Freshers Week Year 3: I can’t be bothered…

Howdy ladies and gents, today I’ve got another personal blog post for ya and it focuses on the whole first week of university partying known as Freshers Week, and how this year I’m just not arsed about it.

Freshers used to mean everything to me when September came around for the last 2 years but this year I can easily let it skip by.

So yeah for those who don’t know, I’m a 3rd year uni student doing animation in Sheffield. I don’t really care for my course, but I love my friends on the course and I love the nights out, best part about being up here at uni. I honestly love nights out, it is one of my favourite things to do and it totally dilutes all the pain, suffering and drama that comes with university. For the last 2 years I’ve been out during Freshers and had a pretty jokes time. It really is a week designed for first-year students and believe me when I came to uni 2 years ago it was one of the most hectic, crazy and awesome experiences of my life. And even though last year wasn’t as good, I still had a brilliant time with my mates… So again now we’re here, however, this year for some reason I’m not so excited. In fact I could just let this major student week of partying pass me by.

So what’s the deal? Why have I just decided to call it quits on the biggest partying week for students?

Some may blame the fact that I’m 23, I’m too old and above the normal age group to be out with all the youngins, and to that I say bullshit! Honestly I love nights out, I’m probably one of the biggest party animals ever and I’ll probably be rocking for the next 20-30 years if I’m lucky.

I think the reason why is quite simple; I’ve just moved on.

Change, I took it on-board and now I’m doing things differently.

The more I think about it the more I just don’t care about it. Sure its a big week for partying out on the town, but in truth I’ve got plenty of other things that I could be doing instead. I could be playing video games, catching up on all my TV shows or doing blogging online like I am now. But I think the main reason I’m not bothered is because just like all things in life, we go through a period of loving something so much and then as we move on that specific thing just doesn’t have the same effect on you. Then the thing you loved becomes the thing you no longer like.

Here’s hoping there’s some truth to this statement.

In conclusion I’m not saying that I’m giving up the party life, far from it, I’m just saying that it’s not so much of a priority and I’m just gonna be slowing down for a bit. So to whoever’s out for Freshers this week or the next, party hard! Just don’t expect to see me that often, if at all. 😛

 

It’s Finally March! Wooo!

Hey people of the interweb and my fellow followers! As it says in the title of this post it’s finally March and my happiness level has gone up by 100!

All I can say is finally.

This is the part of the year I always wait for with high levels of anticipation. Besides being the time in the year when the weather starts to balance out and we get to put the clocks forward, this month is also the month of my birthday and that’s always a good thing! 😀 The lead-up to my birthday is always something catches me off-guard, I know its coming, but here we are in March already and my birthday is 28 days away. What? Where did this come from? I’m still stuck in January/February. XD

But anyways if you’ve been reading my blog recently then you would have seen one of my recent blog posts entitled “What the hell is going on with my life right now?” and it wasn’t that jolly and was kind of depressing. And while education is still giving me issues and I haven’t resolved my money problems at this point in time. Yesterday, March 1st really started the month off on an interested note. I got to hang with my classmate while doing some work on our module and at work last night things only got better where I earned loads of my in tips working in the cloakroom as the person who takes in people’s coats. The work was long, tedious, boring and partially stressful when loads of people came, though it was very fun to talk to all these different people and admire the women who came by. 🙂 Some of the people really sounded grateful for my work and really did acknowledge my existence as a person who was working to give them a good service. Fun was had yo.

As for the rest of the month there are loads of things to look forward to. Firstly I have a number of parties coming up, besides my own at the end of the month, I have at least 2 or 3 lined up over the next few weeks. Plus there’s some interesting films showing up this month including Oz The Great and Powerful which is directed by Sam Raimi which should be interesting. And then there’s the fact that after this month then it’ll be April and near the end of that month we over here in the UK get IRON MAN 3!!! CANNOT WAIT YO! 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

So here’s hoping this month can get me out of this funk and get me into my stupidly happy place where I belong. 😀

 

Birthdays Are Awesome!

