Emma Maree Urquhart's Blog

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Meet Buck from TeamCerf on Vimeo.

This short is amazing - So colourful! So fluid! So kinetic! SO SUPER COOL, AND OH MAN THAT DEER IS SPIFFY.

It's about Buck, a guy with a deer's head, meeting his girlfriend's hunting obsessed father.

Equally amazing is the action packed and ever-so-shiny Salesman Pete short:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you enjoy. And more importantly, hope you all have a Merry Christmas!

We've already had a pre-Christmas celebration involving nerf guns, remote controlled helicopters, lots of tea, mulled wine, roast potatoes and venison. (Ooops, sorry Buck.) It was pretty fantastic, but I'm still trying to clean up all the dishes that were used making the meal....

Now I'm off to Inverness to see the family!

There's only one and a half hours until Christmas Eve is here! I'm excited, are you?

Deck the halls! I already have, in lots of tinsel.

(If you're working tomorrow, then be excited anyway! Fabulous bank holidays (or overtime)  await you!)

Anyway, the reason I'm wasting your prime pre-Christmas blog surfing time is to link you across to the Humble Indie bundle - five great games, including the brilliant time-traveling platformer Braid and the gorgeous Machinarium.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you like video games, you'll like this - you can get 5 games, at any price you want to name, and you can choose how much of you money goes to the developers who created the games, or two charities.  'Child's Play' supply toys and games to sick kids in hospitals worldwide, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation is dedicated to defending digital rights such as free speech and privacy.

It is 'name your own price', though I might as well mention: anything less than $1.50 is swallowed up by Paypal and none of the charities of developers will make anything and anything more than the average price you'll see dotted around the main page ($7.64 at the moment) will net you five extra games, including World of Goo!

A lot of the supplied games can be activated in the popular gaming distributor Steam as well. They've got some money-draining Christmas sales on as well.

So it's an awesome deal, and it's all for a good cause. I highly recommend picking it up, for some great games and warm fuzzy feelings as well.

Sorry for skipping Ferret Friday last week, WordPress kept crashing when I tried to upload photos straight from the camera. I had to resize them before it stopped panicking.

Ferret Fact: If female ferrets aren't spayed or bred, they can get sick and die from a condition called aplastic anemia.

It doesn't take much to make me worry, so this week all of my worries were focused on our two fuzzy girls.

Tea and Coffee are over 6 months old now, so they were due to come into season soon. I was being a tad neurotic and worrying that their paler, winter coats meant they were already in season - which would mean they'd need to get a temporary  injection instead of being fully spayed. I was also worried about them going under anesthetic so young, and the whole scary thing where they'd get.

The Moray Coast surgery staff were great - I was at work for the appointment, but after swiftly arranging an appointment they explained everything to Dave and phoned quite often with useful instructions (don't feed them for 6 hours before the operation, bring some of their favorite foods to eat after the operation is done). They were also happy to update us and let us know that the operation had been successful.

Now I've just got to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't bite at the stitches, since they don't exactly do those headcone-collars for ferrets.

Ferret Fact #2: Alongside cages, spaying is one of the most expensive parts of choosing to get a ferret. It's a complication operation involving internal surgery on the little things, and averages out at around £60 - 80 each ferret.

Below are a few pics of them post-surgery - nothing gross, just the scar and some sleepy ferrets.

You can click the images to view them at a larger size.

Coffee, usually the boisterous one, was still drowsy. The line on the shaved skin is her stitches.

Sleepy Coffee

Tea was wide-awake afterwards, and wouldn't sit still.

They're both settled in their cage now - the affects of the anesthetic were obvious Thursday night because they keep flopping down to go to sleep in the middle of the floor or hanging out of their bed instead of their usual curling together.

A question for you lovely lot: What pets do you have? Any quirks to share, or medical scares you've been through?

Being able to write is (generally) required to be a stand-up comedian. Being able to perform stand-up comedy about writing isn't.

So, here's one of those rare occasions - a stand-up version  of the wonderful blog How to Write Badly Well.

Part 1: On the history of writing.

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Part 2: A lot of words to use instead of said.

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I actually read out all those words for said along with him. "Because that's how I roll," she alarmingly alerted.

There's a relatively new trend in video that I think is really awesome. It's called kinetic typography (moving text, in other words). You've probably already seen it in a few things, like movie opening credits.

