Roll, Roll, Rock'n'Roll

A first (or second?) Stardust Trailer is up. It's looking good. Maybe a bit crowded with action, which makes you wonder if they aren't trying to press too much story and action into one film, but overall it looks exciting. I'm looking forward to the film. There haven't been nearly enough good films in the cinema recently (I had to switch from going to the cinema once or twice a week to once a month because there are simply no good films that I want to see - and the good ones like Pan's Labyrinth only make me realize how bad the bad ones are, so I'm not even trying to see the films that look okay but might be bad).

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I had my first game with the German RPG system Das Schwarze Auge (The Black Eye). It's insane. You have to do three die rolls to see if you managed to make a spell or to see if you managed a skill check. If one of them fails, you're out. It's not even as if the three checks were easy.
You also have to roll die when you gain a level to see if you even level up - a roll for every skill and ability and spell you want to level. This means if you roll really badly, you can level up without improving your character at all (unlikely, but still).
I like the theory behind all this, which is that a skill is influenced by several abilities; but it's not practical at all. Maybe it will get better after I've played a few times. I certainly hope so.

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San Francisco and Paris banned plastic bags from supermarkets. That's great. One thing that always annoyed me a bit in Oxford was that I usually ended up with three or more plastic bags, because the cashiers were so overwhelmingly helpful to pack them for me (which isn't done in Austria and which I found nice service). Problem was, that usually didn't give me the time to get out my cloth bags and pack them, and the cashiers put only about 4-5 items into one bag, leaving huge amounts of space there (probably because otherwise they'd rip). The general attitude is nice, because you're not so stressed about packing your bags quickly - but it would be perfect if I could still pack them myself and have the other customers wait patiently (which they almost always did in Britain and never do in Austria).

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Two designs of skirts I intend to sew, and some scribbles: