Off the prompt "cuddles."

that thing i said the other day about having overcome my need for soulmate perfect song matches for vids, and being able to cut songs for my vids now?

I am currently gnawing my fingernails over IF I CUT THIS VERSE AM I GUTTING THE SONG? How about the haha no sarcastic stinger after the theoretically serious chorus? Am I destroying the song if I want to end it on "I love you" not "at least I think I do"? Am I doing the song 100% wrong in the first place if I am trying to decide if the girls verse is superfluous to my dudeslash ship?

(/o\ at least it's not two white dudes? only one of them is white? and like. I can think of parallel things I want to do with the ladies in the fandom for the "girls" verse like it's totally possible to read the separation of verses as divided rather than complementary, but like, am I ruining the song by reinterpreting it????)

in other news: juls has still not gotten the memo that vidding is almost always more about the fandom than the song?

So I have a complete draft of a vid for Club Vivid, but it needs polish, and I have not gotten critical feedback! Well, I've gotten detailed feedback from enemyofperfect but they liked everything! I mean that is very encouraging but I feel like I cannot possibly need absolutely no tweaks. (I mean. I should probably put credits on at some point, and there's one frame of digital noise that needs re-render. But like, clip choices and flow and stuff!) I sent my brother a list of questions; I was teaching him how to (how I) vid by having him skype in and watch my work, which is the only reason it is done(ish) this far ahead of the deadline. He was worried about his OCD getting in the way of providing feedback and I was like "here just answer the questions" but I haven't heard from him. I should probably poke him. And niqaeli sent me "eeee adorbs!" from bar, but I don't want to poke her rn because she's finishing her semester and her degree about the same date the vid is due :p I also dropped the vid on an old friend that I'd sort of let the friendship lapse while I fell off the internet for like 3 years and probably "give me feedback!!!" is not the most uh, uh, the um best way to re-initiate contact but apparently I'm still a failboat in her general direction. Facepalm.

Anyway I have this vid that all I've done with it for the past week is watch it and re-watch it and giggle to myself, and I'm like is it done?? Is it not done?? What does it need?? and, hands

So I'm noting for the record that I'm having a bad knee day (it feels weird, more so on steps to the point I'm taking all the sidewalk cutouts at crosswalks) because last month I was like "one day my knee bothers me in six months! Fixed with using a cane for one day! No big deal!" And this makes 2 days in the last six months so...

I mean, I was terribly physically active yesterday there was the moving of many furniture and furniture components. Good news, I lift with my knees, not my back!

Currently treating with ice pack, will be using cane, hopefully this clears up again quickly.

I watched Limitless (tv series, and partway through, the movie to which the tv series is sequel--well, it's a sequel to the alternate ending, heh) this past week while recovering from concrud. I figured the wacky partners fight crime! genre was decent for sick brain capacity, and honestly if I hadn't been looking for lighthearted cheese I probably wouldn't have stopped skimming Netflix on a show starring a white dude. I enjoyed it fairly well for the purpose I chose it, but after, I am thinking about the genre, the mismatched partners, one of whom is responsible/uptight, one of whom is wacky and fun! and how often that division lands on a gender lines in a way that it comes out as a professional woman having to add to her job the responsibility of babysitting a misbehaving manchild. In Limitless, definitely; Castle's another example; Chuck (to which Limitless has a lot of parallels: NZT and the Intersect have the same plot function); Psych, in some ways, although it's mitigated by Juliette not being the sole (or arguably even main) straight man to Shawn's comic act (I think Gus is up ahead of her, and Lassiter is definitely in the running for most uptight). I'm tracing this back in my head through to shows I watched growing up and I think even X-Files has a seed of it; Mulder is at least trained law enforcement, not some civilian tagging along for lulz, but arguably Scully was the responsible, sensible one who was supposed to reign in his wild conspiracy theories. Comparable dynamic. I'm skimming through the TV Tropes "they fight crime!" page and oh look, yeah, Sleepy Hollow also qualifies.

So, that's a thing.

Reading stuff lately--from the library, checked out some Nicola Griffith, Ammonite, about a planet cut of from the rest of humanity for a few centuries, and with a plague that kills off dudes. So everyone on the planet is female, it's under quarantine, and our intrepid galactic anthropologist is trying to solve, among other questions, how do make babies? This book was listed among various other important feminist scifi in reviews, and I got to the end of it going "what was so special about that?" then I read the author's notes and she was trying to fight the idea of a feminist utopia by having every kind of person, good and bad, kind and cruel, etc etc, represented but all women. I was like "that's the groundbreaking thing? --that's the groundbreaking thing." and just, facepalm.

