Letterblade

I very rarely post at all from work. But, meep, I needed to go somewhere, metaphorically speaking, and quietly FREAK OUT FOR A BIT. What with, y'know, terrorists shooting people to death in churches and museums. I am freaking out a bit.

It's odd, I suppose. The much larger-scale attacks committed by international Muslim-fundamentalist terrorists frightened me less. Maybe it's because they scared so many other people into overreacting, and I deliberately took the calmer attitude. Maybe it's because they were so tremendous, so shocking, that they didn't quite register in the same way. It's much easier to be scared of being shot by a nutjob when you walking down the street than to be scared of having twenty well-organized nutjobs flying planes into you. What's simpler is more plausible, more likely to happen again.

But smaller-scale attacks committed by domestic Christian-fundamentalist terrorists? Yeah, I'm scared. Maybe because of the plausibility. Maybe because Fox News and talk radio are practically cheering these guys on in their efforts to murder and terrorize American citizens. But really--

Al Qaeda targeted Americans. And that's a very, very broad target. I identify only vaguely as American, mostly because I happen to be born and raised here and because I agree with the basic tenants of liberty and equality which the American government and political culture likes to shit upon. And it's a very, very big target. Millions upon millions. When 9/11 happened, I didn't know anybody personally involved. I think I'm as closely connected to the writers of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as I am to anyone deeply affected by those attacks.

But these guys who have been shooting policemen, doctors and woman's health specialists, Unitarian congregants, security guards whose only crime is standing about in a Holocaust memorial?

I was raised Jewish. I'm a sexually active, pro-choice woman. I'm queer and very out about it. I'm a progressive liberal. And those are all things I do identify with, quite strongly.

Not personally, no, but ideologically? These terrorists are targeting me. They're targeting my friends, my lovers, people whose work I admire. They're targeting my lifestyle, my ideas, my ethics. They've murdered, and will continue to murder, people like me.

So, yeah, I guess it's a monkeysphere thing. Much as I try to have a strong sense of sympathy and personal identification, it's still more likely to extend to Dirty Fucking Hippies like me than to America as a whole. But it's a rather jarring moment when you realize that there are folks out there who want people like you dead.

Meep.

Though I shouldn't complain too much--I've got it easy. I'm white, so I can walk down the street without worrying about getting shot by cops. I'm able-bodied, so I can call the EMTs and have a reasonable expectation that they might actually help me. I'm cisgendered, so I can show somebody my genitals without, again, worrying about getting shot.

Goddamnit.

I mourn for the victims. I pray for the survivors. And I still hope, even if I know it's in vain, that our country might find sanity at some point.

I'm sorry for the complete and total lack of posts. And for the fact that I haven't so much as read my friendslist in a month or two. Pretty much all my time and energy is going into the following things:

- Work, which has been extremely hectic and stressful as of late.
- Writing The Treaty of Pallas and Shebopaleileigh, both of which run in less than six weeks.
- Plotting and playing in a private LJ/LARP game which my local family has been doing. (The chosen kind, not the blood kind, of course.) Someday perhaps I will post more about this.
- Battling endless soul-sucking sick. I've had various colds for two months solid.
- Unit origami.

Obviously some of those are more relaxation things. But I sleep in because I'm exhausted, run to work and stress all day, come home wiped and try to drag more of my LARPs out of my brain, or try to relax with the private-LARP adventures or crazy origami projects.

Two small accomplishments:

I've been politically minded as of late. (Since I started following the election. It's carried over into the private-LARP.) It occurred to me, contemplating the hate-cult train wreck that is the Westboro Baptist Church (which I feel ashamed to have the name of my hometown associate with), that the following might make an excellent political slogan or bumper sticker, if it does not yet exist: "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from conscience."

Though it also occurs to me that there really cannot be a law in this country to prevent one from being a jackass; that's kind of the point. I just wish it was a less hateful culture, I suppose. Still proud of the phrase.

Accomplishment the other:

If one is coloring the edges of a regular dodecahedron with five colors, it is possible to arrange the colors so that no color is repeated around the edge of the same face. (The same pattern of colors cannot repeat on all faces, however.) I do not have the technical proof of this, as I am not that sort of person, but I fiddled with pens, made a hypothesis, and then tested it both on paper and with paper.

