I have watched so many bad movies this evening I think my brain has gone numb.

In the past few hours, John and I have watched, solely for mocking purposes, Eragon, Bratz: Fashion Pixiez and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, all of which we got from Blockbuster solely because we were in the mood to watch some truly terrible movies. We also, courtesy of late-night Skinemax, saw about half of a porno movie entitled something like Tropical Passions which somehow managed to be much, much worse than anything else I have been subjected to all evening, including the badly CGI-ed Bratz movie.

I have reached a few conclusions as a result of viewing the above. In no particular order, as the four movies I sat through appear to have merged into one Ur-movie of positively mindwarping hideousness, these are...

• Murder investigations in Hawaii are apparently conducted by a crack team of two detectives, neither of whom does any work.


• Eragon is like Bo Duke, just with none of the charm.


• Despite his age, obvious wisdom, and distinguished British accent, nobody ever listens to Jeremy Irons.


• Throwing over your lesbian lover will lead to her going totally nutso and trying to KILL EVERYBODY WHO HAS EVER SPURNED HER.


• The land of Alagaësia is comprised entirely of forests, CGI, and really obvious matte paintings.


• The source of all evil is a really generic Hot Topic wardrobe.


• It is possible to design armor for a dragon overnight. It is not possible to find the female lead a spare helmet.
  
• Bad implants leave a girl looking like she's shoved a pair of grapefruit down her shirt and hoped that it'll pass for a cleavage.


• Captain Nemo is possibly the baddest ass ever to prod buttock.


• You'll know when you've met your BFF because they'll sound so similar to you people will have to watch your lips to know who's talking.
  
• Impecunious supervillains can make a cut-price evil lair by hanging a big map in a lobby with a lot of stairs, and turning the lights out.


• All Goth girls are apparently Evil and will turn you into a tree if given half a chance.


• Every single teenage girl in the world looks like a palette-swapped version of every single other teenage girl in the world.


• Everything in 1899 was blue-tinted. Everything.


• Any time candles show up in late-night 'adult' movies, it means someone's going to get laid.
  
• It's possible to tell when bad sex scenes are going to start just by listening to what the soundtrack is doing.
  
• Garden gnomes are hardcore. Hard. Core.
  
• Pixie circles look exactly like really awful dance clubs.


• Dragon eggs look exactly like Anadin Ultra caplets.
  
• In a world where people are called Galbatorix and Murtagh, a name like Angela sticks out as badly as Babylon Moonfruit does IRL.
  
• Detective work doesn't solve murders. Screwing everything with a pulse and being photographed naked by your evil ex-girlfriend does.
  
• Alan Quartermain ish in fact Sean Connery and ash shutch he ish Schottish and talksh like thish.
  
• The land of the Pixies looks like modern America on really bad acid.
  
• The only known way to survive Eragon is by making over nine thousand Star Wars jokes.
  

My computer has just died.

Well, I say 'just'. It could have died any time between my going to bed last night (when I stood it by as usual) and my getting home from work this evening. I only noticed it when I got back in, though. John and I took it down to PC World, where it came from many moons ago, and were told basically not to bother trying to spend out to repair it. It's so old that there's absolutely no point. All I can do is buy a new computer and hope like Hell that my data hasn't been too badly damaged to be recovered.

Given that I have absolutely no money and my parents (though they may be able to help) are not exactly rolling in it themselves, I have no idea when this will happen. It'll be weeks at the least before I'm anywhere near up and running again. Maybe even months. I'm hoping it won't be months, but right now I get the feeling it may well be.

Given also that I have no idea when it went down (but the power was to it all day) and tried to make it power up a good half-dozen times before we took it in to be seen to, I am rather worried that the data has been corrupted. If this is the case I'll have lost a load of planning work for original stories, a fair amount of same for my fanfiction, some MSTs I was working on, at least a thousand Weiss Kreuz images and screencaps, a fair number of which I took or scanned myself and will probably never be able to recover, the backup files for my personal homepage, which I was hoping to update sometime within the next month or so, and the layered versions of every single icon I have ever created. I'm trying to be sanguine about this - it's only stupid fangirl stuff, it's not really important - but it's still one Hell of a blow.

Fortunately, I saw this coming to an extent and have backed up my Weiss Kreuz music to data CD and my fanfiction to my pen drive. Not exactly all of it and not, in all cases, the very latest versions, but there's enough of it there I don't feel like I've just seen every last little bit of the last few years of my life go up in smoke.

Just most of it.

It is going to be hard for me to write and update now, as I have nothing to write on but my landlady's PC. First off, it's not my PC and I don't know how much patience she'd have for me being on it even more than I am already.

Second, for fairly obvious reasons I'm not entirely happy about trying to write some of my stories where I might be overlooked, meaning that I'm going to be very much out of the loop where fanficcing is concerned for a while, and just as I was beginning to pull my way out of the Slough of Despond and back to writerdom, as well, which pisses me off mightily. But I do at least have the data, or some of it. At least the raw material is there, and I'm not totally up the creek. I'll back what I have up to Google docs or something, and with any luck I'll be able to pull at least some of it back sometime.

For obvious reasons, though, I'm not feeling particularly lucky at the moment.

... yeah. Nissan Micra, meet Ye Olde English Country Ditch.

I'm not totally sure how it happened, but John and I went driving this afternoon and, after about an hour or so trying to find somewhere interesting to go on a rainy bank holiday Monday, we ended up coming off the road at the bottom of a rather picturesque hill - neither of us can work out what happened; the car was supposed to turn but didn't - and ending up making friends with a bramble hedge, not to mention a rather large quantity of mud.

We both appear to be fine (though my pants are a bit on the muddy side and my creme eggs have been squished). Oddly enough, so does the car; it was in good enough shape, one tire change later, to drive us back to sunny Streatham. (Albeit at the grand speed of thirty miles an hour.) The RAC guy showed up, expressed disbelief over our location, and dragged us out the ditch backward after first expressing a degree of skepticism whether or not this would be possible at all.

Fortunately, it wasn't much of a ditch. More a ditchlet.

It took him about forty minutes to show up, much of which John and I spent sat in the back of the car gazing out at a very nondescript field - we'd almost ended up in that instead, but swerved. Through the trunk. Fortunately, some kind soul had removed the parcel shelf a few days before.