Read another Nicola Griffith, Slow River. The most interesting bits of this (also the grossest? maybe?) are the technical exploration of near-future designer microbes to process sewage and industrial waste water. The main character is the youngest child off a family who has gotten very rich off their genetic patents for that technology; she is kidnapped, tortured for the ransom demands, all on mass media, and then after being dumped, the ransom never paid, she tries to completely change her identity to never go back to her family. She falls in with a scurrilous rogue, a thief and sex worker who pretty quickly tips into "consent? what is consent?" with the use of sex pollen drugs. All of the drama about the main character's family (there's sexual abuse, and disgusting capitalist spy games) and all of the, honestly I'd call it whumping, of life in the *gritty underbelly*, was gross and kind of boring? There was one line that stuck out to me, at the end, when the main character has been outed as the rich kidnapping victim and reunited with (the acceptable) parts of her family. She tells her shady ex that there's always a choice, you didn't have to do all those horrible things to everyone we know; and shady ex is like jfc you're going back to your fortune you want to talk to me about CHOICES? some of us DON'T have them. I was thinking about that, and the thing about shady ex was, all of choices were bad, but so were all of her options. Like Ammonite, this book had a ton of F/F relationships with no like, commentary or justification or even discussion of queer identities; it was unremarkable. Unfortunate byproduct of this was that it was also the main character's mother who abused her daughters. I don't, I don't even. Ultimately noped out of the rest of Griffith's stuff. The ratio of interesting to uncomfortable was not working for me.

Audiobooks I've listened to lately--The Curse of Jacob Tracy by Holly Messinger, about a couple of trail guide pardners in Reconstruction era America (so one white, one black, of course) with the complication of one can see ghosts and gets sucked into some spiritualist conspiracy. Liked it, not 100% sure what I thought about the race dynamic, and I don't really feel qualified to judge the subject. White dude was the one who could see supernatural shit, so we avoided magical negro I guess? There were several instances of white dude trying to stand up for his buddy and tell people to fuck off for trying to be racist at black dude, and black dude being like ffs chill I don't want to fight about this stop making my life harder??? so, I don't know, maybe aware of layers? not treating racism as a simple issue?

Updraft, by Fran Wilde, this reminded me of Pern not so much in particulars as in broad strokes. An invisible enemy in the skies, fought by an elite and insular ruling group, who might take common people with ~special talents~ into their number, but would completely divorce them from their previous lives in so doing. Flight, though it's a lot more visceral here, and not made possible by dragons. A lot of it seems pretty unbelievable to me: humans learning to echo-locate, for one. Haven't really decided what I think of this one, or if I'll go for sequels.

Steal Across the Sky, by Nancy Kress, in which an alien race known only as the Atoners recruits (via internet ads) a bunch of people to Witness the crimes they committed against humanity: humans once had a genetic trait which allowed them to see spirits of the dead before they moved on. The Atoners took a whole bunch of humans to experiment with 10K yrs ago, and set up a whole bunch of systems with two habitable planets, where one population got to keep the gene (and generally seemed like... more peaceful? I mean, I guess it's harder to use death as a threat, weapon, motivator, if you know people keep on existing after their bodies stop. But this particular sociological phenomenon is not explored) and the other planet with the other population got no spirit sense and was full of war-making people like Earth. Also the Atoners totally took the spirit sense away from all specimens they left on Earth. Halfway through the book we switch from one team of three Witnesses figuring out what is the difference between the two planets at the system they've been sent to (the Atoners didn't TELL them about the spirit sense gene, they had to figure it out, and some of them were pretty skeptical) to the lives of the Witnesses on Earth after returning, either full of media or attempting to avoid media and live normal lives, however unlikely. There's... we pick up several new Witnesses during this switch, and the time jump disconnect combined with the main character merry-go-round combined with no one knows what the Atoners are actually DOING to Atone, makes things very weird? (It turns out the Atoners have brought pregnant women from some or all of the worlds were the spirit sense gene was still present, to have kids on Earth. But they stop a couple of the Witnesses from trying to bring back a DNA sample to analyze and add back in themselves. Basically they're just still high-handedly doing whatever without asking humanity's permission for anything. I was also left wondering if they planned to Atone to any of the populations they seeded and manipulated for their experiments, a question no one in the book thought to ask.) Sooo. *seesaw hand* Interesting, but kind of a hot mess.

so, vividcon. this post is entirely subjective and all about my complicated mental health feelings, not so much about any fannish experience of the con. Will be posting the vids I took to vividcon after I write this, and that will probably be the extent of posting on fannish matters.

