Darlo's World

When I moved up to Leeds there was an incident involving my TV, the TV that I’d owned and used regularly since buying it with paper round money when I was about 14 or so (more info on that incident can be seen here). So I have been up until now without a TV to watch DVDs and play games on. So that we don’t have to fork out a serious wad of money for a TV Licence, I don’t plan on using it to watch live broadcasts on. To be fair most news and good stuff ends up on the internet anyway.

Nosing around shops the only teles that seem to be available these days are LCDs or Plasmas, or as I call them “Flimsy Little Things That Break Easily And Don’t Even Look That Good Boxes” (or FLTTBEADELTGBs for short). I wanted to replace my TV with a big old style that wouldn’t fall over in a light breeze and didn’t cost more than my yearly food budget (Asda 8p noodles for the win). After looking around second hand websites and such, my thoughts returned to a little community that people I know used back home, the community of Freecyclers.

The aim of Freecycle is …

… to keep items out of landfill by providing an internet listings service to help people give unwanted items to someone else for free. Keeping stuff out of landfill helps build a sustainable future, is good for the environment and builds local and world communities.

… and to be fair it’s a great idea. What you do is when you have something you don’t want that you’d just end up throwing away, you offer it to your local freecyclers to come and take it off your hands. It’s a great way of clearing your old stuff quickly and efficiently, and also you might find something on there you’ve been after and could get for free.

… like a TV.

So getting my new (advertised as ‘a big old 80′s style TV’) home, I decided to test it out, so what better way to test it than to keep on studying (aka watching a Japanese DVD). The study material of choice? The Animal Crossing Movie.

On a completely different note, I now have a webcam. Don’t worry this won’t become a video blog (despite my excessive use of YouTube videos as it is), I just thought I’d share that.

And so ends mid-terms week. Today’s 8 page grammar exam marking the end of tests … until Monday morning when we have a vocabulary test. Still I guess I should be thankful that there’s no homework due for … crap.

A few days ago I had the privilege of watching 動物の森 (doubutsu no mori, Animal Forest), more commonly known as Animal Crossing (the movie) in the UK. I’m not going to write a review of it (now), but have to say that if you liked the game(s) then you won’t be dissapointed with the film. It keeps so many things down to it’s original, including characters, music, outfits that change whenever you see someone, emotions, even the wonderful delivery task at the start. I’ll be looking to buy a copy of it here to take home to the AC loving family, hoorah for region 2!

Wait … one thing ruined it for me. Bob, the much loved purple cat, wasn’t there. T_T

Tomorrow I’m off to a fire festival in … somewhere, so I’ll have more to write by then.