Just been scrolling back through old entries and found one I locked because I thought it was too odd and angsty.

Looking at it in retrospect it’s fascinating. Fascinating to see how misguided and confused I was (wondering if its possible to ‘jettison your mind’)

A look into the strange mind of Cat

wow, just looking for kitsune images and found this asian woman who designs some amazing costumes, anime characters cosplay and originals (like the kitsune one).

I want to make wings.

This didn’t turn out like the original inspiration (may try again sometime).
In the original she had clothes.. this one is also more ‘sketchy’ which I like

I blame the whole thing on Rob’s Bjork CDs and the ‘hunter’ track 🙂

Its interesting how music effects the drawing. (and possibly hormones as well..)
tori amos = happy bunny girl
bjork = naked asian kitsune

You can see it’s more sketchy even from the start.
The mask will cover her smile but I still know it’s there…
Small pic showing alluring effect of the mask.
The final pic

Inspiration from jakreven (I can remember your posts on kitsunes, also the association with bjork I think..) and scifox sinced I happened to be talking to him at the time and thought of ‘fox girl’

Yesterday IT SNOWED!!! I LOVE SNOW!!! 😀 (sorry)

I went running about trying catch snowflakes in my mouth and generally being silly. I made a snowball. It was good.

But, in admist all this very cold weather the radiators have stopped working. I woke up this morning without the wonderfully warm radiator next to my bed and had trouble convincing myself getting out of bed was a good thing.

Marc caught the guy who changes the bins (or in the case of Lafrowda, replaces the bin-liner..we don’t have real bins..) and asked him if the heating system was broken

“We think it’s because the thermostat thinks it’s warm enough not to need heating.
It doesn’t help that the heating system was built in the 1960’s. That’s why its so naff”

Only yesterday I was gloating how at least Lafrowda is -warm- . And now I’m sitting here with a wooly hat on. Ah life. 🙂

cool.
Spent a leisurely evening talking to Sam and Neil(orange) on trillian. I’ve been doodling about on photoshop at the same time… Neil is someone I know at IBM over summer, he likes furry coats and rabbit girls, so I decided to draw one for him.

What followed was a sort of ‘group effort’ me uploading pics for him to look at as I went along. If you’re interested to see a pic in progress:

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Final version

whee!

I still need practice with photoshop and using graphics tablet some more, but it was fun and I’m happy to have done something creative for a change.

As a side, Tori Amos “Scarlets walk” ROCKS and has been on infinite repeat since i started drawing hours ago. Thanks Kay!! 🙂

I’m going to present THIS at the Theology Seminar tomorrow (after actually doing a proper discussion, but not finished that yet).

It’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek attempt to extract ideas from the Bible and try and construct at least a vaguely coherant theory out of it.

It comes with diagrams! 😀

Please bear in mind that for purposes of this part of the course I need to take God as actually existing and all. (before you say ‘but that doesn’t work because God doesn’t exist’)

Although if you do what I do and see ‘God’ as a metaphor for some basic spiritual wossname beyond our comprehension then it probably still makes sense (!)

Hey. It’s a good attempt for this time of the day(night).

*pause*

For a minute there I thought I could hear the screams of foxes screwing somewhere outside. Surely it’s out of season…(when do they mate anyway?) It’s a rather bizarre thing to imagine, or to have come to mind either way. I need sleep. ^O_O^

wow… what is it about the air that makes it *look* cold?

..
….

Time to fish out the hot water bottle 🙂

In an attempt to increase my random skills and earn some money I’m doing transcribing of interviews for some psychology research on marriage (or some such). At £24 per 60 minutes transcribed it doesn’t sound bad… just 5 tapes over the next month or so is a good £100.

I’ve been working through my first test tape. I deliberatly picked a woman because I thought it would be more interesting.

As some sort of karmic revenge I pulled some mad Irish lady who is not only two close to me for comfort but talks at the speed of light.

argh!! I’ve been working on this thing for 4 hours and all I have to show for it is half one side of the 63 min of tape and back ache.

Two thoughts

• I hope I get much faster as I go along
• WHY do people have to have such SLOPPY language! 😀 She says ‘y’know’ so many times I ended up cutting it to clipboard for quick ctrl-v insertion. (shame I can’t have another key for ‘sort of’..)

ah.. better do some real work now i guess.

Note to self : remember to go to this tuesday !

-“but you’re just a 3rd year, what are you doing here?
-“the voices made me come..*twitch*”

An abstract:
Emotional dysfunction and schizophrenia have long been uncomfortable bedfellows. It was Bleuler who first argued that problems of affect lie at the heart of schizophrenia and that the symptoms we all focus on, the hallucinations and delusions, are merely’accessory’ and common to many forms of disorder.

This view gave way to the now familiar distinction between affective and non-affective psychosis and to Jaspers’ hierarchical approach to diagnosis wherein affective symptoms are
‘trumped’ by the presence of schizophrenia in terms of diagnosis and treatment. Yet emotional dysfunction is pervasive in non-affective psychosis!. Sometimes (and
unhelpfully) referred to as ‘comorbidity’, these include: depression, usually accompanied by hopelessness and suicidal thinking; social anxiety, usually accompanied by
social avoidance and problems forming relationships; and traumatic (PTSD) symptoms. There is also the distress (fear, anger, shame) attached to the experience of psychotic symptoms themselves.

In this lecture I will argue that the distress from psychotic experience and the
disorders of emotion in first episode psychosis may arise from three overlapping processes including: those which are intrinsic to psychosis, those which are a psychological
reaction to psychosis and patienthood and those arising from anomalies of childhood and adolescent development, triggered by an emerging psychosis, childhood trauma or
both. Furthermore, in general, the distress occasioned by persisting symptoms has been shown to operate through a ‘psychological filter’: those patients with more positive
self-schema seem able to withstand the threat of voices or other persecutors (Birchwood et al, 2000b; Freeman et al, 2001).I will illustrate this with data from studies of
postpsychotic depression and suicidal Thinking and studies of distress arising from ‘voices’..

Leaving behind late night angst from yesterday, I need to get my thoughts round the strange and weird concepts of Spirit and Soul for a theology seminar presentation next monday.

The title of my seminar is : “Whatever happened to soul? How should we view talk of ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ in the light of the current debate on the mind-brain problem?”

What I really need is some GOOD QUESTIONS.

Given that psychology can work in parallel with theology (ie it can’t be used to disprove or reduce spirituality to /nothing more/ than ‘psychological experience/delusion’) What interesting and difficult questions can I put to the christians? [1]

I promise that the reactions to anything suggested will be recorded and put online here!

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Thoughts so far
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• There is a suggestion that in the same way a “mind” can be seen more a collection of “mental attributes”, “soul” is a collection of “spiritual attributes”. Given that culture and social influences have a profound effect on what sort of resultant ‘mind’ we have, is it then possible to have a variety of different ‘souls’ across cultures?
• (in which case, what happens to the christian idea that every one has a similar soul redemable in the same way?)

See some of my random thoughts and information gathering so far