If nothing else, we served as a talking point for everyone else: just about everyone who passed us by rubbernecked shamelessly, and some of them stopped to ask if we were okay. A very nice couple and their young son stopped almost the minute we'd ended up in the ditch to check if we were okay, and gave me a bottle of mineral water and some popcorn to get my blood sugar levels back up to scratch.

And, if nothing else, I now have a Horribly Lame Car Crash Story to tell at dinner parties. And all I need to do now is actually get invited to a dinner party someday.

I'm also probably going to end up burying Ken alive.

... yeah, he needs a new fangirl badly.

This was going to be a post about the banishment of wk_fiction.

However, it appears to be back. This is good because it means that wk_fiction is back and I now have no need to worry. It's bad because it means that I now no longer have anything much to blog about. So, here is the original post as preserved for posterity, up to As Far As I Got before hearing that the community was, in fact, Back.

wk_fiction wk_fiction wk_fiction - say it three times and it appears.



I'm joining the chorus of people who are utterly baffled about the sudden disappearance of wk_fiction.

(This as seen on weiss_kreuz about here, and again on wk_fic_finds.)

Given that the user name is bolded out rather than struck through I'm going to guess that this is an account banning rather than an account deletion, as user-deleted accounts are still struck through. I have at least one struck through account on my userpage, and you can still click on the name and make it to a placeholder page explaining that the account has been deleted. As far as I'm aware, bold text is only for banned accounts.

I don't actually mind the distinction that much - yes, I know, SHUN THE UNBELIEVER and all that - but what I do mind is the lack of a status page. When someone you have known for a while, or (in this case) a community you have been in for years, suddenly vanishes from your radar it's kind of nice to know what in the flaming fuck actually happened to it and why, exactly, it happened at all. An explanation would be nice, but I doubt there'll be one forthcoming.

This is not good, not least of which because nobody who was in the community knows why it would have been deleted - not even suspended, just summarily deleted - in the first place.

Nobody even seems to know who the maintainer is (was?), which doesn't help either.

My worry, therefore, runs as follows:

Because Weiss Kreuz is a small fandom, with a small number of LJ users who are active in it, my guess is that if the journal has been deleted, we lack the numbers to create enough noise to actually get an explanation as to what the Hell is going on. I know pornish_pixies managed to get it together after an account deletion, but that was a Harry Potter community - and Harry Potter fans are well known for being loud, easily mobilized, and above all, wanky. There's also a lot of them.

Weiss Kreuz fans tend to be far quieter. There's also a lot less of us, so I doubt we could ever make the kind of noise that would lead to our getting anything much in the way of answers.



... and then, as if by magic, the community was restored, stopping me in my tracks and rendering this entry Null And Void.

Five weeks, 24 pages and 21,640 words later I have finally finished my weissday prompt.

At half five in the morning.

... yeah, I told you guys I had length issues and if I did try and write something I would end up exceeding the minimum word count by a value of over nine thousand. But this appears to have mattered not as I HAVE FINISHED. RL tried to stop me, the prompt tried to stop me, my body tried to stop me by crashing three times. BUT I DID NOT CEASE. And I DID IT.

GIVE IT UP FOR ME.

It helps that I had a really awesome prompt and a really awesome plot, so inspiration was about the only thing that was not a problem. Though I had off days, I never had 'why am I writing this?' days. It was just... an awesome awesome plot. I should write more stuff like this.

I would say more but I am really really really exhausted and have spent much of the last twelve hours staring at a computer screen trying to take words out of my brain and put them into a text document. 5,116 of the words in that fic were added to it in the last few hours which, for me, is an absolutely unbelievable amount to write in the space of a single day. Thus I am tired and I need to go to bed before the sun comes up.

Here's something random and fun that I found on Gaia Online while I was busily procrastinating with my weissday prompt and and feeling ill enough that being on Gaia seemed like a good idea.

... no, I don't know what I thought I was doing on Gaia. I just go there every so often for the fun of it, then get depressed on realizing I will never be able to make enough virtual gold to own a virtual cat plushie, which costs a virtual arm and a leg and is the only item on that site I really want, without dedicating my life to it, and also I realize I am not fifteen years old and should Give It Up Already.

Anyway, here's something random and fun I found on Gaia and did because it gave me an excuse to play with online avatar generators, something which I always find fun and will gleefully do so under any pretext, no matter how slender.

Hey kids, it's Tektek your characters night--only this time you have to use your brain! Here are your instructions:

1. Go to Tektek and click on the avatar creator
2. Create an avatar and dress it up like your character
3. FUN PART! Find items that express something about your character's personality and add them to the avatar (ie, a pencil for artistic characters, emotion bubbles, ect)
4. Post the tekteked version of your character and talk about why you picked the items you did. Talk about how they show your character's personality
5. You can also add details like race, gender (should be obvious), age, etc, but it's not necessary. The point is for you to think about your character's personality traits, not just their obvious physical traits.

Yanagi 'Karin' Shindou Karin is a stage name - she's one of life's many wannabe model/actress/whatevers (and, like most of her fellow wannabes, she doesn't stand a cat's chance in hell of making it). She's a party girl, hence the bottle she's carrying. The heart balloon is because she's a romantic - a rather unrealistic one at that, with a tendency to try and matchmake for her friends and relatives. Her 'celebrity date' represents her boyfriend, a rich guy from a good family who is about as serious about her as celebrity dates usually are about competition winners this side of Win a Date With Tad Hamilton. Finally, Karin's ass is on fire because she doesn't tend to think about the consequences of her actions, either for herself or for other people, and doesn't realize how serious they have gotten until it's much too late to do anything but pick up the pieces.

Kazu Shindou Karin's younger cousin, a college student. She is of the opinion he needs to come out of the closet. This might work a little better if he'd allowed himself to realize he was in it. He's wearing a wedding veil because between Karin's matchmaking plans and his traditional family's expectations he'll have an arranged marriage, whatever happens he's basically getting married off to someone. Clearly he needs to get his head examined for agreeing to any of it in the first place, though, hence the bloody bandages. The sweatdrop balloon represents how utterly confused he is by all this even before the hormones - here represented by the little hearts on the left - kick in. The book under his arm is closed because he's supposed to be studying, but thanks to everything else that's going on, he really isn't, and the kitty on his head means his cat doesn't care about any of it just as long as she gets fed on time.