About a year ago, niqaeli and I took my brother out to the movies and pitched Vividcon to him. Every time I'm in town we take my brother out to do something even if it's as silly as wander around IKEA for two hours, because he has, since his first attempt to go away to college at 18, been living at home with fairly debilitating OCD. He is now 25. He's lost touch with all but one of his friends, he relies on my parents for a host of super basic things like turning off the water after washing his hands, he has IBS which only makes his unclean feelings worse, and I really feel like getting him out of my parents' house is a service to everyone involved.

Anyway, my pitch about Vividcon was, it's a trip halfway across the country that he'd take with me and not our parents, to do a fun fannish thing I hoped he'd appreciate, and did he think he could work on his OCD crap enough in a year to be able to go and take care of himself in the ways our parents usually take care of him at home. He does this thing, part of his OCD, where he has to come up with the exact right words to articulate himself for fear of misleading you if he gets it wrong. It can take him days to answer a question. I tend to treat this the way I would querying a computer--I try to ask an exact, specific question to elicit a succinct answer. So I asked him, first, did he want to to, and second, did he think he'd be able to. The answers were yes, and since it was a year away, he thought so.

I made various deals with him over the course of the last year--that I was going to work on making a vid, which was going to be my hurdle parallel to his OCD behavioral therapy work. (I made one! Two actually! Proving once again that the only thing that makes me complete vids is deadlines.) That I would FaceTime with him at least once a week to check in. (Sometimes I had a hard time with this, because when I was behind on my goals or having a bad brain day, I didn't want to have to admit that.) I gave him advice from my own experience getting treated for depression--that it's okay to have bad days, but you don't let a bad day become an endless string of bad days, you pick yourself up and start over the next day.

So last week, or, Saturday nearly two weeks ago, I FaceTimed him after having not for about three days. I was in the process of bleaching my hair and dyeing it pink, and I was afraid my mom would give me crap about being interview-ready on the job search, so I wanted to have the whole thing done and a fait accompli. I have the stupidest reasons for failing to call my brother as regularly as I promise. It turned out that basically the entire three days he'd spent ruminating on how he didn't think he was going to be able to go, and Mom told him he should talk to me about it but he didn't call me. Because well. He was even more internally flaily about that than I was about the dye job.

Our travel plans included me driving to Phoenix, where my family lives, the night before we flew to Chicago for Vividcon. I ended up driving out three days early to spend more time with my brother and try to convince him it was TOTALLY POSSIBLE. And meet his therapist in passing. On Tuesday, he decided that he would go ahead and contact that one high school friend he still talks to every few months, who happens to live in Chicago now. I cheered. The next day we went clothes shopping, because Mom wanted him to have new slacks and shorts for the trip. He was incredibly patient about trying on everything she found for him. There are so so many parts of why this was amazing.

So anyway: we did it. We totally got on the plane and flew to Chicago and went to Vividcon.

And I think my brother enjoyed it more than I did.

At one point around April or so I wrote him a long long description of what Vividcon was like, to my recollection. Club Vivid and the Joxer Dance and the anticipation of Premieres and stuff. One of the things I wrote to him was we'd probably go to 2-3 shows/panels per day, no one went to everything (read: I never went to everything). It's funny to me that I remembered that, but not why.

The why is, I find cons exhausting. I took like three naps a day the entire trip and I felt just beat after watching a vid show (of course, stupid, engaging the extreme focus to watch vids for an hour takes a lot more mental energy than watching an episode of a TV show for an hour). Let alone talking to people. Once we were in the consuite for like ten minutes and when niqaeli decided to go do something else I was like TAKE ME WITH YOU EVERYTHING IS TOO LOUD. There were a ton of people that I marginally recognized as "person I have seen at VVC the last time I was here 5 years ago" but my mental connections between faces and usernames are crap and I was never good at talking to people at cons.

PS If you talked to me about my vid and I made weird faces or said something dumb, it's because my brain was going AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HOW TO FAKE BEING A HUMAN?????? I mean, I also do not know what to say to compliments so assume what I MEANT to say was "Thank you" but oh my god, SO much alien cyborg input error brain.

I ended up hiding in echan's room watching Olympics during Club Vivid to distract myself from feeling that there were too many people, and too much noise, and I stressed myself out about plane tickets, and also everyone else was enjoying booze while I was not because meds and it's not that I don't want anyone to be drunk around me? It's more, I don't know, I felt like I'd left myself out of everything on that score. Or something.

