I just wanted to upload some photos I took at the gallery opening, which was the Saturday before last.

<3 DarkSlinky.

I quit my job because I got into university. Yay!

I am now a poor, unemployed university student studying a Bachelor of Applied Science/Bachelor of Secondary Education.

My degree eats all of my time. The time it takes for me to travel to and from university, attend classes and study is more than a full time job; somewhere between 50 and 60 hours a week, maybe even more.. This is the first night in a long time that I’ve actually stopped studying before 7pm!

You may wonder where so many hours are going – well, let me tell you! 80% of my time is invested in one particular subject, ‘Cellular Basis of Life,’ in which we were studying biochemistry in the first week. It is extremely overwhelming and stressful, but I’m managing. I was worried that I would struggle with chemistry but every biochemistry lecture is effectively just words plowing into the brick wall that is my brain. Chemistry is difficult, but biochemistry is off the difficulty scale entirely.

Actually, it’s kind of funny, because my chemistry lecturer will mention something, for example, a hydrogen bond, then will explain that we don’t need to understand it early on as it’s quite complicated. Meanwhile, in my biochemistry lecture in the hour before, we were told we are expected to know all about every kind of bond on a chemical level. I always laugh a little inside, in a sad and bitter way.

The other 18% of my time goes into chemistry, philosophical science and mathematics. That leaves 2% of my time for eating, sleeping and ‘me’ time (usually spent zoning out under a steaming hot shower).

I am completely exhausted, I come home every day with a headache, but I’m so glad that my life is actually going somewhere. I never believed I was good enough for science, yet here I am, understanding horrible words like oligosaccharide, polypeptide, hemiacetal…

In other news, a photo of mine was picked to be in a gallery for Youth Week. I am very happy, can’t wait to see it hanging up for people to see!

These are the 5 photos I sent in and they ended up picking the 4th one (first on the second row):

Hopefully I will be able to update more in the future but I have assessments due and mid-semester exams looming, so I will probably update in another… year….

<3 DarkSlinky.

I’m hoping whoever sent me that message will read this one day.

You didn’t discourage me in the least.  Your words that were intended to hurt me didn’t phase me. I didn’t even consider giving up, as you advised me to.  In fact, because of you, I tried harder than ever to show my artwork to the world, and my efforts have been rewarded.  My artwork has been published for the second time.

The first time an artwork of mine was published was in an art book when I was 17. It was a photo I had taken of my mother and my niece sleeping together on the day my grandmother died.

I’ve now had 5 photos published in a magazine called the Quirk Quarterly, one of which made the front cover.

I took it one evening when my boyfriend and I made a trip to our local dam to enjoy the sunset over the mountains.
To me this image reflects a lot of aspects of my life, the main ones being:

My boyfriend; he is the light of my life and the most beautiful thing for me to see every day.

My home; the mountains in the background are so familiar to me, when I see them I know I’m home.
I’m so privileged to live in such a nice city in one of the best countries in the world.

My life; to me this image is a message of hope.  Even in the darkness there is always light, warmth and hope.

<3 DarkSlinky.

Enjoy!

Critiques and suggestions, as always, would be appreciated.

<3 DarkSlinky.

This was quite difficult because for starters, my backyard is not a pretty sight, and I didn’t finish work until 4:45 so by the time I got home the sun was very close to setting.  My backyard is surrounded by trees so I had about 15 – 20 minutes to get some nice photos (I was aiming for about 6, like last time).

Critiques and suggestions would be appreciated.

<3 DarkSlinky.

On Sunday it was a lovely day and I decided to visit one of our local parks.  There was a bit of a catch, though, because this park was completely submerged and battered to hell in the Queensland January 2011 floods.

Critiques and suggestions would be appreciated.

<3 DarkSlinky.

This morning I very clearly remembered.

It started with me walking through a very old and very beautiful museum.  I was standing in a large room with descending stairs in the middle and thick, glass doors behind me.  I watched as the sun began to fade through the high windows of the room.

I turned and through the glass doors I could see a creature that looked like an ogre crossed with a dinosaur.  Its’ teeth were sharp and its’ black eyes were glinting, watching me.  I pulled a shotgun out of nowhere and began shooting at the creature but all it did was break the glass and give the creature access to me.  I opted to run from the creature.  I ran straight past it down a pitch black corridor.  I couldn’t see where I was going but I realised I was running past hundreds of dead bodies.  Everything went black and I realised I was dead.

