So not much in the way of updates for a few weeks
I took a little time off went to Harry Potter studio's which was one of my Birthday presents from the wife. It was really very good actually and even if you are not a 'fan' of the books/films it's well worth going to.
The scale of custom built props, costumes, hair pieces, set's is astounding. I assumed lots of it was CGI when watching the films. Turns out they built a huge number of sets on an almost industrial scale, sometimes for them to only be used for a couple of days filming to then be demolished/taken down. Of course some of the main buildings/sets were built to last through a multitude of films.
Here are some of the pic's I took with my phone, not the best since I was running out of battery badly so only have a couple that are shareable
Hogwart's castle, the pic doesn't do it justice, its massive way bigger than my house and took them about 40 days to build I think. Every sweeping shot of the castle they have was done using this. I think there were around 3/4 stages in the design process, taking it from paper drawing, to scale model and then onto the full thing.
One of the heads of 'merpeople','dobby' and some other props, literally hundreds of model heads of all different creatures knocking about
The potions room, the glass jars behind are actually filled with stuff. I think they said there were around 4,000 of them with hand made labels. The set director's even went to local butchers and got bits of bone and sinew to throw into a lot of the jars to add authenticity to them!
It was really way way better than I expected, though I like the films/books a tour of the 'studio's didn't seem that appealing. If you are in the UK anywhere near London it's worth checking out.
In other news put in quite a lot of extra work into finishing off the Game Theory course I was taking since I was taking an age to finish it. Completed it last week, with a decent score of 89.9% overall. It should have been higher but, I got a bit lazy/hasty answering some of the questions towards the end.
Haven't played much at all, in part though due to a nasty accident I had last week. While putting dinner in the oven, the ceramic oven dish the food was in literally just broke in my hands.
My left thumb got slashed pretty badly and a large ceramic fragment wedged in the resulting cut.
It was a little bit of a nightmare to be honest, as the wife was away and I was home alone and I am rubbish with this kind of stuff. So with blood pouring everywhere I managed to clean it up in the sink and then to my horror I could not find anything to bind it up and stop the bleeding.
Ended up using some ankle strapping which is sticky to bind it up, which was a bit of a disaster but had to stop it bleeding. Cleaned up the huge mess in the kitchen, and went hunting round the house for the 1st aid kit which I thought was in the car (wife had the car) but on the off chance it wasn't.
Could not find it anywhere, even though it was in the house in one of the place I looked! So ended pulling off the ankle binding which hurt like hell and ripped open the cut (which was pretty big) even more) padding it with kitchen roll and then re-strapping it.
After about half and hour, it occurred to me like a dolt that perhaps this cut was too big to just heal and maybe i should go to the hospital to get it checked out. After a bit of back and forth in my head, rang the wife and my mother to get advice. Mum knows best after all gave me a right rollicking for being a dolt, told me to go straight to hospital to get it checked out.
I really didn't want to sit in the accident and emergency room on a Saturday night to be quite honest but, off I went though. Actually didn't take that long to get seen, my wife broke her finger a few month ago playing netball and she was there for about 3 hours before getting seen.
As soon as the doctor saw the damage he was like, yeah your going need quite a few stitches in that. Anaesthetic injections also hurt like hell straight into the actual cut and 5 stitches later all done. Doctor essentially told me I was an idiot for considering not coming to the hospital and there was no chance it would ever have stopped bleeding or heeled since it was basically a huge flap of skin!
So after that little adventure my left thumb is all strapped up and even the slightest touch kills. I have woken myself up last 3 night in a row clenching my fists (think subconsciously the need to flex a thumb that's been straight for a few days) and then been in agony for the next 25 minutes or so. I can't play poker since I am left handed and cant hold the mouse properly using it, and doing much of anything is a pain in the ass!
Stitches come out at the end of the week and I'm looking forward to getting back on the grind again