It was so frustrating, that like. By almost any metric I would have thought of beforehand, this was a very successful Vividcon for me. I made vids, and people liked them. I saw other people's vids, and they were awesome. I did my hair and made a costume for Club Vivid and it was adorable and lit up. I got my brother to go on a four-day trip without my parents and his OCD did not prevent him from participating in the con or meeting up with his friend or even getting out of the hotel room by checkout time. There was no wankfest that blew up in anyone's face.

But my stress-activated GERD had me burping all through Vid Review and during the back half of Club Vivid I was watching Michael Phelps get a medal and having a bit of a cry.

This was the first time I've been to a con since getting medicated for the depression, so probably five years ago I put all the same kinds of reactions down to my brain is borked. But now a year and change into pharmaceutical unborking, I am still having these fundamental problems. The introvert problems. The, too loud, too many people, being around this many people exhausts me and maybe even frightens me, at least in the social awkwardness sense. The, everyone is having fun except me.

So I think I probably won't be going to Vividcon again. Or any con.

Which really sucks because where will I get deadlines to goad me into finishing vids now.

so the vid I turned in for vvc premieres (I'm going to vvc this year, shockingly!) and it's a Fringe vid (I recall there is a culture of anticipatory secrecy around Premieres, but I forget how much of it was my own habit of making vids that I wanted to surprise people with. anyway, not saying anything more about the vid than the fandom) so I've been rewatching bits of Fringe the last few weeks trying to pull it together, and I'm sort of contemplating a full rewatch for purposes of it turns out I ship Walter/September sort of a lot, and kind of want to write fic about them, but I'm afraid if I do that I'll end up finding the PERFECT SHOT for that one line in the vid I already turned in, it's done gdi.

The main thing that struck me about Walter and September is I was trying to put together a mental map of the time jump between seasons 4 and 5. Because there's like 5 years between the end of season 4 and the Observer Invasion (the time in which Olivia and Peter have a kid, maybe even get married I honestly forget), and then there's like a twenty year gap of they got ambered and didn't get pulled out until the occupation had been ongoing for a while, which allows them some brief anonymity in fighting the Observers bc the Observers have assumed they were dead.

During the 5 yr gap, Walter and September were working on a plan to stop the invasion, apparently without Peter or Olivia or Astrid's knowledge. Walter's brains are scrambled to prevent the Observers from getting the plan out of him with telepathy, but no one else on the main Fringe team has any idea what the plan was. They have to follow tapes they dig out of the amber in Walter's lab to collect all the plot coupons--one of which is actually September. Because they figured out early on Walter was working with someone named Donald on this ~secret plan~, but no one, not even brain-scrambled Walter, knew who Donald was or how to find him, until it turned out that Donald was September, but with hair.

So my question was--how did Walter, who (to his own chagrin) requires pretty much constant babysitting, commonly coordinated between Peter and Astrid, manage to not only travel to work on a plan he was keeping secret from them, but avoid ever introducing anyone to his co-conspirator?

One of the things I want to rewatch for is to figure out how many of them have actually met September face to face. Peter had a brief interaction with him in 104 that went rapidly to an "Apples, bananas, rhinoceros" place because the Observer plan for avoiding action is apparently use their telepathy and unusual relationship with time to mirror at people. He then shoots Peter with a futuristic stun gun and makes his escape. There's also, September bleeding out foretold Olivia needing to die to prevent Bell from collapsing the universes at the end of season 4. Also Olivia studied September's face pretty thoroughly when she was trying to figure out why he was stalking her crime scenes. I'm less sure of Astrid, but in general I think this means September would have had to keep out of everyone but Walter's sight to maintain secrecy. I can imagine he would want to, like, the Observers ID'd Peter and Olivia as important, he should never be anywhere near them to avoid them realizing he's meddling, right? Although how he can then get away with hanging out with Walter I don't understand. Maybe, hand wave, the Observers discounted Walter from importance when they wiped Peter out of the timeline. And figured that held even when Peter stubbornly refused to cease existing, since Walter didn't remember Peter, so whatever, not important anymore.

I'm kind of imagining Walter telling Peter he needs his own place because he, ahem, met someone, and anyway Peter will want more space in his own house when Olivia has the baby; and both Peter and Olivia being like, excuse me what? because that was totally something September mentioned in passing, not something that's like, happened yet. I also feel like if Peter's only interaction with September pre-hair was apples bananas rhinoceros, he might be able to see him, be like "I know you from somewhere" and be satisfied with September admitting they met once in passing before but Walter hadn't introduced them so he (September) was rather flummoxed and rude, so sorry.