I ‘respawned’ within eyesight of the creature.  I began to run away from the creature and managed to gain distance on him because the corridor was too short and it was forced to crawl.  Eventually I came across another person and we agreed to work together to escape.

We turned a corner began searching the rooms on either side of the corridor in case there were more survivors.  I found one;   a friend of mine who I barely recognised because he was so sickly and skinny that I could lift him and carry him myself.

We left the room and realised the creature was getting closer so we stopped searching and continued to run.  We turned another corner and came across Simon Pegg dressed as he was in the end of ‘Hot Fuzz’ – armed and dangerous.  He told us he would lead us to safety, took my friend off of me and we began to run down another corridor.

The corridor eventually began to lighten and I noticed there were a lot of teenagers in school uniforms looking frightened.  We arrived at the room with the glass doors where there was  a plump lady, clearly a school teacher, telling her students not to be afraid.  I told her to be careful not to break the glass doors which had also, somehow, respawned.  I looked out the high windows into the dead of night and thought to myself that I might be late to my own 21^st gathering.

Suddenly everyone around me was joyful and relaxed and there were people outside the museum cheering and taking photos of the museum and those inside.  I realised the people inside the museum had the privilege of seeing it before it officially opened and for some reason people found this exciting.  I decided my 21^st birthday was more important than the opening of a museum and began to walk towards the entrance.

As I walked out of the museum and down a red carpet I tried calling my boyfriend in the dream (who, in reality, is my ex-boyfriend who I had been with for nearly 5 years).  He didn’t answer and the service provider informed me that he was busy watching TV.  I called him repeatedly as I walked down the dark street and eventually he answered.  When I asked him to pick me up he told me he was too drunk to drive.  I demanded that he go and ask my mother to pick me up and hung up on him.

I decided that while I waited I would sit with a group of drunk, homeless people next to a bus shelter because in such a dodgy neighbourhood I would have preferred any company over none at all.  The lady sitting next to me was drawing pictures on her leg using a tiny welder-like-instrument shaped like a pen with glittery goo inside of it.  She told me I should give myself a tattoo and explained how to use the pen-welder as she handed it to me.  I told her I didn’t want a tattoo but she didn’t seem to comprehend what I was saying.

I looked at my phone and suddenly felt like I was completely alone in the world.  I began to miss my ex-boyfriend (who, in reality, is my current boyfriend) so greatly that it was hard to breathe.  I wanted to call him to beg him to take me back and save me from this situation but upon typing his name into my phone I realised I had deleted his number.  I tried to contact a friend who would have his number but I realised I had deleted his number too.

I suddenly heard a girl screaming and I looked up to saw a ute pulling up across the road.  There was a topless bogan sitting on the hood of the car and 2 more bogans got out of the ute.  They were all intoxicated.  Together they pulled a young girl and a young man out of the back of the ute and began to drag them inside a dirty looking house, the girl was screaming the whole time.

I felt horrified and got up to walk away as I began dialing my mother’s number.  She answered the phone and said, “Are you okay my baby?” and I told her I’m okay but to hurry.  I started heading towards a petrol station that looked safer than street while I formulated a plan to call the police once I got to a safe place, and then to win my ex-boyfriend back.

Then I woke up.

I find this dream particularly interesting because in all of my dreams for the past year my ex-boyfriend and current boyfriend have been one and the same.  In this dream it seemed like my mind was finally identifying them as two separate people.  The rest I haven’t thought about yet…

<3 DarkSlinky.

What did I do, you ask?

I won the first cosplay competition I’ve ever entered, that’s what, dressed as the Scout from Team Fortress 2.

A few months ago at a housewarming party a friend of a friend of mine suggested we all get a group of people together and go to Brisbane’s 2011 Supanova as the Red Team from Team Fortress 2.  We joked around about it, discussed who could potentially play what character and decided to go for it.  It was decided I would be the Scout.

As the weeks went by we planned and collaborated via e-mail, everyone working on their own clothes and weapons and gradually we began to resemble the red team – everything minus the spy and the pyro unfortunately.