You know birthdays are interesting little things aren’t they? It is the one day in the year that symbolizes your age and it is that one special day to celebrate your existence in the world. The anticipation towards this one day can be pretty immense depending on the specific age or occasion and besides Christmas, it is the most important time of the year for most people. But when that day normally comes it can be an incredible experience. Being around your family and friends on that day is a great feeling because you are around people who love and care about you, also depending on how old you are you can get presents too which can be an exciting experience in itself.

Birthdays, they are just an excuse to have fun 😀

Either way your birthday is the one day for you to be you, to enjoy life and celebrate the fact that you’ve made it one more day into a new age with new and exciting opportunities ahead of you. Well that’s what birthdays mean to me.

Just recently (yesterday in fact) I turned 22 and it was a pretty crazy lead-up to the day. I had been waiting for this day in particular since January when me and my faltmates had a flat party and went out for one of their birthdays and that was an incredible, unforgettable night and I wanted the same for myself when my night came around. Not only that but last year I never went out or did anything big for my 21st birthday so the event for my 22nd was gonna have to be big to make up for not doing anything last year. this year I decided to have a flat party with all of the people I have met since coming to Sheffield. So then Friday came along and I woke up to lovely birthday messages on my phone and Facebook. Then headed off to class in uni only to find out there was no class, so that annoyed me a little bit, but at the same time I was like “Yay no class!” So then when my second class came around I went into that and got a birthday wish off a friend and an even bigger and louder happy birthday off of my other classmate which resulted in several other people who I didn’t know giving me happy birthday wishes too, so that was unexpectedly nice 😀

 

So in class outside of doing work I had some interesting and funny conversations with my mates before heading back to my flat. Then I went out to the pub with my flat mate and some other friends and while playing pool one of my other classmates who had promised me cake finally sorted me some cake, it was incredible. I swear it was like one of the best moments of my life. I don’t get given many things from my friends, so the fact I got a whole cake from a classmate from university who I haven’t known for very long was very touching. She is definitely gonna be one of my best friends for life! So we continued to chill at the pub and had some food before rushing back to the flat to make a playlist and fix it up before the party people started showing up. Then people started coming, the music started playing (even if it wasn’t always from my playlist) and the drinking began. It was just a great feeling to be around all of these people who said that they were gonna come, I felt so loved. We all danced, drank, hugged and I took so many pictures it was insane. It was a beautiful atmosphere of smiles and chaos. So much stuff got messed up. Stools moved up and down the hallway, me and my flatmates’s rooms keep being invaded, two of my mates were dressed in wonzies at one point and the drinking game known as “Battleshots” was mad. Though the night didn’t end there, we eventually went out on the town and danced and raved it up in the clubs of Sheffield it was great. There was a lot of last night I don’t remember, but luckily from what I do recall I did have fun, probably the most amount of fun I’ve had in a long time.

So yeah I just wanted to share with you people of the internet my delightful birthday experience. This birthday more than made up for my 21st and even though it was my first birthday away from home and my family, my parents did call me and I got a funny text off my sister too so it was all good 🙂 I just wanted to say that birthdays are awesome and they can be fun for anyone if you let them be 😀

 

Those Crazy Uni Days!

Howdy ladies and gentlemen and welcome to another blog post. Tonight’s post is going to be a little simpler in nature to most of the hardcore film and video game posts I’ve been doing recently. It’s literally gonna be me talking about me and my recent crazy perspective on my life in university.

University life… Yes, it is all it’s cracked up to be and then some. It has certainly impressed me and passed my expectations.

Since coming to university in Sheffield back in September and being initially shocked at how big the city was, how many things there were to see and do and also shocked by the whole nightlife. However a lot of time has passed and now I have a much better perspective on things and looking back on things even though I have suffered greatly, have metal breakdowns and been on the edge of sanity at the same time I’ve had so much fun and have so many stories to tell, in the end I’m so glad I came here.