I also have been pondering September seeking Walter out after the whole de-observerfying. Like, it's not just that now he has hair, he also has physiologically driven emotions and the inability to stalk people through time and space since his implant has been removed. So he has to get from wherever the Observers dumped him to where Walter is, probably has to do some more traditional stalking to figure out when he can approach him without other people being there to see, has to somehow come up with like, money or a job or something for clothes and a place to live, or find Walter fast enough that his lack of such doesn't impede him too much until Walter can help, although I am continually laughing at Walter trying to convince Peter and everyone that he should be able to live on his own with his boyfriend why won't you let me mortgage a house.

Maybe Walter can argue his way into living in one of the properties he already owns; the Reiden Lake house, for instance.

But the idea of September skulking around trying to figure out when to talk to Walter suddenly made me wonder--when he shows up to talk to Walter in the lab at the end of season 1, and they end up at Reiden Lake and Walter is Missing and Peter eventually finds him out there--like, did September hold hands with Walter and jump him through spacetime from the lab to the lakeside, or did he lead Walter out to the parking lot, pull a key fob out of his pocket, and make a car beep and unlock for them? Like, we know September can drive; he was driving Walter's car in 1985 when Walter woke up from the dunk in the ice. So September could have driven them to Reiden Lake. But like. Is it his car? A car he randomly "borrowed" that he knew its owner wouldn't be looking for it for a day or so? What kind of car does an Observer drive? or--what kind of car does September drive, he's not exactly standard Observer temperament in all things. Does he cram Walter in a Smart, because the future has taught him to conserve resources as much as possible? Does he revel in some kind of classic gas-guzzling boat, because nothing of the sort is available in the future? Does he have a Camry or a Civic or something, because it's a common car that won't stand out and attract any attention? What did they talk about on the three hour drive from Harvard to Reiden Lake? Did September let Walter pick the music? Did September drive off and leave him there after the dramatic handover of the coin? Did Walter say, "Wait, where are you going?" and September enigmatically assure him someone would find him soon?

But, back to the future (starring Eric Stoltz), the few years of recently humanized September and Walter managing to hide all their adventures from everyone else. And like. When they find him in season 5, he totally brushes off what happened to him as he always admired the time period, it wasn't much of a punishment to strand him there; but like. Imagine how much crap he was going through, going from having no feelings of his own, just weird echoes of feelings from Observing a society where everyone had them, to suddenly having all of the biochemical mechanisms of feelings flowing in his veins. And not having any experience with moderating anything. Like, I'm imagining him throwing something in frustration, and being shocked by the sound of it shattering, and admitting, I don't know why I did that. I think Walter would glibly offer to take a blood sample and synthesize something pharmaceutical to help September out, he certainly uses chemicals to induce moods and states of mind he wants for himself; I'm not sure what September would think about that.

And then, also, pants feelings. September comes from a society where no one has romantic relationships, let alone sexual ones; all offspring are grown to maturity in tanks; and they don't seem to have gender delineations, I'm not even sure they have any expression of sexual characteristics at all. The lack of hair might have pointedly been genetically added in to mark the lack of secondary sex characteristics. So here's September, who's been adult but neuter for an entire waking life, who now has suffered what the Observers term biological reversion to turn him into a standard 21st century human male, so he's dealing with both the feelings and the anatomy for the first time in his life. It's like puberty, but worse. And he has no models from his own society on how to or when it's appropriate to act on his feelings; he's been Observing the world he's been dumped in for a while, but he has no experience of his own, and he's so lost, and he doesn't even know if he wants to act on his feelings, like the society he comes from seems to have all kinds of like, cultural suppression and disapproval at anyone who seemed like they might be feeling things. Even though he's not there anymore, he spent a long time pretending that he was unaffected by Observing, that feelings were not at all catching and he certainly had none, sir.