When the day finally came we all got up early so we could arrive at Supanova with plenty of time to spare.  We queued for over an hour to get in, and then queued to sign up for the cosplay competition, some of us reluctantly, thinking it was too much effort and we couldn’t possibly win despite how happy we were with our costumes.

After two or more hours waiting to go on stage, our opportunity to present our costumes finally arrived.  I didn’t realise it was going to be in front of such a big crowd, but the cheer was enormous.  We all ran out on stage, the soldier first as he yelled “GO, GO, GO!”

Above our heads they had a screen with “They’re all spies!” as we stood there posing, waiting, watching the host stare at us in awe, as the heavy spun his mini-gun barrel.  This caught the hosts’ attention and he immediately moved down the line to talk to him first.

Host (to heavy):  “How did you make this gun?”
Heavy (in Russian accent):  “Engie is credit to team.”
Host (to engie):  “So, you tell me, how was the gun made?”
Engie (in American accent):  “I took a gun, and I added more gun.”

The crowd loved it.

The host then proceeded down the line, asking my team questions and all of them remaining in character.  I was ready with an answer, but he unfortunately skipped the last couple of us and went back to addressing the crowd.  The soldier then waved his arm, yelled, “ROLL OUT!” and we marched off stage, the crowd cheering behind us.

My boyfriend, who was dressed as the sniper, wanted to go and buy more stuff from the stalls but I told him I wanted to stay for the results, even though I doubted we would win.   I told him he could go by himself, which he did, but the venue with the stalls was closed and he came straight back which was kind of lucky.

When the results were finally announced, at first they said we had come second, which we were stoked with.  Then they said there had been a mistake and we hadn’t come second, which was disappointing, until they announced we had actually come first for the group cosplay.

It was a long, hot day with a lot of queuing, waiting and literally thousands of photos taken by hundreds of both strangers and friends, but it was so worth it.

Thanks to my amazing team.  I love you guys.

Now to plan for next year’s competition…

<3 DarkSlinky.

Team Fortress 2 Red Team

On the stage, from left to right: Engie, heavy, medic, demoman, sniper, scout, heavy, host.

Soldier, heavy, scout, sniper. Taken by Kohanna Photography.

WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?!  You disgustingly creepy bogans will NEVER get a girlfriend when you sound like that.  You say you’re married; a pretend marriage to the pyro DOES NOT COUNT as having a wife.

You can request I get back in the kitchen, demand I make you a sandwich, call me Justin Beiber and question why my balls haven’t dropped all you like – I will still kick your ass, and I’ll look over 9000 times (sorry, had to) better doing it.

No matter what server I went on tonight it was filled with drunken perverts, and no, I’m not going to turn my microphone off and be supressed like they want me to.  I’m better than that and I refuse to tolerate male dominance.  I quite simply take it in my stride and hand it back to them when I’m sitting on top of the score board, laughing.

I was in the top 3 on every server, and they simply couldn’t deal with being beat by a girl.

My conversation with one friend was as follows:

Me:  “Ha, I’m beating you.”
Friend:  “Yeah, you were camping on the cart.”
Me:  “Your score is so bad I can’t even SEE you on the scoreboard.”
Friend:  “THAT’S BECAUSE I WAS PLAYING ENGIE!”
Me:  “Excuses; you can’t take being beat by a girl!”

He was silent after that.  Surprise, surprise – he’s from the clan of notorious trolls that I recently left after getting sick of morons.  I won’t mention who they are because there are people in there I like, but I’m sure you can guess.  This ‘friend’ is the sort of gamer who’s hard to beat, doesn’t like to lose and reacts immaturely to both.  He knows who he is.

GROW UP!

I don’t hate all guys either – just most of you.

I’m not being biased towards one sex, girls suck in game too.  In Team Fortress 2 the majority of them are the kind of girls with high-pitched, nasally voices, IQ’s no bigger than their shoe size who play nothing but medic for hours on end without improvement because they have no lives and they’re only playing for the attention of lonely little boys on the other end of the internet.

Sexism has been weaved into our society so intimately that it’s camouflaged and accepted unconditionally by men and women alike.  For the past few months I have been stomping on it so hardcore, whether it be my family or friends.  I shall continue to do so.

/RANT.

To my close male and female friends:  I love you.  Don’t change.  You know who you are.

<3 DarkSlinky (unless you SUCK).