An assortment (like Quality Street)

Lots of people falling sick in the last few days. The weather is changing a lot and it's cold and hot and cold and hot here, too. (But mostly hot.) It's quite hard to dress right.

hyouteiexchange, switching_it_up and santa_smex all happening around this period, and then they try to start another one at the same time... I love Renji to bits and think he deserves lots of attention, but uh, terrible timing, IMO. BUT! At least some fans are doing something for their favourite character, rather than sit around and moan that their favourite school/pairing aren't getting enough love and all fangirls of other schools/pairings are ruining the fandom, or whatever stupid thing it is they say. *yawn*

Nori is selling anime/manga/myu stuff! Check here!

Won some shiny new doujinshis and they were cheap.

Threw lots of things out. I know I won't need to carry all the stuff myself now that there is a removals company, but stuff I haven't touched or thought about in two years = stuff I really no longer need. Some clothes, bags and shoes have gone to charity shops.

Short days tomorrow and Wednesday, then I'm off work until next Tuesday. No internet from Thursday.

Re-started writing for switching_it_up. Don't think I can concentrate on it much right now, though.

..........just been told I need to go back to site in half an hour. Short day today too, then! Go there, make sure the right thing is being done, take a few photos, go home. I can't believe how much I'm being paid to do this job sometimes.

The Castleford Project

I've been very interested in this programme since I first heard about it, partly because of the actual regeneration ideas, but more because I want to know if they'll highlight the sort of difficulties that always arise (public consultation, funding, all sorts of hoops to jump through). It turns out they focus more on the townspeople's reaction than the other bits, which I suppose makes sense because that makes good TV and connects with the viewers. But I wish they'd talk more about, for example, how hard the architect had to work to get the railway underpass - something that small, with a budget of only £100k, can take several years to start work and by the time it starts, the client/funding source changed. Sometimes it means you'll have to start the procedure all over again. It's the sort of struggle that I hope more people can see so that they'd think again before they start saying "I've been complaining about [thing] for years and nobody's listening or doing anything about it."

The programme does say a bit about how hacking away bits of a design, for cost or other reason, can completely destroy it so that it doesn't serve its purpose anymore. And then the people'd say "well all that money spent and all we got are a couple of plastic chairs!" - no, that wasn't the original intention. But so often a patchwork approach gets adopted, taking bit and pieces from different designs, and in the end it just doesn't work. You like Stephen King's plots and Haruki Murakami's writing style, but you can't mesh the two together, it'll end up horrible. Really. The designer and the community need to work very tightly together to get things to work.

Um. By the way. Don't let architects try to create traffic calming designs. They know fuck-all about traffic calming.