From September I came here and got to know my flatmates, we’d gone out in the first initial weeks of uni and we danced, we got drunk and raved into the early hours of the morning. Me and my flatmate Craig also found the gaming society in our uni and became part of that and since then they have become part of my family, just hanging out and gaming, good times, nothing comes close to a good game session with good people 😀 With the game society we’ve gone to Quasar (Lazer Quest) twice and gone a good few nights out in socials and just on general nights of clubbing. It’s been fantastic. And speaking of clubbing… Man, I have gone out so much its unreal. While not every night out has been perfect or completely memorable, when a good night has come along, my god, they have come and been some of the best times of my life in the company of brilliant people I’m glad to call my friends. Even if we’re not going out and raving it up, I’m just chilling inside in my flat with my flat mates gaming, messing around or having dancing sessions or sometimes we go out to meet our mates at their houses or meet up in the park and do more hanging. Also one of the best things about the people I have met up here in Sheffield is that some of those friends I met have now become the lovely people I shall be living with next year in our new house that we’ll be transferring into in July and to be honest I couldn’t have asked for better people to leave with. We’re all so similar, firstly we’re all gamers which is like the best thing ever in my life, plus we’re all into cartoons especially Adventure Time and we seem to gel really well as a group but also as individuals, it’s just fabulous.

And obviously the course I’m taking at university does come into play somewhere haha and to be honest its pretty good. I mean at first in the first few months leading up to Christmas I really didn’t like what we were doing all that much, there was a lot to do with blogging, essay assignments and working with complicated and frustrating animation software like 3DS Max and Adobe Flash which annoyed me to the highest heavens! Though there was some nice things to do like doing screencasts and actually learning how to animate in the second and third dimension because I had never tampered with anything like that before coming to university. Luckily the course finally picked up after January started with us doing some stop motion animation and though the experience was just as frustrating as it was in college, but thankfully it was a much shorter and funnier experience. Then we moved onto doing 2D animation again, but this time it was with a program called Pencil and it was a hell of a lot easier to use than Flash. Using this software we had to do walk and run cycles. Plus it was a completely new experience as I was working with tablets. Though I had used one briefly in college, art tablets are just alien to me. The project was finished recently and it was fun but caused be a great deal of stress when my work decided to disappear, become corrupted or the software would crash on many occasions. I had to deal with so much hassle on the night before and on the day of the work deadline. Luckily like a don I preserved and got my work on time because I’m frigging awesome! It really was a close call but as I put it “I bet the system!”

As I said before while I have had so many great moments in university, I have also faced some of the darkest days I have ever seen in my life. I have been in the deep end with coursework, having awkward moments of friendship with people and been in financial ruin on several occasions to the point where it nearly destroyed my world. It really did affect my life and the way I acted for a long time. Luckily I have the support of my family and friends that has kept my spirits above the pont of drowning into a state of depression and I’ve never been more thankful for their existence.

Family and friends, the most important people in my world, especially in the last few months.

In the end even though my first year of university isn’t quite over yet, it’s been a turbulent rollercoaster ride of different emotions, situations, scenarios and life-changing stuff. And though some of those of experiences I wish I’d never lived through, I don’t regret it because they say whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger and I believe I am a much stronger individual because of my trials and tribulations. all I can do now is look forward to the future which is looking pretty bright, I have the MCM London Expo to look forward to, plus I’ll be moving into my new house in a little while, plus The Avengers will be out next month and lastly it’ll be my birthday in 2 days!!! Hooray for me, I can’t wait!!

Thanks for reading yo 😀

 

The Game Has Changed

Just like the name of the song by Daft Punk from the Tron: Legacy Soundtrack, I see that the game which I call my life has changed. You see I’ve been living in Sheffield now for just under 2 months and have taken in a lot of different things and experienced many aspects of life in this new city like university, bonding with me new flatmates, leaving me family and friends back home, adjusting to a bigger location, taking in the ridiculously extreme nightlife and having to establish my whole identity all over again. It’s a lot to do and really does impact the way in which you operate in your daily life.