Any pentagonal face in a dodecahedron is going to have a third edge extending from each corner. Like, if one isolated one face and one edge, and pardoned the fact that ascii does not do small scale pentagons well:

 |
/ \
\_/

so.

The extending edge is the same color as the opposite edge of the original face. Like:

 |
/ \
\_/

so.

Following this rule throughout the construction will produce the afformentioned result. I have a rather large open-frame dodecahedron (the "little turtle" unit from Tomoko Fuse's Unit Origami) sitting on my dining room table in proof. (It also had to be held together with tape on the inside, as the unit gets floppy in large open constructions. But still.)

Now to make a seven-side box, purely for the Box of Babalon lolz.

Conversation of the day, taken from me hanging out with mllelaurel, when a spider appeared in our vicinity.

Me: *hunting it with a cup* No, I think it's gone under the radiator. Maybe it's roasted.
Her: Awww. I mean, I'm afraid of spiders, but at least you would have treated it in a humane fashion when taking it out of my side.
Me: Yes, I would've taken it outside to freeze.
Her: ...That's it. You've officially been writing Seishirou too long. I'm going to have to start wearing gloves.
Me: *innocently returning to seat and snuggling under blanket* But I haven't marked you yet.
Her: *falls back facepalming in a reverse headdesk, thwacks head on a stack of boxes on the back of the couch* OW!
Me: But apparently my puzzle boxes have...

X fangirls on crack, ladies and gentlemen.

Just found out, via my friendslist, that the love of my life is moving to Germany for a year, to be with the love of his life.

...honestly, I kind of expected this months ago. It's still a bit of a blow. If nothing else, I wanted to finagle him into more LARPing, because he's amazing, but...so much for anything.

Please to be being over this someday, and not turning into a cranky, lonely old maid?

That aside:

Highlights of Intercon Midatlantic included playing Santa Claus, making out several cute people (didn't get farther and I wouldn't have handled it if it did), hanging with famous LARP writers, and walking on the beach.

Lowlights included realizing it wouldn't go farther and I wouldn't have handled it, playing several manipulative bitches not particularly well, spending a fair chunk of Saturday depressed and lonely, and getting stuck in traffic for an hour over the Tappan Zee when I really really had to pee and then getting lost in some place called Nyack looking for a bathroom. (I have been instructed how to avoid Nyack in the future.)

Also I slept in until four in the afternoon yesterday, which is, like, unprecedented. I was supposed to take a half day at work; I rushed in as soon as I woke up, caught up on stuff, made sure I wasn't fired (knock wood), and got roped into production.

I think there was something else I wanted to post about, but now I forget.

Oh, yeah--my new major problem as a housemate. Which is buying random yummy large fruits and veggies, leaving them on the counter, getting sick or distracted and forgetting about them, and letting them rot and molder to spectacularly disgusting degrees in shared space. :/ And then finding them and picking them up first thing in the morning, just to put me off breakfast.

The more I think about it--following less on the rotting vegetables and more on the lonely old maid thing and being depressed at a con full of LARPs and sex--the more I realize I am an extremely fucked up person. And that I've still got a huge bleeding hole in my chest from him dumping me, what, six months ago? And I have no idea, no idea at all, how to go about healing.

And now I need to stop thinking about this so I can go to work and get through the day without crying. I'm housed, employed. No family members or close friends are dying, hospitalized, or racking up huge medical bills. I'm doing well.

File this in with the timeline web widget for writers. God, I need to learn more PHP/MySQL. God, I NEED MORE TIME AND SPOONS.

(This is what I meant about wanting to hire a small strike force of artistic/technical ninjas. To keep up with all the crap my brain spews out for me to do.)

Call this a combination between an online LARP casting questionnaire and a purity test. The basic idea is, there would be a website where you could log in with username and password, and there would then be an exteeeeensive series of questions covering various situations and character traits in LARPs. Kind of like the "are you comfortable playing somebody who's gay/in a leadership role/sings/is a plant/immortal sociopath" section of most casting questionnaires, but expansive. For each thing, you would get to rate it on, say, one to five (from DO NOT WANT through meh through PRECIOUSSS), and there would be an additional checkbox for "I will not play this period ever hard limit." You could save your results, edit them, and so forth.

And casting GMs could view them.