And--it struck me in the episode where they find "Donald," that even though he's emotionally open, he's astounded that Walter is still alive and so glad to see him again, he's not tactile. At the moment where I totally expected him surprise everyone and embrace Walter, he didn't. He was so effusively happy but he didn't reach out, at all. And of course nothing in the society he's from would encourage touch at all. No one is a parent in the sense of raising a child, genetic donors do not hold their offspring and the offspring are not children, they are fully matured in tanks and enter the world as adults. No one has intimate relationships outside of the families they don't have. No one has any reason to touch anyone else. And it's not that I think September might not want to, more that, from that background, he doesn't know how, doesn't trust himself to do it in a way that conforms with social expectations, and honestly, might be overwhelmed. Even the smallest touches, Walter's hand on his shoulder, evoke so much emotion in him. And he's so ill-equipped to handle emotion at all.

feeeeeeeeels

I appear to be having a period this month. Don't know what that's about.

oh look; it's a period.

My teeth continue to be terrible. They're up to three root canal's in the last month. Apologies for the terrible punctuation, and any weird spelling issues, for some reason when I update dreamwidth on my phone I can't get the cursor to be anywhere but the end of the entry so I can't correct earlier mistakes without deleting a bunch of crap.

I just called the endodontist on a number that I was told took voicemails for him on nonbusiness hours and I would get a call back. But he actually picked up the phone, which threw me, and I don't feel like I said everything I had planned to say about the condition of the most recent root canal.

Also I haven't eaten food yet today. I have root canal's on both side of my mouth, the left side has like a filling Cap so it's not too bad to eat on but I'm not supposed to eat anything crunchy or sticky. The two root canal's down front are fresh and sore and I'm not supposed to bite down with them so I need to eat food I can spoon into my mouth basically. Or that I can cram into the left side and bite off over there. But my basic solution to food distress only eating things that don't require utensils or plating -- Not working so much today.

So because I'm super terrible at doing things with no deadline I've been contemplating making myself weekly schedule of all the things I want to do and keep failing to get to. It's funny because when I was a kid somebody told my parents I needed more structure, apparently it's true, except that with externally imposed structures it's too easy for me to see the arbitrariness and refute them. I apparently need internally imposed arbitrary structures, I guess. The current iteration of weekly schedule I'm contemplating looks something like:

Sunday: relax, read fanfic
Monday: bake or batch cook (to be replaced by jobhunting after I have done the schedule a week and am okay with the idea of the schedule) (cooking tends to happen on its own, I do get sufficient satisfaction from it to compel myself to do it without a scheduled day)
Tuesday: writing
Wednesday: vidding
Thursday: quilting
Friday: alternate between mending day and cleaning the bathroom top to bottom
Saturday: Knitting for me (there was a knitting for other people item on Friday, but knitting for other people tends to happen without the schedule because those have holiday deadlines mostly, and this list is for items that I want to do but I'm not getting done)

So I looked at the list today to see what I was going to be doing and trying to figure out writing freaked me out and I wanted to switch the days around to do quilting today or something. I think it's okay to alter the schedule for like, workflow reasons? Like I am considering making Saturday the relaxing day and putting a doing something item on Sunday because Saturday my roommates are home from work and I am likely to hang out with them and not do Things, versus on Sunday they are at work and some of these items I feel more comfortable doing without other people around. However I don't think it's okay to change the schedule because on a particular day I don't want to do to thing that's on schedule because if I give into that I will just constantly move the things that I don't want to do into the future and they won't get done and it will thus defeat the purpose of the entire concept.

So even though it's not what I originally meant by writing (I was thinking narrative fiction, probably fanfiction, maybe eventually in the future pro writing, scripts for things I want to produce, when that concept terrifies me less) I decided that writing this entry that's all meta about writing would be my stab at writing for the day. Yay success.

Part of the reason writing narrative fiction caused me to freak out was that I can't pick which story to write. And then part of it is I have notes for different stories, disorganized, stashed in years' worth chat logs, and occasionally I start the project of sorting through chat logs for all the stories or a specific story but it's such a gargantuan project and it doesn't feel like actually writing, prose is not produced. I think it's okay to write a story out of order (although I've never really done so) so I'm going to try to give myself permission to, if I find a scene notated in a chat log that grabs me, translate it into the narrative prose on the spot without finishing the gargantuan project of sorting all the chat logs because I can't finish that project first and then start writing, even though I feel like that's the right order to do things, because doing that just puts off writing indefinitely.

The other thing I want to do today is pick a limited set of all the stories I'm interested in writing, with and eye to limiting how many years of chat logs I need to sort through to get my data. My most recent plotbunny-generating fandoms are Teen Wolf and Cherryh's Foreigner series, and my participation in Teen Wolf extends back a sufficient number of years that I'm not willing to put all of my plotbunnies for that show on this limited list, there's too many, there's too much volume of chat log to go through.