... and I'm sick again. Oy. That's, what, the third time since I signed up for weissday?

Yeah. I've gone from food poisioning to a head cold to a stomach upset which left me spending at least half last night lying awake going OH MY GOD MY STOMACH. And being sick. And, um, surfing the Internet to take my mind off how thoroughly yecchy I was feeling, because it wasn't like I was actually getting anything much in the way of actual sleep.

(Which I still need quite badly.)

If it hadn't been for that I might actually have finished my prompt on time. But instead I was downstairs at six in the morning looking for the phone number for NHS Direct and hoping like crazy that whatever the hell had happened to my vision it was just going to be temporary. Cold sweats and near-blackouts in the smallest room? Now I know how Elvis must have felt when he was going, but at least I'm still here on the other side. That, though, was seriously worrying.

I had to call NHS Direct three times before one of the nurses actually got back to me. The first two times I got told to present at the ER(!) by one of the advisers; it was only on the third that I actually got to speak to someone with medical training. She told me to drink a lot of fluids and monitor myself for any signs of kidney failure just in case; thankfully for me, I have enough of a medical grounding to do this All By Myself. My back aches a little, admittedly, but that's usually a sign of Teh Sick for me and anyway, my kidneys have been making their presence felt numerous times during the night. As long as my eyes don't start going yellow that's good enough to get me by.

I now have a bottle of Evian to sip - well, okay, it's tap water in one of those awesome flip-cap squeezy bottles that say threatening things like 'for hygenic reasons this bottle is intended for the exclusive use of Evian water', as if that's really going to be enough to stop people using them as flasks - and a sore ass.

Gah. Just GAH. I only got over feeling achy a week ago. Now I have an all-new series of aches in different locations. WHAT JOY.

... and before that, I was actually doing quite well with my fic, too.

The moral of this sad, sad tale is that I am never eating tinned tomato soup again. That's what I was doing when the sicks started, and rightly or wrongly I'm choosing to blame all my woes on it. Well, it's either that or Ken Hidaka has a seriously vengeful Old-Testament God on his side and I'm an agnostic, so I'd rather believe in the tomato soup.

Okay, I have had a cold this past week and sundry other RL things have been happening to me to the utter detriment of my actually managing to work on my weissday prompt. This is not good as I like my weissday prompt and really want to finish it, because I feel rightly or otherwise that it's a really strong idea that I'm actually managing to do justice to.

The minute I realized I couldn't write with my cold I emailed genkischuldich to let her know that I might need an extension. As of yet, she hasn't got back to me, so I'm going to have to operate on the assumption that for whatever reason I am not going to get one.

I don't want to abandon this prompt and turn in something halfassed.

Meaning that I have until the 7th of March to finish this fic to my satisfaction.

This is not going to be at all easy given how much ground I have left to cover and how slowly I usually write. To that end, I am going to be going into hermit-like seclusion for the next few days in a desperate attempt to get this wretched thing finished before the deadline. If you don't see me around before then, that's the reason for it: I've got to pretty much pretend that the internet and my all new Actual Social Life don't exist if I want to have any hope in hell of actually getting this bastard finished.

I've written 1,625 words this evening so far. I'm taking a bit of a break right now because I wanted to google 'Venice Beach' and my brain is demanding to know What is This Thing Called Activity and I feel like I need one, but I'm going to have to get back to work again soon. Please wish me luck, because I am going to need it.

I can't find my tape of early-Nineties Chinese pop songs.

Don't ask me why I have (had?) a mix tape of early-Nineties Chinese pop songs. I can no longer remember. I'm pretty sure that my father gave them to me when I was a teenager, or maybe even before that. Why he had them is an utter mystery, but he did. I used to listen to them during my musically stunted teens, and I have one of them running therough my head and I wanted to hear it, but when I went to look for the tape I couldn't find it. It wasn't with the rest of my tapes and it doesn't appear to have been left anywhere. It's very odd.

Naturally, I searched for it. I looked for at least half an hour, with absolutely no joy. That isn't to say I totally struck out, mind. I might not have found the thing I was looking for, but I did manage to find a few other things instead. Ignoring dust bunnies and the crap I threw straight into the bin (old papers, some blusher - I never wear blusher these days - and lipstick, a couple of old pens), the haul of unexpected stuff regurgitated by the depths of my bedroom include:

• One crucifix earring.


• A full box of Apollo chocolate


• One hair tie


• Stray replacement silver fascia for headphones


• SIM card (T-Mobile)


• The National Service Framework for Coronary Heart Disease, 2005


• A pin badge showing Planet Earth


• Three back-of-envelope sketches of Abused!Ken


• A copy of The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler


• A copy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare


• Cat-patterned umbrella


• Self-recorded tape of City Hunter image songs


• Spray bottle of body cooling mist


• Three BHF heart ribbons


• An incense burner


• Pair of gold earrings with blue stones


• One half-full pot of Badger Lavender Sleep Balm


• Copy of Sim City 3000


• Copy of Manners for Men


• Tape copy of Alison Moyet's 'Hoodoo'

I knew I shouldn't have signed up for weissday. I might as well have hung a sign round my neck saying HI THERE REAL LIFE, BUST MY ASS PLEASE. Yes, now I have a cold. God damn.

I slept ridiculously poorly last night. In between lying in the dark feeling so achy I might have gone ten rounds with a tiger, waking up every couple of hours because I needed to blow my nose, and my throat politely informing me (repeatedly) that it felt like sandpaper oh and also your lips are dry, any chance of a drink?

I only came downstairs at all because my job hunt demanded it. Of course, I might as well not have bothered. Nothing new that I could apply for, a couple of emails about some new job site I had inadvertantly sent my details to.

(Of course, I'm still not hearing anything back from any of these people. I'm not only not getting interviews, I'm not getting anything. How hard is it to send a candidate a form email saying 'Dear Ms. Jones, You suck, please fuck off'? Quite honestly, I'd take that kind of response as a welcome courtesy considering the damn-all I'm habitually getting.)

Anyway, I applied for a job on Saturday and got told to go sign up at some website to update my CV. Got an email telling me I needed to Click Here To Activate My Profile And Check My Details. So I did that and got directed to a page saying something to the effect of OUR SHINY NEW WEBSITE REQUIRES YOU TO CHANGE YOUR DETAILS. Now, I don't have details to change, so I just try the password they sent me.