In a hypothetical dream world where this actually catches on, most players would only have to fill out the whole shebang once. Ever. They sign up for a game, the casting GM goes to the vaporware thingie, looks at their various answers, and has most of the information they need right there. Casting questionnaire is boiled down to contact information, kitchen sink, and any really game-specific questions. (For example, "are you familiar with source material blah" for any fan/derivative/referential LARP.) And the casting GMs have way more information on a player's style, strengths, and limits than they could get from a standard questionnaire.

I would now like to request an extra twenty-four hours in a day. Then maybe I could get everything I want to do in the next year actually done in, oh, say, two. Instead of never.

Unrelated: A tribute to Captain America's crotch. Because scans_daily is crack.

If I had a million dollars which doesn't get you very far these days.

If I were suddenly independently wealthy. As in, had a substantial static fortune and/or regularly incoming money which I didn't have to work for.

( Fantasyland. )

So, yeah, basically one half eccentric British gentleman and one half nerd social nexus. I would reserve the right to putter about in tweed with a pipe. :P

a.k.a., WTF I've had 2938479237 tabs up for months and it would be really nice to be able to clear them out and find stuff.

Ryohei Hase. Madly beautiful art, not always worksafe. The detail is mindboggling. Also, the fifth image in (from the left) on the Melancholy page...I almost cried when I saw it, with how much I identified with it.

Random Marvel feature: the psych ward profile of Tony Stark.

An open letter to all Republicans from a former religious right activist. I want to read this guy's books.

The Rolling Stone bio of John McCain. An honestly chilling look at a man who let others burn.

And it's been a while since I took this one. My psychodrama quotient seems to have gone down somehow.

The Ultimate LiveJournal Obsession Test
Category	Your Score	Average LJer
Community Attachment	49.46% There's a party in your comments page, and everyone's invited!	22.89%
MemeSheepage	24.56% Only trendy when it's sufficiently entertaining	27.63%
Original Content	69.35% Newsweek, People, and your journal	38.1%
Psychodrama Quotient	22.89% Your dark side's safe with us	16.61%
Attention Whoring	29.55% You do a little dance whenever someone friends you	20.68%
Take The Ultimate LiveJournal Obsession Test and see how you match up! (By The Ferrett)

I am...doing better. I think working intensely on The Treaty of Pallas (the Escaflowne LARP) may be energizing me. Or maybe something just swung around. Worked nine hours yesterday and got home energized. I cooked a little something (half out of a box, but still) and tidied up and put away dishes last night, and felt very proud of myself. I splurged on a new, much larger external hard drive (640 gigs for $99 at Microcenter--hit that sale if you're looking for Western Digitals! 500 gigs for $92. Their terabyte drive was in the $180 range, I think, but I wanted to stay close to double digits.) So now I can actually use Time Machine and have a good backup of this poor little computer I drag around everywhere.

I hope I haven't jinxed it. I hope I keep doing better.

I have too much leftover booze from the Escaflowne marathon. Who wants to drink it with me?

"I think I can get Jesus up for you..."

1. I now have multiple categorized costume boxes. There's a Goth Box, a Sparkly and Weird Box (some overlap there), a Relatively Normal Modern America Box*, and an Archaic and Miscellaneous Box. That's for actual clothing items; masks, gloves, etcetera, remain at present unsorted and filed, though I have obtained a cheapass bureau from Ikea for that exact purpose.

An even vaguely organized costume closet is something I've wanted for years, and folks are of course free to borrow from it for LARPage.

2. I have considerably more yarn than somebody who barely knits due to hand pain will ever use. Local knitting types, would you be interested in a Raid Tory's Yarn party? Some of it may be project-specific and something I would be reluctant to part with, but in general...too much. Mostly going to be wool, novelty, and random black crap.

*This particular box contains what is probably my VERY FAVORITE costume piece that I own. I've never had reason to use it; it's incredibly character-specific, one of those little things that speaks VOLUMES about the sort of person who'd actually wear it.

( Photos. )

Intellect and curiosity: shut down. Reason unknown, though it probably includes exhaustion and burnout.

Creativity: shut down. Reason unknown, though ditto above.

Desire to communicate with others: shut down. Reason is the usual wacky combination of self-protection and self-harm. (Being around people can be one of the healthier things for me, hence the latter.)

Sex drive: shut down. Reason is probably an extension of the above, mixed with sheer confusion.

