of NI contributions. I shouldn't have to pay because I come under the small-earnings category at the moment, but I'm not sure how their refund policy works for a bill that hasn't actually been paid yet..

On Saturday I went to the bank and closed down my last student account. I've now got one bank account, like a normal person, instead of the four I used to have. It feels good.

We've organised a small _pinto outing on Friday to see Shame at the cinema. It will be nice to see _faeriequeen and leandralocke again, have some dinner and then watch Fassbender get naked a lot. I've actually seen Shame already; I got tickets to a private Tate members screening in December that featured a Q&A with Steve McQueen, the director. We lucked out and Michael Fassbender showed up too, and I managed to meet him briefly afterwards and get a photo. If you have me on twitter, tumblr or facebook this will be old news, but I have a compulsive need to post it everywhere!

( Myself and Fassbender )

Best morning ever! Benedict Cumberbatch and Noel Clarke (mickey from dr who) have been confirmed to be in the new star trek film. Benedict will be playing the villain. I cannot even. This will be the best film ever, I need it now.

Second best news: myself and my brothers girlfriend have decided to go to a uk supernatural convention in may (Asylum 8), so we have now officially become those fans. We've found a cheap hotel which offsets the cost of the con a bit, so now I just need to save for photoshoots and stuff. Also keeping our fingers crossed that Jensen will confirm too as Sam loves him the most. I myself will be going giddy over Misha :P

( Under the cut )

I've just realised I haven't flailed about Sherlock yet.

HOW FLIPPING GOOD WAS SHERLOCK?! OMG EVERYTHING WAS PERFECT I LOVED IT NEED NEXT WEEKS EP RIGHT NOW

I had to restrain myself from watching it again immediately after. We may have waited a year and a half, but my god it was worth it.

I hope everyone has had lovely holidays. I have mostly been eating chocolate and getting drunk, it's been great. I also got sick of my hair and had it all chopped off last week:



Look how short it is! It's so easy, I love it. I literally wake up, shove a bit of wax in it and then it's good to go. Lovely.

Now here is my now traditional review of the year in photos.

( 2011 in photos )

I looked back at my resolutions from last year, and I think I've done pretty well again.

-Lose more weight, feel happy about myself. Definitely did this, dropped about 10kg and feeling good at the moment.
-Develop more jewellery designs and sell at some craft fairs/conventions Sold loads, had a great year jewellery-wise.
-Pimp myself out at more gig photography sites, as I'm losing faith in GigJunkie Didn't do this, possibly spent too much time on my jewellery and uni courses
-Take more photos, get more lenses, possibly upgrade camera body too Didn't take many photos either, although I got a new small camera that helped
-Continue doing well in my computing courses Continued to get good marks, all is going well
-Pay off my bank overdrafts DONE!!!!
-Travel to more places I've never been to Went to Edinburgh and Glastonbury festival, that counts right?

I think the overdrafts is the thing I'm most proud of. I've managed to pay off over £3000 in student overdrafts this year, and as of a few days ago they are now all completely gone! So my 2012 resolutions look like this:

-Finish overhauling website
-Get back into gig photography
-Lose more weight and keep it off
-Continue building my jewellery empire :D
-Save up enough money for a flat deposit and move out

Fingers crossed it all goes well. This year I will be turning 25 (how scary!) but we're going on a nice holiday to Benicassim festival in July so that should take my mind off it.

Sorry LJ, I do mean to update but I always have too much to write about, so I put it off and then forget what I've been doing anyway.

In the last month and a half I have been to the Doctor Who Experience twice (awesome both times), had a few days off and wandered around London with j33_3, got my tragus pierced as I didn't buy a lovely dress in Camden, sold and thrown away a fuck ton of old clothes and bits from my room, read a lot of New X-Men, went to a London Rollergirls Rollerderby, and probably got drunk a lot.

I started calorie counting/healthy eating again a few months ago and it's going even better than before. I now weigh the same as I did four years ago and I'm almost at a size 16. I've got loads of jeans that I'd bought and they were too small (damn Primark and their wonky sizing) so I'm looking forward to wearing them! I'm hoping to get into my size 16s before Christmas, and then I can enjoy myself a bit over the holidays :P I didn't tell my mum about it and she noticed the other week, so it seems it is making a difference. I feel really good :)

Also having had pink/purple hair for a few months it is clearly time for a change, so I'm dying it nuclear red next weekend. Pics to follow I imagine.

I haven't got any of my photos from the last few weeks of shenanigans onto my comp yet, so here are some photos from Halloween:

( Halloween 11 )