So the stories I'm willing to look at and work on are:

–Wolf wife, a sort of fairytale deconstruction I was working on at the end of last year/beginning of this year which I actually wrote a few thousand words of narrative prose for and planned out to the actual ending. That's only about two months of logs to look through and the existing readable prose might encourage me to write more.
–Bren-daja, an AU of the Foreigner series in which the protagonist is female instead of male, featuring menstruation in science fiction, cross cultural discussions of queerness with aliens, and chocolate smuggling. I don't believe I wrote any narrative prose on this but it's a plotbunny I had this year so all the chat logs should be like January through May, and I think I outlined it all the way to the conclusion as well.
–The Yes Story, a magical allegory on consent and also one manifestation of an archetype of a story I have had plotbunnies for across multiple fandoms, and also a wallow in whumping and hurt/comfort for when I have depressive moments and need something external to be sad about (this happened last month when I was having my downswing, I started thinking about this story and poked chat logs, and had the funny realization that it was much less distressing to focus on the terribleness of Stiles under a curse than to feel like everything in my life was terrible. Especially when I had crying for no reason days. Crying over a story feels much less broken than crying for no reason because depression. So I don't want to focus on this story all the time but I sort of want it to be there when I need it, and to be on this list of stuff I can poke.) These logs go back to April 2013 so that's a longer chunk of data and will be intermixed with other stories like Magic Rituals that I might also get distracted by, but at least this one is also outlined beginning to end. (It actually came into the world fairly fully formed, the first scene I thought very much about was the end when Stiles and Lydia are burning the body and breaking the curse. I was driving from LA to Phoenix and that scene playing in my head was sort of an odd companion, yet still better than when I let my brain wander down dark depressive holes, which it can do when I'm on a long drive alone at night--I need to keep a better collection of audiobooks and radio plays and maybe podcasts for that drive, they're the best distraction from the inside of my own brain.)

So I have this iPod speaker dock that I honestly forgot I had and which has become pretty irrelevant in my current set-up. It is perfectly functional, just not something I ever use. It's the old style iPod connector, not the lightning--the 30-pin (so apparently up to like 4th generation iPhone, and I had a 5th generation iPod nano that used that connection?). It is rechargable--it comes with a power cord, but after you charge it up you can unplug it and take it wherever. It also has a little bitty remote control. It's Logitech, and I believe it was in the range of $100-150 when it was new.

If anyone wants it, I'll part with it for $25+shipping (to be calculated from your zip code and the weight of the thing boxed, approx 3.5lb). iPod not included.

First up: I have an appointment with an ENT. Not soon because that's not how doctors or American insurance works but in a couple of weeks. Naturally I had hoped to not be suffering from my sinus crap in a couple of weeks but apparently it will be ongoing so hey they can look at it happening live.

So today, my sinuses are doing a new and interesting thing: I keep getting these twinges (and by that I don't mean painful per se I just mean awareness of thing happening) where it feels like my teeth are adjusting position, as if the sinus pressure is pushing one or two of them out of socket. And honestly, compared to the typical sensations of sinus pressure on my teeth, a.k.a. sobbing pain, I'll take it. I would really honestly happily lose a molar if it meant my ongoing sinus crap was less horrifically painful.

I'm also going to the dentist soon hopefully, if any of my upper molars have anything wrong with them, which given the history of me and root canals it is sadly possible, I'm just going to tell the dentist to yank them: I actually have a theory that my existing root canal hardware pokes my sinuses whenever they are swollen and makes everything more painful so yeah. I would million times rather lose a molar than take another root canal.

I think this is spotting? Or possibly "breakthrough bleeding"? Overall I think my body is confused, I'm still in week three of my new birth control script.

I am doing some closet clearing, and since I know plus-size clothing is hard to find, I figured I would offer up this stuff on the web. For most of these items I will only charge shipping. I will be only shipping in the US with flat-rate boxes (small, $5.95, probably good for like, one shirt; medium, $12.65, could fit I'm guessing 3-4 garments; large, $17.90, not sure maybe up to like 7) so we'll figure out how much it will cost you based on how many items you want.

Comments are screened so you can leave an email address/shipping address. Let me know what you're interested in or any questions you have. Deadline to claim stuff is 11:59PM on Thursday, June 25th, 2015, as I am totally taking the rest to Goodwill the next day.

I'm going to include as much sizing info as I can from the garments, but for reference the sewing mannequin is set to a waist of 40", hips at 45", and given one of my bras so her widest-bust measurement is 51". It's not ideal--I would have made her more plus-size if she expanded more--but so you know what you're looking at in the photos below.