It's ten on a Saturday night. I had an invitation to a play party, which I didn't follow up on partially because my phone and net connection both died when I went to contact people for more info, and partially because I was all meh. And instead I'm going to be showering and going to sleep, before my bedtime on a weekend, with Final Fantasy status condition symbols dancing behind my eyelids. My dazzling, fascinating life.

I. Um.

I miss being in a (healthy) relationship. I miss the interaction, the support. I miss Eric; I miss the person I was becoming when I was with him.

I miss not feeling like there's a huge, gaping, bloody hole in my chest.

I need my soul jump-started. It's kind of run out of energy and curled up under a rock somewhere.

I really kind of hated parts of FFXII. As Rossini said of Wagner, it has great moments and bad quarter-hours. Or hours. Or dozens of hours. When you're doing the endless boring grinding trying to keep yourself levelled enough to go on in one piece, or just scrape up enough cash to buy decent armor which is virtually impossible, and this doesn't even consist of actually DOING anything, because you pre-program all your character's actions and then just wander around with the controller in one hand and your ramen in another, drowning in game-boredom-induced existential addictive depression...

...no, I don't have a 100-hour-plus save of this game, why do you ask?

And some of the characters are completely pointless and/or useless, and the summons are also utterly useless and generally ugly, and most of the game system is annoying and/or skewed, and the plot is a sprawling mess, and huge boring dungeons are huuuuuuuge and you keep getting dragged back into them for sidequest after sidequest until the dungeon music won't leave your brain...

150-hour-plus, I think!

But there's a part of me that's all like, "well, hey, you never DID actually do the final dungeon and the ending, you should find out how it ends, and replay the plot up until then for context, I mean, you don't HAVE to do all the sidequests that drag you back to the Giza Plains 293847287364 times and the extra bosses, and your replays of FFX were, like, noticeably shorter each time, so this will be the same...and, hey, there are secondary characters you still can't keep straight, and you did want to write the fucked-up Vayne Solidor/Doctor Cid pr0n with the Venat thing watching them...and it's not like the game isn't REALLY FUCKING PRETTY, except for those stupid summons..."

I HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO WITH MY TIME. LIKE WRITING STARS. AND THE FIC I OWE quigonejinn, LIKE, SOON. EVEN THOUGH MY WRITERBRAIN IS STIIIIILL BURNED OUT FROM KINK BINGO.

*flails*

I really did kind of doom myself by downloading the soundtrack. But I had my Favorite Dungeon Music Ever stuck in my head, and there are a few other really nice tracks. And hearing it on better speakers than the tiny crappy old TV Cyn had is really nice--there's a crispness to much of the music, and extra layers of instrumentation, that's really quite pleasing.

But.

There's also a lot of emotional baggage here. My 150-hour-plus game of FFXII is, at least from my perspective, a major portion of why Cyn deemed me a useless layabout and threw me out of the house. Because, y'know, it's not like she never sat around in a depressive-addictive haze and played video games instead of job-hunting while unemployed, but she was a grown-up and I wasn't, so it wasn't okay for ME to do it.

And I already had a bit of an obsessive streak with my FFX replay, and I really, really don't want the current housemate to wind up thinking the same thing.

And I really should write more of Stars. And go eat my kamut-with-butter-and-garlic as soon as it's finished, and stop whining about video games.

(I may throw a few of the nicer soundtrack bits up at some point though.)

So my new crack these past few days--besides, of course, the FFX replay, which is to the last save point--is reading the archives at, say, Feministing. Or this crackin' blog (that particular link is image-heavy, maybe NWS, but I love it for containing the line "[I'm] wondering if fangirls are the future of feminism.")

I have never really considered myself a feminist. More of a of-course-men-and-women-are-equal-now-let's-get-over-it-and-talk-about-new-stuff-ist. And, yeah, I've lived in enough of a privileged liberal bubble for my entire life that I could get away with it. Hell, I've barely experienced any discrimination/hostility/put-downs for being queer, never mind female; it's one of my basic assumptions that the answer is always "yes, I can, and should," or "yes, women can, and should." I entertained presidential fantasies. You know.

And I never really had any direct interest in feminism or women's studies or that general intellectual area. (Which I would now, after extensive study reading two blogs, categorize as "what this world, as it is, does to women--who, btw, do kick ass, thank you--and how we can go about making things better in that regard.") It was pretty much a "you people and your quaint little categories" reaction.