Trying to establish my identity was a very different experience after I arrived here in Sheffield.

The cool thing that I’ve experienced while being here is the level of freedom, compared to being back home where most things felt restricted and weighed down by some form of invisible gravity. Sheffield feels weightless, like you could walk on air. I love it. Being in uni feels fresh and exciting, the course, the students, heck even the building of Sheffield Hallam itself is awesome and represents so much promise for the future. But what’s probably more impressive is the nightlife, I know uni is more about the educational side of things, but from my first 3 weeks here it was clear that the nights out were not only miles ahead of anything I got back home, but they even outshone the course I’m on. I guess compared to my home, Sheffield is stupidly massive and on my first night out I went to West Street, and was totally freaking out with all of the possibilities that could be created. Then take into account that my student accommodation is one of the most mental places I’ve ever been in, people always making noise, parties always going on, people always going out and it has a lively atmosphere. Its one heck of an introduction to university lifestyle. And it was that initial feeling, that feeling of fresh new experiences that made me so happy. I loved my life, it was like getting to start over with new people and doing things that I loved but on a whole new scale!

Unfortunately this is very true.

However nothing lasts forever especially when it comes to new experiences, eventually the people in the accommodation started to slow down and the pre-parties started to die down and that initial spark for the first time started to flicker. During week 4-6 me and my flatmates found regular places to go and found ourselves going out randomly just to kill time because we were bored or we just felt like it and surprisingly enough those nights were pretty darn interesting, sometimes even fun and memorable. Although from there into week 7 (last week) things started get really messy, sometimes the clubbing went from being okay-ish to downright awful with questionable music, dodgy company and a bad atmosphere normally being the problems that stopped us from having fun. It seemed that when we started going out with no plan, things just seemed to work themselves out, but it wasn’t always good and in recent times there has been a steady decline at 2 of our regular clubs that’s lead my flatmates and I to believe that we have to try out some new locations.

Though hope is not lost, because in my 8th week (this week) I have seen a glimmer of hope as the Monday night just past in one of our regular clubs we happened to meet one of our mates from uni and we got introduced to his mates and we all went crazy. It was madness and there was a level of happiness in the air that was undeniable and it totally changed up the night completely. Even the playlist held up pretty well and I was having epic fun for the first time in ages. And the fun didn’t stop there. Me and my good flatmate Craig attended a friend’s house party for his birthday. After a gaming session at our uni games society we headed up with a good few regular people, and honestly the night was amazing. We went up to a secluded location and went to our mate’s house, but since there were too many people inside his house we moved to their common room. And so the night started out okay, people chatting and drinking, you know the basic stuff while the main birthday man constantly disappearing and being on the move. However after a while things just changed and then the party completely descended into the kind of awesome chaos that can only be shared with good friends at a good house party. I won’t go into details but needless to say it was pretty crazy yo 😀

House parties do bring out that awesome party feeling!

Another interesting thing is that while me and my flatmates have been out partying together, we’ve never done anything social-wise like go to the cinema, have lunch together, you know just hang out. Besides the times we’ve chilled in the flat together, gone shopping in town or chilled with the gaming society, as a cohesive unit we’ve never just spent our time doing things regular friends do and it’s a darn shame. Don’t get me wrong, even without those social activities we’ve bonded fairly well, but in the 6th to 8th week period we had come to the conclusion that we don’t hang out as much as we should do as a group. So while we don’t have the money to tackle that venture yet, we said that we’d definitely have to put some time aside for those kinds of activities to build even stronger bonds between us.

So at this current point in time me and the guys are chilling out from all of the usual amount of partying we do so that we can be financially safe until the next big event at the end of this year which should be mental. Hopefully nights like Wednesday just gone aren’t going to be too far apart and I’ll still be able to have fun and bond with my flatmates for many nights out to come!