Unfortunately, the password they sent me isn't working. Okay, fine, I'll request a new one.

That password isn't working either.

Nor is the third password they sent me.

Okay, back to the site. Click the same link... okay, I'm directed to a totally different page this time. Again it asks me for my login details. I type those in. Nope, they don't work. So I close that page down and go back to the email they sent me. Try the link again. Once again, I'm redirected to the wrong page.

A bit of experimental clicking around gets me back to the right page. I try the third passowrd again and it still doesn't work. So, I request a fourth temporary password.

After another couple of attempts, I finally manage to change my temporary password and gain access to the site itself. First impressions: this doesn't look terribly user-friendly. (Damn, what was the old design like?) Second impression: this looks like it was designed for people with far more awesome and impressive CVs than I have.

Ok, CV proforma thing. It's full of sections that don't apply to me. I'm going to look like a total underachiever if anyone sees this. Still, showing willing, I enter the information about my schooling. It wouldn't save it. I try several times to get it to see things my way, but nothing happened. It just stubbornly sits there on the 'enter your details' screen. In fact, it won't even load the page I came from. The only way out of that jam short of closing the browser is to go back to my site profile and hope that somehow it had realized I clicked the 'save' button five times and actually did want to keep the details I had entered.

Needless to say, it doesn't.

Okay. Not wanting to get stuck on that again, I go and look at the 'enter your skills' section. Now, I have a skills section on my CV so okay, no problem, I'll just copy/paste the skills I have into the box thing. Wait, there's not a box thing. Instead there's something telling me I need to type in a keyword and search their 'skills directory'. I don't get on with the serach engine. Is there perhaps a drop-down menu of what the 'skills directory' contains? Of course there isn't. There's just the search engine. Which doesn't really work very well, requires very specific keywords, and doesn't really allow you to try and make your skills look at all distinctive.

Unfortunately, my work history is terrible and my two attempts at tertiary education have ended in ignominious failure. I have, therefore, created what is known as a 'skills CV', in which what I can do is treated as far more important than what I have done, because I haven't done anything very much. If I can't make my skills sound impressive, I quite honestly don't have a hope in Hell of getting anyone to look at my CV. Selecting them from a 'search engine' so they look just like every other jobbing secretary's, therefore, is not going to work for me.

Is it any wonder I have decided that actually, I won't be using that website?

I don't like John Wyndham.

This may seem a bit of a random pronouncement but trut me, I've been thinking about this. Not for long, admittedly, and while overdosing on quite brutal tiredness and sore feet (my new plan to save money and get in shape at the same time by walking everywhere that I can walk to within about half an hour from home does, I admit, have some drawbacks) but still - thinking about this.

Now, no offense to everyone who does like John Wyndham but to my thinking his novels are what happen when interesting plots meet bad - or at least phenomenally boring - writing.

I read The Chrysalids while sitting round at my parents' house, bored out of my mind. The book didn't make it much better. I read the whole thing because the plot was good, but in spite of this I was resolutely un-gripped by the actual prose. It was a good story, but to my mind it was a good story which was told in a rather dull way, perhaps because it was seen through the eyes of a rather dull - I might even say characterless - perspective character. Sure, he had Speshul Powers of Speshulness™ and was living in a rather fascinating post-apocalyptic religious community, but he didn't seem to have much in the way of a personality. I can't even remember his name. David? Thomas? Johnathan?

Personally, I wouldn't have pegged the hero of The Chrysalids as the next step on the evolutionary ladder because he was, qute frankly, boring. I only knew he was supposed to be special and interesting because the book kept mentioning it.

I hate informed attributes.

I flipped through The Midwitch Cuckoos at the charity shop I volunteer in, Thursdays being very very boring and this Thursday being no exception. I'd heard of it, I'd heard it was supposed to be a very good piece of speculative fiction, I decuided to give it a chance - maybe my lack of interest in The Chrysalids was more my problem than Wyndham's - picked it up on spec and I was bored again.

Perhaps it was no surprise to realize that once again, here was an interesting story told in a boring way. The main character was, once again, quite frightfully dull - and, unlike what's-his-name in The Chrysalids, he only seemed to have a very tenuous connection to the plot as a whole. The book was full of more interesting people doing more interesting things and here we were lumbered with a protagonist who seemed to have nothing to do with anything and no real connection to events save for living in the same town.

That wasn't what really annoyed me, though. The annoying part was that I felt positively offended on behalf of my whole gender by the patronizing, paternalistic attitude both characters and author displayed to pretty much every single female character in the novel.

Just in case anyone is unfamiliar with The Midwitch Cuckoos, the plot involves the entire fertile female population of a small English village falling spontaneously pregnant with Alien Babies of Massive Creepy. It's a story in which most of the really severe physical and emotional consequences of the Resident Plot Contrivance happen to women and it's told exclusively from the perspective of men. An odd decision, and one which doesn't seem to have a lot of logic behind it. Yes, maybe Wyndham wanted his detatched narrator - problem is, the detatched narrator is a large part of what makes the book, in spite of its interesting plot, rather boring.

Anyway. Women, in this book, are (in the eyes of the male perspective characters) superstitious, hysterical, dependent, unthinking, largely undifferentiated and unable to cope with unpleasant truths. The male characters conduct several earnest discussions about whether or not they should trouble the little ladies with their horrible suspicions about these pregnancies or just let the village women carry on thinking they all just so happened to end up naturally pregnant at the exact same time, even the chastely secluded widows and the equally chastely secluded virgins. Because of course their poor pregnancy-addled female brains would be unable to draw any sensible conclusions themselves without some tackle-packing bearer of the Almighty Y Chromosome to set them on the right track.

This in spite of the fact that, um, it's the ladies what got knocked up, guys. They should be quite capable of working out that Something Ain't Right About These Coincidental Pregnancies without some guy having to come along and tell them. They're the ones who are pregnant. Women, believe it or not Mr. Excessively Boring Narrator, do have functional brains.

This, not so coincidentally, is the point I started very definitely skim-reading (and very nearly gave up in disgust altogether).

I nearly gave up again when, after the Babies of Massive Creepy were born, even the staunchly child-free were presented as wavering in the face of the joys of motherhood. Because it's absolutely impossible for a woman to say she doesn't want to have children and actually mean it and all it takes is an alien rape baby to set them right - and God forbid they actually try and do anything about said unwanted pregnancies or alien babies without being talked into it by one of the men.