That started changing--because you will never escape fandom with me!--when the idea for Stars bit me in the ass. Because--I've rambled about this extensively before, but will condense--what drove me to write that thing was not just "oo, shiny" or "oh fuck, Stella's HOT" (well, some of the latter), but the fact that this fic, rare for me, seems to be Saying Something. And the ideas and the characters started catalyzing when I stopped and thought, "wait a minute, how would people react to an independent female superhero at X time? Or to a woman beating up Nazis/being a doctor/running an international munitions firm in 1942/1966/1972?" And the answer was generally "not well."

And that started me thinking--mostly at the hindbrain level--about how society shapes women as opposed to men. Which I'd never really thought about before. And then it kind of all exploded to the front when I randomly clicked through to Feministing from a general political blog, and...

...now I find myself sitting here thinking, "I'm a feminist."

That's new.

I have always had a vague aversion to the word. Mainly because I vaguely associate it with female chauvinism, which is one of my major pet peeves. I happen to like men; of the people I've known personally, I've had far more quarrels and abuse issues with women than with men; and my general goal with this sort of thing is equality. I get pissy when either primary gender treats the other like second-class people who think only with their dicks/uteri/wallets/cars/mall gift cards. It strikes me as defeated the point.

And that association--is the sort of thing one just sort of osmoses from the culture. Along with the idea that feminism has done its job--hey, look, we can vote, we don't have to take our husband's name, there are ovaries present in sports and politics well, sort of, and we're all over the workplace making less money.

So, yeah, I didn't consider myself a feminist, because the culture has tacked a miasma of "radical man-hating" around the word. (I did know enough to know that there's sex-positive feminism, versus the old all-sex-is-rape trope that gets trotted out now and then by people who don't like Firefly, but I admit that that was pretty much it.) And I like my bras, because otherwise they bounce and it hurts; and I have a decent prospect in life; etcetera. Mostly you'd just hear me ranting from time to time about how I believe in equal-opportunity consensual objectification, thank you. (Which I blame on reading Elfquest at a young age, where all the hot elves of both genders are half-naked and horny.) Or the bits of annoyance that, yeah, it's not exactly fair that possessing one set of genitals gets you held to a beauty standard that entails spending massive amounts of time and effort and money, not to mention starving yourself and wearing uncomfortable shoes, while possessing the other set of genitals entails you to shave only the visible bits. Especially the starving yourself bit; that I get cranky about, especially after reading another blog. But.

I think my train of thought has--not quite derailed, but has paused at an intersection of several tracks and is sitting, mulling, and sending the people out with the blankets for the sleeper cars. But at least it's acquired a shiny new label to add to its collection: feminist.

On an irrelevant note (B-flat!), I give you the "501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to toasters - yes, that's correct, the kitchen appliance."

On a Stars related note (A!), I need to reboot my writerbrain. (kink_bingo fucking exhausted me.) I've been poking at it. Brainstorming. Got my hands on the scans of the old origin stories for Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Hen's past and inner life is finally coming together in my head. And it's also become clear that this fic is spawning sequels. God help us all. Mostly the Yellowjacket arc, which would need to be in a separate thing for timeline and tone issues, and which I'm, frankly, fucking terrified of writing. All issues of huge sprawling writing projects aside, I know how it should go, and I don't know if I can go there.

"Get in there, you! No, ow, not that way, that'll pop out..."

*POUND* *POUND* *POUND* "Oh, yeaaaah!"

"Easy, let's get this nice and smooth, don't want any industrial accidents..."

"I need a peg."

*loud rhythmic thumping in time with Nine Inch Nails*

"Wait, wait, turn it over..."

"Nice and sturdy, just what we need."

"Keep them parallel--"

"Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!"

"I think we should've saved that one for last."

*THUD*

"Now where's my handy-dandy screw organizer?"



Pop quiz: Your housemate is:

a) having sex.

or

b) assembling something from Ikea.

So I just got a briiiiilliant idea for a web widget!

A timeline and date tracker, specifically geared towards writers. As in, you can go and enter all your main characters' birthdays, and the dates and times (if applicable) of events in your story. It will then tell you how old so-and-so was at such-and-such a time, as well as generating some sort of nifty timeline. Days of the week provided when necessary. Probably also a random date generator, for "well, this took place sometime in the spring of '42, but beyond that I don't friggin' care." Further fun steps would be generating Wikipedia links to lists of events on particular dates, or, if I can figure out how, planetary data and so forth for the astrologically inclined.