Two of my favorite recent examples have been in fan-made music videos for Jonathan Coulton songs. Jonathan writes a lot of geek-themed songs, most famously the Portal ending song 'Still Alive'.  Another song by him, 'Re: Your Brains', also plays in Left 4 Dead 2.

Below is a fan video for 'Still Alive':

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And his song 'Shop-Vac':

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(A 'Shop-Vac' is basically a Henry Hoover, as far as I can tell.)

If you're a fan of what you hear, here's a cute animated video for 'Code Monkey', a song about the lonely life of a techy monkey. A few years back, when I was still in secondary school and spending most of my evenings coding websites, I found and loved this song. Didn't pay much attention to the romance aspect, mind - I was probably too busy being in awe of people who not only also code things, but write songs about it!

Click here to view the embedded video.

And an audio-only video of Re: Your Brains, drawing some relatable lines between being an officer worker and being a zombie.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It's ferret Friday! And here are your ferrets.

Ferret Fact: Bathing them too often makes them smell worse. Bathing them monthly or so is the most often you can do it - some ferrets love it, some ferrets hate it. Ours are fond of paddling and rolling around in towels to dry off.

Guess what I found, right in the nick of time?

Merit badges! Click on them if you're not sure what they're for, they're all writing related.

Here's a video about adverbs, the dastardly foe between me and my next merit badge.

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Stephen King is well known for hating adverbs, and for good reason too - ideally, context and dialogue should tell us about a scene without any need for things like "he said angrily", "she said mockingly". And don't even get my started on running quickly, panting tiredly and all those other unnecessary words. Getting rid of them is easier said than done, though.

Anyway, 50k words! I feel pretty good about hitting those words (I did have a little panic it was too small a word count, but for YA it's actually a decent length). Ploughing into the second draft now, which involves lots of cutting and moving around giant chunks of story to get something that feels right.

Blogs might be a little scare on the ground for now. So in my absence, don't forget you're all awesome.

I received my organ donor card today.

I actually pledged my organs a while back (there's a section to do it on the Provision Driving License application form), but now I have the flimsy cardboard truth to back it up.

I've pledged all organs apart from my eyeballs - they're not exactly prime condition, and besides that, I might need them when I rise up from the grave. I've got to see where I'm shambling, after all...

It's November, which means NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month) has begun - where hundreds of thousands of people try to write 50,000 words in one month. Not something that works for me, because I'm really bad for going back and editing my work before continuing on, but it's still a cool event.

With Halloween now over,  I'm kind of annoyed I didn't decide to dress up as a Hunter zombie from Left 4 Dead (pictured in this post)... but the idea only occurred to me five minutes ago so I'm a biiiiit late. Next year! In the spirit of Halloween, here's a creepy and beautiful comic.

My actual Halloween was spent out Geocaching - basically, treasure hunting using the internet or an Android phone/iPhone to find certain hidden items using clues and GPS co-ordinates. There's a fair amount in Nairn and a lot in Inverness, and it's good fun wandering around in the dark, searching nooks and crannies for the 'caches' and praying the police don't ask what you're up to (because 'internet treasure hunting' may not sound convincing).

Finding a geocache is a lot of fun, though - and we had two successful findings, thanks to bringing along two friends who were like geocache snifferdogs. Awesome snifferdogs.

Then the temperature dropped to 1°C and I, being terrible at handling the cold, started handling the cold terribly. So I was very glad to get to bed!

It's all horribly geeky. So I love it.

One last thing - the Nicholson Institute, Stornoway's only secondary school, decided keeping an autistic 18-year-old in a 'cage' (a fenced-off area of the playground) was a smart idea. I'll just be shaking my head over here...

Through trial and error - namely eating Lidls lasagna and feeling sick, eating Dolmio sauce lasagna and feeling sick, trying it again the next day and feeling sick - I have discovered I am probably (very mildly) allergic to lasagna.

Probably not the mince or the pasta, but I'm guessing the source of my woes is the white sauce.

Let me tell you why this is awful:

Now, no matter what I achieve in my life, I will never be better than Garfield.

Woe.

Here's a video about how awesome the BBC is. Because I love the Beeb, even if I do get annoyed at them sometimes. They create amazing telly, and that's what this super-cheesy (but awesome) song is all about.

Click here to view the embedded video.