The sixty-odd so-called 'Cuckoos' these poor women ended up giving birth to turned out to be a gestalt entity, or at least that's what I took away from it; I may not have been entirely correct, but I was getting so creeped out and annoyed by the condescending, paternalistic attitude displayed to the female characters I wasn't in the mood to read closer. This might have been slightly more disturbing if it wasn't for the fact that Wyndham - or at least his narrator - had been treating the village women as barely more differentiated than their creepy clone babies. I'd like to believe, if only for the sake of my own faith in humanity, that this was intentional and treat the whole novel as a thinly-disguised polemic on Women's Rights, but I just ain't that hopeful...

And am I the only one who thinks he has a serious problem with dangling characters?

So, February is turning into the kind of month that, in the immortal words of one cards_slash, smacks you in the ass and just smiles.

I won't go into detail about precisely what the deal here is because in spite of what appearances may suggest I am not actually trying to pity-whore here, but suffice to say it is not at all pleasant, it is aging me overnight, and it has forciably brought home to me the fact that I need a job yesterday.

So I've been spamming job applications to anyone who looks like they might be even remotely interested - the people at Office Angels must be utterly sick of the sight of my CV - and went back to that temp agency I signed up with about a fortnight before getting owned by Depression Gone Physical to let them know that yes, I do want work, here's my CV, please call me. So far they haven't, but I can but hope. How hard can it be to get a job as a receptionist? I may have bad hair and curves in all the wrong places but I can enunciate precisely and I'm not that difficult on the eye.

If job hunting was all I had to think about, it wouldn't be so bad, but of course I am Fate's Bitch and am trying to juggle this and about ten thousand tonnes of other administrative crapola related to the Very Unenviable Position I currently find myself in. To say I am utterly sick of being on welfare would be an understatement.

Of course, life being what it is, this coupled with difficulty sleeping coupled with the fact that (though I may be doing a lot better) I'm still not exactly Miss Mental Health 2008, has had that stupid herpes simplex virus I inherited off my mother in childhood flare up again. I've got my father's eyes and bone structure; all I got from my mother was herpes simplex.

Yes, as if I didn't have enough to think about as it was, I've got a very nasty and ugly cold sore. And it hurts. And it, combined with make-up, makes me look like something from a nineteenth-century textbook about Fallen Women.

And then I'm still trying to work on weissday.

As usual, of course, what started out as a relatively simple kind of idea has necessitated the usual thousand tons of research - I won't say what on, as it would give the game away rather - and quite a lot in the way of Aya Fujimiya. God knows if, what with all the sundry crap I'm dealing with all of a sudden, I'll actually get it done on time. I suppose I can but give it my best.

I should probably stop babbling about weissday but I'm not totally sure I want to.

Okay, so yesterday John and I hatched the brilliant and random plan that hey, we could totally go to Brighton for no reason at all except that it wasn't London and we wanted to go somewhere interesting. (Okay, to be fair said plan was actually hatched Sunday night. But still.) It was awesome, though not the kind of thing I'd blog about as I kind of suspect you had to be there to know why it was so lovin' cool. We didn't do much but it was still very cool.

It appears to be becoming a running joke between us that I'm 'not like the other girls'.

(One thing I will say, though: John had never seen a proper sunset before yesterday. And he's 22! I guess he didn't have the same kind of vacations I did. The one we saw yesterday was pretty, but not up there with the best I saw, which was over the sea in Darkest Devon outside a regrettable pub. Awesome sunset, tho.)

Anyway, to get this entry back on track - he kind of saw me having my Wobbly Moment over my assignment on Monday, or at least the tail end of it after genkischuldich pulled my ass out the fire and saved me from having to try and write something I knew I would fail hard at. I now have another prompt and it's ever so much better and something I am really looking forward to writing. Well, continuing writing.

I had an idea for a plot strand in the car on the way to Brighton and it all kind of spiraled from there.

I won't go into it in any detail as it would give my prompt away and that might not be politic. Suffice to say I came home with the my entire fic largely planned out thanks to John and his Plot Brain, and a quick conversation with pichi to remove a couple of plot slips later, I was pretty much in business regarding the actual storyline. The only problem is that it is clearly going to be much longer than 1000 words and I am going to have to work my ass off if I want to get this done by March 7.

Which I do.

So I am, therefore, going to work my ass off.

I started work on the fic this evening at about half six. (It was going to be four, but I got owned by my tireds and had to take a quick nap. There is absolutely no point me trying to write anything when tired.) I've managed to get the opening written and have made a good start on the second scene, after a bit of a tussle with an opening paragraph that just didn't want to be anything other than clunky and horrible. I feel pretty good about this so far, I just hope I can keep this up.

To the surprise of precisely nobody who knows about my tendency to verbosity, I have already passed the lower word limit, and I still have the majority of the fic left to write...

Good luck to anyone else on my friendslist who's Doing This Crazy Thing!

Do you, my invisible reader, ever feel bad about what you put canon characters through while writing fanfics?

I do. I suspect it is not entirely sane of me to do so, but I do anyway. Therefore, in a spirit of Lenten repentence, I have decided that I am long overdue to issue an Official Standing Apology to the Weiss boys for damn near everything I have ever written, ever, since I first put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) as regards this particular fandom. Consider this post a public apology for the depredations I have visited, and no doubt will continue to visit, on this innocent team of highly trained schizoid assassins in the course of fulfilling my fangirl duties.

(Also, I saw cards_slash's post about the Official Standing Apology to Bo Duke, and I thought it looked kind of fun, so I decided I wanted in on that. Besides, if Bo deserves an apology for getting hot ass-sex with his cousin and his hot ass, I think Ken definitely deserves one for - well, for just about everything, including the red Chinese dress and possibly the banana milk.)

Therefore, I would like to apologize...

... to Aya Fujimiya, for:

• Largely ignoring you and all your redheaded mangodliness because you're such a bitch to write for.

• Letting Ken steal your coat.
  
• Automatically assuming your heterosexual self is not averse to sampling the delights of situational ghey.
  
• Having Ken discover that you write your name in your underpants.
  
• Getting, for the purposes of parody, your ass pinched on the subway. In front of Ken.
  
• Constantly making you drag Ken's bloodied, semi-conscious and probably precariously-clad body back from wherever the Hell he's decided to collapse this time.
  