Sproing! This could be fun. And useful. And save us all from those headdesky JKR errors.

Does this already exist? If not, want it? Assuming it is within my PHP/MySQL capacity and I have the time and energy to go through with it?

Obviously it would be limited, at least to start with, to the modern western earth human calendar, C.E. If there was sufficient interest, I could probably, with sufficient work, make it support B.C.E.; more work to support other known dating calendar (Chinese? Jewish? Stardates?); massive work to support user-defined calendars. But.

Yes, this post brought to you by crazy ideas generated at five in the morning when I woke up with a torn toenail thinking there was somebody in the house, then clipped the toenail and confirmed there wasn't, then couldn't get back to sleep.

Current kink_bingo fic is coming v. slowly. To quote the inimitable Feyd Rautha Harkonnen, my head is being dragged through mush.

Having Sharon Carter for a POV character is not helping. Trying to make sense out of her. All I know of her is from Brubaker and Wikipedia, and Brubaker writes the surface of her very clearly, but her motivations...conflicted, she keeps saying. She doesn't know why she does half the things she does these days, she says. THAT'S HARD TO PIN DOWN, YOU TWERP.

Hope to have it finished before crashing tonight; will probably not have time to code it.

WEBSITE'S GOING WELL THOUGH. PHP MAKES MORE SENSE THAN PORN RIGHT NOW.

...signing my lease and madly writing porn, I give you the awesomest awesome that awesomed today:

The flowchart of things to say during sex.

Yesterday's awesomest awesome that awesomed was, of course, XKCD, which somehow managed to combine sexual taxonomy and mathematical history into some of the funniest shit this side of Gary Larson.

HOLY CRAP I HAVE A TON OF STUFF TO POST.

So let's start with, like, the non-fandom non-sex general-interest stuff.

1. WHO GOT THOR DRUNK? It's dark as night and bucketing out there. Holy fuck it's awesome. (endymion_stcyr thinks it might have been him.)

2. YET MORE SPONTANEOUS IRON MAN. I will (most likely) be seeing Iron Man (AGAIN, I KNOW, BITE ME) this Saturday night at 9:20 at the Fresh Pond theater. (Only time it's playing anywhere around here.) JOIN ME. BRING SLASH GOGGLES.

3. As perhaps can be deduced by the amount of capslock in this post, I am feeling quite chipper today, and very productive and high-energy. Work was busybusy but GOODbusy. Helped organize a last-minute emergency mailing of 2034293845 bottles of toothpaste. (I don't work in dentistry, I work in homeland defense. Long story.) Got some damn good work done in Access, learning my way around, doing fun things with forms, and getting surprisingly close to having a first build of that database for other people to use. (Well. Okay. I still have to learn to do reports. :P) Working on fixing somebody's computer. Finally got it set up so my boss is sharing his calendar with me so I can be more assistanty. Etcetera.

4. Also very close to getting the MASSIVE CHUNK OF FIC that involves Andrea pwning Ty done. *flails* Only the hardest part left, go me!

5. Catch up on LJ comments. Eek!

THINGS TO DO THIS WEEKEND/SOOOOOON:

1. Actually, y'know, MAKE all my Blogathon donations.

2. Contact people who don't seem to have made their donations for mine yet.

3. Finish Blogathon request fic, both the aformentioned chunk of Stars and some hot Stark-on-Stark-snark for the terminally awesome quigonejinn.

4. REC STUFF. quigonejinn broke my brain with the ammonite of wrong, and I have to explain how.

5. REC MORE STUFF. ironman_lounge is having a rec-a-thon this weekend, and I want to throw in my two cents, 'cause I haven't seen some of my favorite stuff in the fandom up there yet. (What is it with me and 'thons?)

6. SEX POSTS. Because the past few days my brain has been, like, sex all the freakin' time. And it has been a while since I TMIed all over this journal. (Will be cut, don't worry.) And I lost, like, my last major virginity last night, and damn it was good. (Note to self: Celexa does not dampen my sex drive. If anything it amps it.)

