farla

Possibly the covid booster is partly to blame.

It was a sort of pastoral movie, where there was a young father and his five little girls living in a nice house somewhat on the outskirts of the rest of the town, up on the lower end of a mountain. There was some gossipy drama between him and one of the more queen-bee local women where she just didn't feel like he was being a good neighbor, like the time there was some event that involved a lot of syrup getting spilled through your typical string of unlikely events probably tied to the five little girls, and he didn't pay for it.

And the narration then said something about how, you see, he couldn't, because he didn't actually have the money.

Because...

He was actually some sort of undead thing covered in a glamour so he seemed alive, and that glamour applied to everything around him. So he didn't have to do things like buy real food or heat his house. Four of the five little girls had already starved/froze to death without realizing it. When the reveal happened and the glamour stopped, they were standing there on the path at the end of the part cut into the mountain with higher rock sides and bushes, right before it turned into grass (but it was also flanked by blood-red autumn maple leaves all the way down), with a bit of snow around, waxy and bloody and faces starting to not sit right on their skulls, and the last one wasn't sure if she was going to die anyway if she left, and if she left she'd lose everyone she knew and die at some point anyway, so she chose to stay with the rest of them.

Then some sort of reporter visiting the town who'd made friends with him, was very forcefully invited up into his house, and the last bit of the dream was about the reporter guy knowing that staying up there would kill him before long, and the last bit of the dream was trying to figure out if he wanted magical immortality trapped in a rotting corpse and was sincerely going along with this, or was only pretending to go along to get a chance to escape before he died, and if that was even going to happen or if he would be trapped here and die without realizing it only to be thrown out again later for not being grateful enough.

Moved 2/5 frogs to the 90 gallon. 2/2 frogs decided to see what would happen if they flung themselves out of the VERY HIGH UP tank onto the VERY HARD floor and then weren't even grateful to be put back in. Moving the remaining three put off until tomorrow.

Also, someone figured something out! Not sure where I'll go with that.

I've been trying to nail down how odd I feel and I think it's that it doesn't feel like there's consequences. I mean, I'm still aware of it, but that "oh no!" spike of them barrelling down, not so much. Which sucks, because those are pretty useful.

Going to try to clear up backlog and see if having fewer things nagging in the background makes the remaining ones feel like they matter more.

Alright, committing to this. This year's NaNo goal is posting.

Another Verse, currently half done with Ch7 which is about 10,000 words.
Encore, currently done with Ch24 (3.5k) but dissatisfied/not sure the transition to Ch25 is working.
The Lindworm, basically done with the whole thing but still tweaking, at thirteen total chapters won't actually be able to post this all within the month unless I'm doing a Sunday/Tuesday thing again. (Actually that kind of is a general issue? There's 14 total days I can post fic if I try to stick to the prescribed times.) Total wordcount is 6k and 3k is already posted, and the final chapter's one of the longest, so that works out badly for me.
Yenna, add short Yenna POV first chapter and penultimate Jaskier POV chapter as suggested.
Dresden, must finish that stupid book. Long chapters and longer complaining about them.
Reviews I owe.
That one fic that handled things so badly I have to say something.
Yet another canon divergence She-ra fic, ready to go but can't post until later this month. 1k I think?
The Sun Shines Differently, just buckle down and write the damn werewolf & Cullen chapter so I can get to the basically done Anders and Geralt chapter and then it'll be finished. Both short.
Image of God and Amnesia, probably not but maybe with all the above done with I can circle back to them later.
"Why wouldn't you travel by main roads?", currently maybe a third done with both Yennefer's and Geralt's chapters. Geralt's is currently 4k words, Yennefer's is on another computer so not sure but likely similar.
As I'm not actually fixing up anything about Lucki I'm not going to count the remaining chapters I'm posting (that'd be over nine thousand extra words, which is ridiculous).

Assuming 1 Lindworm a week that's 4 slots taken with it, then the She-ra one leaving 9 slots, so probably fine until I don't finish something on schedule and start missing days.

Well, logging back in for other reasons and I've been meaning to make a post. Well, meaning to try to post at all, but a specific thought I keep coming back to.

My grandmother died right before this all got going. The whole thing felt distant - she'd been "going to die" for a couple decades now, her memory's been gone for years, and we never had much in common. I was upset but I kept waiting for it to hit properly. Worrying it might suddenly hit at a bad time, even, just out of the blue. The wake was bad, but it was a lot worse for my brother so I was distracted distracting him, and some distant cousins talked a bit and somehow fell right into how much we both support abortion and the prolifers don't give a fuck about life, and there's something really nice about finding someone agrees with you about the topics no one dares talk about in public.