• Dragooning you into providing the 'comfort' side of the hurt/comfort equation by writing you into scenes featuring copious amounts of hand-holding, hugging, and tearful angst.
  
• Using Asuka to justify writing you into slash pairings. (Well, one slash pairing.)
  
• Making you forget the lube that one time.
  
• Failing to have written you into any threesomes with a pair of hot blonde co-eds.

• Deciding that 'Kenken' is an utterly adorable nickname and your irritation over it even more so.
  
• Automatically assuming your conflicted feelings over Kase translate into 'you'd do him in a heartbeat if only he let you' or, in extreme cases, to 'you guys were totally at it.'
  
• Thinking you're pretty tied up.
  
• Deciding, after many years agonizing over your musical tastes, that what you really like to listen to is ridiculously upbeat J-pop.
  
• Using your impulsiveness, your quick temper and your sometimes frankly suicidal loyalty to your friends to get you into horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad situations you only escape from at obscene personal cost.
  
• Using, in fact, just about everything about you as an excuse to torment you horribly at one point or another.
  
• Thinking you look good on Schuldig.
  
• And on General Powell.
  
• And just about everybody else.
  
• Using your status as Weiss's Official Damage Magnet to get you into twice as much trouble as any of your teammates in about half the time, and possibly abducted and/or bleeding and/or unconscious to boot.
  
• Forcing, in keeping with the spirit of the Weiss Kreuz anime, you to dress up in drag on the flimsiest pretexts imaginable.
  
• And deciding you are curiously attractive to middle-aged men while so doing.
  
• Making you do all the cooking.
  
• Constantly, in spite of the fact that you could probably kick the ass of just about every other male character in the series in a fair fight, making you bottom in bed.
  
• To the extent that you bottom to Omi.
  
• Almost never letting you have enjoyable consensual sex.

• Making you do almost all the work.
  
• Paying attention to the bad fanon about Leader!Aya back when I thought everyone else knew something I didn't.
  
• Absolutely everything that has happened or will happen during the writing of Acts and Omissions.
  
• Deciding you're not totally averse to kink.

Okay. Having spent most of the last two nights tooling with CSS, I think my Livejournal is pretty much looking the way I want it to right now.

Gah. Neeervous about the whole weissday thing. So far it's proved counterproductive as far as getting me to write goes - I've been worried I might get into a groove for one of my WIPs and then have to abandon it while it's looking promising for weissday, so I'm not really writing anything at all. Well, I managed a couple of RP posts and wrote a few lines of Abkürzen but I'm not at all sure that actually counts. (Because it doesn't.)

Still, we should be getting the assignments within ther next couple of days. At least once I've got the prompt I can stop worrying about what I'm going to end up writing about. I hope I get something decent, but I'd settle for something that I could actually write.

Yeah, I'm kind of worried about screwing up.

I know fretting like this over a fic exchange is daft, but I'm doing it anyway.

Speaking of fic and my WIPs, I've got the weirdest idea that it might be a good idea to set up a community for Weiss ficcers with works in progress. I have no idea what would happen when you got there, but I was thinking maybe some kind of - timescale thing could be set up for people to work to as regards getting chapter drafts or one-shots out. I know some people out there like to work to a timescale - I certainly seem to work harder if I know that I have to finish something by X-Day or THE WORLD WILL PERISH - and maybe making the goals public would help.

Yeah, it is a very vague idea and I suspect it probably wouldn't work at all in practice. But it is nonetheless An Idea.

Unfortunately I know damn near nothing about running a community and suspect that one might take rather more active moderation than many. Still, it might be interesting to set it up anyway and see what happens.

Or maybe I just need to start using reset_to_zero as a fic journal and try and post at least one piece or chapter part every month. That might be it. After all, not everyone is a spacy spaz who procrastinates for their conutry and habitually oversleeps. I guess I'll see what happens with The Dreaded weissday. If it turns out that the deadline does help me, I'll just have to start imposing deadlines for other thinmgs as well. I need to get Seuche finished sometime before the Last Trump, after all.

... however, I am in no state to do it right now. I would go upstairs and try and write a bit before John comes round but I, predictably, am tired. I had a bad night and therapy was slightly more unsettling than usual, and what I really really need right now is not for the Muse to decend upon me, but marmite on toast and a couple of hours' sleep.

What does it say about me that I think It's So Easy is soothing music for my frazzled mind?

A revised, updated and expanded version of a comment from wk_fic_finds.

... okay, I admit the comment in question wasn't so much 'revised and expanded' for this post as this is what I'd written in response before character limits came and bit me in the ass. Given how long I spent filling out this stupid thing in the first place, though, I want some kind of permanent record of what, exactly, I decided I was going to say.


1. What is your favorite fic?
I'm not totally sure I have one. That said, though, the last fic that I read which turned me into an incoherent, fangirly wreck living from update to update was pichi's Divided We Stand. Read it, then imagine having to wait twenty-four hours between chapters. It killed me, seriously.


2. Where do you go for fic-reading needs?
I'm old-school enough to think fanfiction.net and adultfanfiction.net are worth the time and trouble. The quality of fic there has declined quite significantly, but there are plenty of gems for those who are prepared to take the time to look for them. There's also the Livejournal communities - I watch wk_fiction, like damn near everybody else - and personal recommendation.


3. What do you look for in fic?
Ken.


Well, that's the non TL;DR version. He needs to be in character, though (and so does everyone else). I try not to let pairing preference dictate what I read too much, but I'll definitely judge fics for pairings I like less harshly. I'm also a sucker for hurt/comfort and long, case-based fics.


4. What turns you off in fic?
Mary Sues, but not just the common-or-garden curves-in-all-the-right-places variety: any OC who isn't bound by the same rules as the regulars or doesn't earn their place in the story counts as a Mary Sue to me. MPREG is another big one, as is a lot of the infuriating fanon surrounding Aya and the tendency some fans have to play up his significance by doing down the rest of the team. Fangirl Japanese annoys me, too, but at least that can be cured with find/replace.


5. What was your first fic?
I honestly don't remember. The first Weiss Kreuz fic I remember really enjoying, however, was Bekampfen Sie das Kreuz by Vitani. It's mission-related gen, and one of the only fics which takes the Weiss-Schwarz team-up trope and makes it work. I reread it every so often, and it's still one of the best novel-lengths I've come across. Pity about the fangirl Japanese, though it's easy enough to edit out. I also remember reading Chalcedony Cross's Grausame Maskerade and Sidara's Sunde long before I had any real idea what the series was about, but those haven't worn quite so well.