7. Craigslist ads for housing!

THINGS TO DO, LIKE, WITHIN THE MONTH

1. FIND A FUCKING APARTMENT HOLY SHIT.

2. Write at least one line's worth of my kink_bingo, since I've freakin' forgot about it, and the deadline for scoring is September. Have part of one fic, bunnies for three more, and nothing more. By virtue of line completion, I have to write bukkake, and I'm FLAT EMPTY of bunnies for that. If I write a second line, it will overlap in rough sex, so I will have to come up with another one for that, but, hey, that's like, almost vanilla compared to most of this shit.

3. Either make serious headway on or finish the PHP-age for my website or give the fuck up and update manually. Haven't updated since June. Have written some fairly widely recced fics since then. Want. Things. On. Site.

4. Make myself a nice LJ style while I'm at it? Y'know, in my copious spare time?

5. GET LAID MORE THAN ONCE A MONTH.

6. Finish some more fic? That would be nice. Heck, I've got a Steve/Tony one-shot that's just awaiting editing. More stuff that's, like, written in my head and I just need to buckle down and take it down. (Like, well, most of Stars. And more Steve/Tony, and Tony/Yinsen, and random gen, and fuuuuuuuucked up Utena fic. Not like I ever write Utena fic that's NOT fucked up. And spoilery. And fucked up.)

Today: not quite so bad. Only a little twitching. Which is good, 'cause that was kinda freaking me the fuck out. Still largely out-of-focus and brain-dead, in a kind of relaxed, vaguely happy way. Sleepy. Writing or doing much of anything seems out of reach.

Work has been oddly slow. Shock of a relatively high-level guy getting laid off? Not sure. Been spending most of my time banging away in Access, constructing my first database. Forcing myself to actually work has been hard.

Craving overcooked, salty ramen. Need something with more food content, not sure there's ramen in the house. But craaaaaving.

Must run to work, leaving me zero time to reply to your comments. Just enough time to kind of stare open-mouthed and feel the brain-monster squirm painfully under unexpected amounts of friendship and support. (Is good thing. I like making the brain-monster squirm.)

Link soup, for to share the happy:
- Why I don't use Linux.
- The Laughing Detective, a.k.a. freakin' weird and hilarious Joker. (scans_daily) "I wake up to the sound of schizophrenics arguing in my head about satellites and ESP but they are not very interesting, really. Just like everyone else, they have a tendency to all insist they're God. I've met God, and he's not very nice." Then his mouth's on the back of his head. Then he decides to be Batman, so that Batman can't be Batman. Or something. I'm not entirely sure.
- Science tattoos. Awesomeness. (Found link from usernamenumber.
- The penis owner's manual. "One third of all penile ruptures occur during lovemaking. They're caused by sudden shifts in position or by awkward attempts at parallel parking with the partner on top. The tearing of tissue that occurs within an erect penis is often audible and always extremely painful. Such injures tend to happen where there is a lack of space, such as between the steering wheel and drivers seat. To protect yourself and your passenger always use turn signals before changing positions."
- Robert Downey, Jr. picspam. That's a lot of hot man there.
- A few gorgeous slashy Batman arts from Ponderosa. (Fandom people--if you don't know her stuff? GO. Browse. Utterly droolworthy.) And two amazing Tony/Rhodey sketches.

I have fic to catch up on reading. And I have Batman to see again. I have happy pills to start taking this weekend, so to not have to call in sick with the first hit of nausea, and I have cathartic pwnage and oddly sweet Stark-meets-Stark to write.

And I have friends.

[Insert awed exclamation here. Holy mackerel! doesn't quite cut it.]

Batman: this Saturday afternoon? Preference for matinee, preference for big suburban theater for full headshaking Batman experience. (Will drive people.) Who wants in? And do you need to submit alternate preferences?

...I got this thingie, you got 14k of genderflipped madness, and Planned Parenthood got $460. (Thank you to last-minute donor!)

Surviving this week at work is proving more difficult than surviving Blogathon. Between the wacky, wacky hours forced by driving (to ease my ankle) and trying not to sit in two hours of rush hour traffic (to ease my ankle, my fuel efficiency, and my sanity) and the usual end-of-month accounting clusterfuck, and being sales person again because our usual was out, and becoming a partially-fledged IT minion with all attendant running about...the only reason today wasn't another 11-hour day was because I put my foot down that I was absolutely, positively leaving before 3. Except for the phone meeting later that day, which I attended in bed wrapped up in blankets. Mmm, blankets.