I was hoping the funeral would mean something, a greater sadness and then coming out the other side, ritual is great, but it was just a bunch of disconnection. The church my grandmother went to, right down the street from her house, was closed during the sex abuse scandal, not because anything bad was happening there but because the property was valuable. So she stopped going rather than travel to a distant one. And the priests she'd known went elsewhere long ago, and the funeral was by someone who'd never met her. I remember my grandmother's church, and even a bit of the priests there, but I don't go to church myself, and with only the ceremony it was all strange and alien.

And now I keep thinking that it's good it happened then. She's been rushed to the hospital a few times before and the last time was particularly fraught and relied on the doctors being really on the ball. And there'd be no way to keep her from getting corona - she ordered all her food delivered and she couldn't remember anything and she couldn't read, and my aunt would've been a mess worrying about her, and when she did get it my uncle would blame my aunt. Or while everyone was worried about that she'd have gotten the regular flu, like she did, only there wouldn't be the resources to treat her. And she'd have died and all the elderly friends and family wouldn't have been able to have a funeral.

And how all that's true for so many other people. This is just...the disruption, not just the deaths but every way it spreads outward.

I was also planning to kill my cat, which is terribly upsetting on the basis of it being a decision made without any clear idea of if it's actually the right thing to do. We decided to wait for the ground to warm and then all this mess put it off, and now she seems like she might not be miserable on balance so I won't again. I really hope she dies on her own. For most of my life cats just died but the last two in a row had to be killed. More unambiguously than this, but also in agony which is what I want to avoid with her.

If this all sounds pretty depressing, this isn't constantly on my mind, just a couple thoughts that tie up.

Easter Wattpad prompt, also gave me a reason to ponder pokeverse religion which I usually skip over. Wanted an egg related title and "a curate's egg" originally means saying there's something good about something terrible "out of timidity or politeness" and the meaning's now shifted to mean "something of very mixed quality".

This will probably be a chapter in itself. Also, the seviper takes her name from the number of zangoose she's bested.

( Read more... )

Oh no I’m feeling better and having emotions other than exhausted sick but smiling hurts. Can’t even hassle Smallbrother safely.

No more funny binging only the soothing tedium of rpgs I guess. Maybe I’ll exert myself into googling an anime.

Well, another year ends.

I...do not think things are going well, on the whole. Whether or not individual things are eventually fixed, the fact they've happened and kept happening without anyone able to deal with them properly...I feel we're kind of doomed. Thinking about it doesn't make it better so I try not to, honestly.

I'm glad about Tumblr shooting themselves repeatedly in the foot, because now finally people understand all at once how transitory the content is and are backing it up all at once, but I'm disturbed by the fact this seems like it's happening everywhere on the internet at once. It's bad enough we're in a cycle of sites growing and being destroyed and mass exoduses to new places, but it looks like we're on the verge of the sites wrecking themselves faster than new ones appear.

I've been crossposting my stuff to Wattpad. (Super depressing, incidentally - there's actually an active community who'll PM you and stuff, and there's even events they run, but no one will actually comment on fic. The site's godawful, though, so maybe it's a mercy that there's nothing on there you'd want.) I started because I was hoping that Blaze/Hybrid would try harassing me over there and have less time to harass people and kept going mostly because I felt I might as well have an extra backup of everything, and I started transferring my old fic over to AOOOOOO as well, because they let you backdate so I only have to feel agonizing shame at my old work instead of combusting at the idea of it being on the front page.

Going through my old stuff's been pretty melancholy too. I was just throwing out random ideas. They weren't anything super clever or anything, and so it's sort of shocking to see that it's been two decades and there were so many things to explore from the very start, and...people didn't, largely. The same stuff gets written again and again instead.

I guess my resolution is to write more because fandom won't pick up the slack. And hey, I finished a chapter right in advance of January. Now I'm about halfway through Another Verse.

A positive thing, I've started reading translated Chinese webfiction, which apparently gets super meta. So instead of the regular gamerfic style of overpowered character ends up in a universe, the character isn't the intended protagonist but is the main villain, or they're not even the main villain but some speedbump, and they derail the plot but start struggling because it's easy to know what to do when you've already read the book but now you're in a scene that never happened. Got into it by the un-meta Mo Dao Zu Shi, which is great because the main character is a sweet, self-sacrificing necromancer. Haven't managed to run into more empathy-powered necromancers but given that story's pretty popular, even if there's no others yet there should be some eventually.

LJ's a bit sad now to come back to that it's a ghost town run by evil. I think I'm going to try to post occasionally on Dreamwidth, though, I think it's nice to write down random thoughts.

I actually feel good about the new year. So many horrible things happened, but we know they happened. And so much of the awfulness is really things that have always been awful, and it's just for the first time people know/care.

Also, three of the five ducks are girls, I really liked both the new Thor and new Star Wars movies, and I'm having a lot of fun with Another Verse.

This year really wasn't that bad. Bad stuff happened, but bad stuff happened before, and there were plenty of good things too.

I'm pretty worried about the next, though.