6. Most underrated fic you've read?
A Sense of Dark by PenguinKye, gradually downward by Lupin, a fic called Perigee - unfortunately I can't remember the author's name any more and and it no longer seems to be online, but it's one of my favorite Youji/Ken fanfics ever - and just about everything by Nichts: Fragrance and Griffon are both absolutely beautiful.


7. Favorite line from a fic? From where?
I've read an awful lot of fanfic, containing an awful lot of moving, poetic imagery. Even the bad stuff contains the occasional gem. There are a lot of beautiful fics out there, and I dearly wish I could say that my favorite line was something moving, touching and profound - perhaps some deep meditation on the nature of life, the universe and everything.

It's not. My fangirl core is insisting that my current favorite line ever is "Fuck you with a pineapple, I'm not sayin' a word", from pichi's Divided We Stand. Oh, Kenken. Never change.


8. Hottest story you've read?
Can I have more than one of these? Monochromatic Whispers by Avium. I'm not amazingly enamored of the ficcer's reluctance to call an eye an eye and I don't see Crawford/Ken but good God, it's hot. They meet in secret, they have sex - they aren't allowed to talk. The second-person perspective won't be for everyone but in the context of this fic, it works. Then there's Setting 2 by cards_slash, in which Schuldig propositions Ken over a shopping basket and it's all downhill from there. (I wrote Ken's dialogue but the hot is all Card, so I hope I can get away with including this.) And last but by no means least, Pulse by Tenshi, which I found through wk_fic_finds in the first place.


9. Fic you've reread the most number of times?
I have absolutely no idea. I suspect I'll have to go with Koumori's Pat Benatar arc, though. Hot sex and an actual story arc? Oh Hell yes. (Some day, she says, I will get off my lazy ass and rec that thing.)


10. Fic that needed to be completed years ago?
I have quite a lot of these, though I'm in absolutely no position to talk what with my own WIP gathering dust. Still... The Poison Tree by Nichts. I have no idea where she was going with this but I really wish I knew. Blood Summons by Rapunzel and Small Acts of Kindness by Mockorange7... there are probably more, but thiose are the ones that leap to mind. There's also a fic whose title I no longer remember in which Omi has gone missing and Ken goes to Crawford for help, and ends up forced into sexual slavery. The last part posted finishes with Farfarello informing Ken, in as many words, that he is going to sodomize him. That's the end of the chapter, and the end of the fic as it stands. This needs to be finished, yesterday.


11. Fic that needed to be written years ago?
Well, I've written or am in the process of writing at least three fanfics simply because I couldn't find anything like them on my travels. I kind of wish other people had written, say, epic case-based YoKen fanfiction, because it's a lot easier to read these things than write them and that would have saved me years of my life and several serious headaches, but I'd probably be writing the fics anyway...


12. Funniest fic ever?
Honestly? Probably the Five Ways series by cards_slash. Weiss and Schwarz are put in several conventional fanfic scenarios and respond with bewilderment - Ken, Omi and Schuldig tend to feature as resident voices of sanity. The more bad fanfiction you've read, the funnier these are, though I suspect they're pretty damn hilarious even without that grounding.


13. Saddest fic ever?
For various reasons, I don't read a lot of sad stories. I prefer my angst to be leavened with ultimate hope. My personal saddest fic ever, therefore, would have to be Deep Blue by pichi. It's not melodramatic; in the classic sense of the word, it's not even really a tragedy. But, to my mind, this deceptively simple story packs an emotional punch that rather more conventional angst-and-tragedy fics simply don't reach.


14. Fic you enjoy more than you let on (e.g. guilty pleasure)? Please indulge the fangirl in me!
Douka and Cat Got Your Tongue? by Generic Miko. I don't like the arcs they came from and the fics themselves aren't great either, but the Schuldig/Ken fangirl in me was thrilled. An AU, Boys in the Attic, by Lord Gackt - it features Youji as a stripper and it is very firmly not my kind of thing, but I loved it. And Blackwake Manor by Deena. It's crack and it's rather more fanon-flavored than is my wont, but it's fun so I forgive it.


15. Most memorable fic?
There are plenty of fics I remember for all the wrong reasons, but one I remember for all the right ones is Der Gefaltete Zettel by Team Bonet. That one's been with me years. More recently, there's been the absolutely magnificent Under Glass by vr2lbast, which I suspect will do much the same.

I think I'm going to have to start working on the Seuche edits before I carry on with the main plotline.

The reasoning behind this? Partly I feel like I really just should get the beginning sorted before I try and focus on where I'm going next. Partly because I've just realized that I want to refer (briefly) back to an event which didn't actually happen in the first draft - at least not in any major, noticeable way. I now want it to be major and noticeable and considered as such by the characters. I don't really feel I can move past the bit where I refer back to it before it's actually happened, and I suspect that's why I'm feeling so deeply stalled as regards the scene I'm writing. Nothing the matter with the scene itself, just that one-line reference to something that should have happened and hasn't.

Also, I really just hate the opening chapters. I disliked them in a vague kind of way for a while, but that was before I knew what the problem with them was. Now I actually know what the problem is, I don't like leaving it uncorrected.

I can, I suppose, at least give it a shot. If it doesn't work to unblock my authorly drain, it doesn't work.

... wow, what a pointless journal entry this was.

To try and make matters rather less pointless, have a matched pair of random drabbles (both exactly 100 words long, too!) I wrote an amazing ho-hum amount of time ago and then did absolutely nothing with because I felt they were far too ridiculously short to post anywhere other than the challenge community I did them for, which I then promptly left anyway.

( The Camera Never Lies )

Well, that was pretty painless.

... see, it was supposed to be a pairing challenge, hence why I did Youji and Ken and nobody else. It's not just because I am a hopeless fangirl, really.

I get the feeling that I should probably do more of these, if only in an attempt to get my head round the concept of brevity, but I seem to remember them being pretty fun to do, too. I'm pretty sure I've got the prompt list for that community somewhere, maybe I'll try and do a couple whenever the mood strikes me and see what happens.

Also, I did sign up for weissday after all. Wish me luck, I guess.