What I hate the most about this? I've frequently been getting home in the evening with literally not enough time to eat dinner before I go to bed. And my breakfast is highly variable. Which means I haven't started my Happy Pills yet, as my previous experiences with that breed of Happy Pills have taught me that having a regular meal schedule helps immensely with the nausea.

And, day by day, I'm becoming more painfully aware of how deeply depressed I am at the moment, and how much it's messing with my life.

Want Happy Pills.

I think I'll be able to start commuting by train again soon, which will put me back on a regular schedule, which will help a lot. Plus no getting up at 5:30 AM. No, I'll be able to leisurely sleep in until 6:30. *headdesk*

Now I'm just kind of rambling in the update window while I nom. Once have nommed (yay nomming!), will curl up in bed and rewatch Batman Begins. Because I wants Batman, and do not feel like hauling ass to the theater, and want to see the first again before seeing Dark Knight again, yaknow?

Tentative proposal of Dark Knight outing party this weekend. Since, FOR ONCE I HAVE NOTHING ELSE TO DO. Except, y'know, writing stuff, because Andrea Stark needs to pwn Ty Stone six ways to Sunday, by popular request.

Mmm. Writing stuff. Want to. And want to work on website. But my brain's pretty much fried.

I think I lose a large chunk of brain cells each Blogathon. But there's a part of me already looking forward to next year. When I'll, y'know, sign up more than a week in advance. And try to have something that will be finished within the scope of the day, one Big Damn Fic like in '07. (Because I liked what I did this year, but, yaknow? Closure is nice. Even if it's punch-in-the-gut character death closure that makes little fangirls cry. Especially if it's that.) And I have two year's worth of data going for me that, yes, I can do this, and, yes, I can write about 9-10k words of pretty darn good fic while doing it. Twice I've done this.

It's good feeling like I can count on myself, y'know? Even if it's only in the miscellaneous little ways like that.

I also realized, in conversation with jennifer, why I was leaning away from the idea of just doing prompts all Blogathon: whiplash. Fandom whiplash, mood whiplash. Much easier to just do one thing all the way through.

Though I did like having five characters to write about (well, okay, more like through, as usual the bug-folks got the short end of the stick, and I feel guilty about that) rather than two. That gave some nice variety.

I now to Batman.

Fanfiction Frenzy for Planned Parenthood has raised $115 so far. Keep it coming, folks!

My foot: looks like this, only more bruised and swollen. Am contemplating going to medical people, seeing as I HAVE insurance now, but that would involve going out again (third-floor walk-up), and it seems to hurt WORSE than yesterday. Want painkillers, but that would involve standing up. MERF.

I wish I had a human-load-rated windlass. Then I could just winch off the back porch. Or out a window. MUCH easier than the stairs.

Part of it is also that the rest of my body is starting to feel the strain of limping around all the time, having to take most of my body weight off of whatever I can grab, etcetera. Wrists, back, my good leg. I wanna hot tub. And, of course, the strain to my fingers from whining on LJ.

Also trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to get to work tomorrow. The train (ten-minute walk on a good day, climbing into it, walking to a shuttle which is usually standing room only, walking to work) is RIGHT OUT. Driving is doable, but the strain to my ankle (because, YES, it's my RIGHT FOOT, damn it) after an hour-plus drive usually leaves me barely able to walk, plus I have to either get in late or get up at 5:30 in the morning to miss the traffic...but I guess I'll have to go for that. So, SO not looking forward to that.

Should learn how to use my car's cruise control, at least, for the highways. That should help, right?

I have goofed off too long and now I don't have it in me to actually, y'know, do anything. Am seriously considering getting on AIM. Aigh.

In the meantime, as I should have mentioned earlier, I don't exist. I'm three for three in that category, and thus have been denied thrice by the gods of FW. Poof!

MERGH, MY BRAIN IS CHEESE.

I should at least try to write some porn or something.

From the Caaaaaaaaaaaaaape.

a) not as sunburned as I could be. Almost like not at all. Yay SPF 50!

b) wrote random Steve/Tony ficthing which I will post to draftfilter soon. Other than that, didn't get much writing done.

c) swimming in the ocean is my new fun thing.

d) mllelaurel and I said all sorts of crazy shit which made me say "must post to Teh Eljay when I get back," only now I've forgotten all of it.

e) writing on a laptop outside in the pitch dark is love.

f) I forget what else. F for Fail!