( Cut for large images of garments )

unexpected: i figured i was skipping my period from graduation stress, but no, here it is?

This is a post about weight; my fatness and my awareness of its connotations under various societal lenses, including medical. Any concern trolls will be summarily deleted.

( Read more... )

so i've been trying and failing for a couple of days to motivate myself to go harass my doctor's office in person about my prescription

today i decided to call them again. played phone tag before, this time i was just like whatever if it needs an appointment let's make an appointment, i know i can motivate myself to leave the house for appointments and i shouldn't have to pay for this but i would rather pay the co-pay than the ongoing stress and worry at this point

so i learned that it would have been rather difficult to find the office in person to bother, as they had moved--which i knew, the doctor told me they were moving to the fourth floor the last time i went in--but it turns out the fourth floor of another building.

Yes, of course, a period just in time for traveling.

seriously body, seriously?

ahaahah so i successfully predicted the period by the incurable insomnia

Is anyone in the LA area interested in a beach trip? I go to Santa Monica beach, spend about half an hour in the water and a few hours wandering around downtown, get something to eat. I have a vehicle and a flexible schedule, I can be the wheels. I just want someone fannish to hang out with.

So I recently upended my life (quit my job; moved to LA to live with jetpack_monkey and echan; finished the last classes I needed for my degree) and the sequence in which I did these things was both necessary and terrifying. They, and my family, are my financial net until I find work. My residency isn't officially switched yet - we need to go talk to the leasing office again on Monday about whether I am correctly in the system once and only once - and I've been in a limbo period for a while where I feel like all I do is watch Netflix and knit.

The only reason I didn't burn through Psych in a week is because there was a trip to Maine in the middle of it. Psych made me cry at the end because it hit all these buttons of real world crap in the last season: quitting the job that makes you a drone, feeling like a leech, trying for jobs people put up flyers for because you're that desperate, moving to follow people you care about, living the somewhat awkward OT3 life. And these things being difficult and having to talk to people you care about and just. Things. All my feelings. (I think I'm Gus, overall, but not everything is neatly aligned.)

In the last two months, I've watched about half of Atlantis, half of Continuum, a season of Daria, the Finder, we've started on Better Off Ted, Hemlock Grove, the current run of Teen Wolf, all of Psych, and I'm reaching for something else to spend my time on. Chuck, Witches of East End, Dead Like Me.

I fell asleep two episodes into Witches of East End, which isn't promising, but that's better than being on edge at the "flunked out of college, dead-end job, oops literally" aspect of the first couple of episodes of Dead Like Me, until I finally just stopped it, or the jarring why didn't I remember this part of Chuck where he's vying for the assistant manager position. And flailing about how he was kicked out of college. Was there a reason I stopped watching Chuck? I can't remember.

My degree is a fingertip's length away and I keep feeling like a drop-out for how long it took. At this point, probably the only more terribly apt media I could inflict on myself would be Wonderfalls: got the degree, and the dead-end job anyway.

Nate suggested Community at one point. I've been avoiding Community since it started because I know I can't deal with a show set in community college until I'm done with school. And I don't feel done enough yet. So.

I could go back to Daria but I'm starting to feel weird about watching high school set coming-of-age shows. When will I feel like an adult, and not like a coming-of-age story is still relevant to my life? I think I've asked that before. Like, five years ago.

I think I want purest escapist fantasy, but I get hung up on the fact that I can't relate to anyone.

I'm tired. I need to do something else.

eta: so I'm gonna turn off comments on this entry, because I was not actually looking for TV recs when I said I need to do something else.

So I was considering making chocolate truffles because I have too much free time and a fair amount of cooking supplies. Only it turns out that I'd be making a batch of like, 15 dozen, so uh, does anyone want homemade truffles?

potential flavors:
--pecan
--walnut
--almond
--hazelnut
--fair warning all the nut ones would probably be made with some form of alcohol
--orange
--lemon
--maple
--honey
--rum
--mint
--am willing to take requests if i can figure out how to do a flavor neatly
--like raspberry ala chambord

Ping if interested with requested flavors, I'll probably figure out the 4-6 favorite flavors that will cause me the least pain and suffering and send out like, a dozen to everyone who wants.

Recipe includes condensed milk and butter, so sadly not for my vegan or dairy-free friends.

✔get some stuff out of the car
✔grocery store
-swim maybe?
-sort logs for writing
-unpack something
✔save knitting for a reward
✔unexpected bonus round: book all the travel with echan