Should I sign up for weissday or not?

It looks interesting.

There are some pretty good ficcers signed up for it as well, which interests me even as it intimidates me. Yeah, twenty-five years old and part of me still wants to go play with the cool kids.

Maybe a fic challenge would do me some good - writing to order and for a time limit might actually get me back into some kind of groove. I feel inspired to write at the moment, I'm just not doing anything with it, which is deeply stupid of me, but whatever I try to work on it feels like I should really be doing something else. At least having something that needed to be done by a certain date would get my ass in gear over something.

(And God knows I would quite like to put in a fic request and make somebody out there write me some awesome Ken fic. There can never be too much Ken fic.)

The problems, however, start, when I consider that I have never done a fic exchange in my life. And there are good reasons for my refusal to do one not least of which because I suspect that when it comes to fic challenges and fic exchanges, I suck. In fact I suspect I suck a lot. I'm stalled about halfway through a fic I started in response to a prompt on Ye Olde Weiss Kreuz Kink Meme. I still want to finish it, I just don't think any good will come of rushing it. I hate rushing things, it always makes me feel stupidly pressured.

I still feel like I did kind of a rush job on That Fic About The Japanese Christmas Cakes and Angst I finished last month. People seem to have liked it and it came out better than I thought and that was a fic challenge of a sort, it's just...

Well, it feels like a bad idea. Why so? Well...

Reasons I should probably NOT sign up for weissday:

• I am a quite stupidly slow writer. Yes, there are others who're worse, but I'm still pretty bad. Pretty bad to the extent that it took me the best part of a month to write four thousand words on Christmas and angst and even then I felt like I'd rushed it. Sometimes - sometimes - I manage to write faster than this, but I feel it'd be taking a risk.


• Furthermore: I am verbose. I catch hold of an idea and I run away with it for several thousand words more than it should have done. Just Another Day was supposed to be short - three pages at the most. It finished up twice that. The premise for Paperclip is 'Youji and Ken have sex on a table'. It takes them ten pages to manage it. Seuche was meant to be about a hundred pages long. It's twice that and still not finished. That, combined with the fact that I am a slow writer, also makes me think that I would probably have real difficulty finishing up a fic in time for the deadline. It would get huge, and it would take me ages to finish.
  
• I'm a Weiss ficcer and feel relatively comfortable in my ability to handle them as a team. However, there's a catch - I cannot write Aya as anything more than a supporting character. I just cannot do it. I don't feel like I have a decent enough handle on his character for that. He causes me no end of difficulty. I'm therefore very worried that, if I got a prompt which required me to write for him, I would completely and utterly fuck it up - and seeing how popular he is with the people who want Weiss fic, I don't honestly understand how I could avoid that.


• I can't write for Schwarz except as supporting characters. I can't write Gluhen-era. I can't write the Side B characters because I don't know enough about them. I can't write consensual porn in less than six months. I fail at het and think Sakura is an utterly infuriating character. Add that to my 'sucks at Aya' problem and I would be able to fill perhaps one of the requests. Maybe. I simply don't feel I'm a versatile enough fanficcer to be able to put myself into a situation where I might have to write something so out of my comfort zone. I don't mind the thought of going outside my comfort zone per se, but that and a time limit?
  
• I'm worried I'd find myself filling a request for someone awesome. I have no idea how in the world I could ever write something for, say, vr2lbast and not collapse into a gibbering wreck over the impossibility of ever living up to her standards. Not that she'd expect me to do, I'm sure, but I would expect me to do it, and I would fail miserably.
  
• Nobody who's so far signed up seems even remotely interested in recieving the kind of fic I consider myself capable of writing. I like all the wrong characters in all the wrong combinations, and I'm most comfortable writing about all the wrong subjects. In short, I suspect I am totally the wrong kind of fanficcer to sign up for something like this and not make a terrifying trainwreck of it all.

Well, I'm a bit late with this icon dump - but a few hours can be forgiven when I had at least 100 icons to upload and HTML-Table-Ize (there must be a neater way of saying this) - at least I hope they can, because late is what I am. I blame... I don't know, I blame the sheer boredom that is dealing with all this HTML, and Photobucket's decision to strip the image names from their uploads. Makes the whole business so much more long-winded and troublesome than it has to be.

Brushes by all the usual suspects - namely colortone, perfetc__, twistedswanton, sugarplumkitten, joyfulsong, sheepy_hollow, snarkybecky, merely_anger forbiddenstorm, ghost_sheep, inxsominax, raynedanser, framedinblood, colorfilter, sinecure, lil_brokenangel, masquerademasks, fading_coal, nebulein, cool_graphix, nv1978, cae_prince, justmi, and mutsie_brushes, - sourced in 100x100_brushes.

• Lyrics on the first (slightly washed-out) set of four Weiss icons come from Hyde's '666'.


• Lyrics on the second set of four Weiss icons come from 'Everybody Wants The Same Thing' by the Scissor Sisters. As usual, Youji proved to be an utter bitch to find lyrics for. Why it's always Youji who gives me headaches regarding brushes, color schemes and quotes whenever I do a Weiss icon set I have no idea.


• Further Scissor Sisters lyrics can be found on six other icons.


• By contrast, the lyrics on the Schwarz icon set come from 'Future' by Leonard Cohen. (Whose songs are, of course, made of Purest Win and Awesome: there are lyrics from 'The Partisan' on one of the Aya icons in this batch, too.) What this says about my conception of Weiss and Schwarz I hardly like to contemplate. The first time I heard that song I wanted to make a Schwarz icon set for it, something I am sure I wouldn't have done if I had never put my MP3 player onto Shuffle in the first place, which says more about me than I might like to think, too.


• For some reason, the Pet Shop Boys song 'Opportunities' makes me think of Omi, and to this end I stuck lyrics from it on an Omi icon.


• Other artists and groups whose lyrics I have shamelessly appropriated include Duran Duran, The Killers, Don Henley, Heaven Seventeen, Jessica Riddle, Blur, Barenaked Ladies, Dashboard Confessional and at least one more group whose name totally slips my mind now. And that's even without including the text brushes I've been using, most of which also involve song lyrics.


• And finally, 'Sepia Lady' is of course the title of one of Omi's image songs

• 'We are the dead' is a line from 1984. George Orwell no doubt thought that having his prose raped for the sake of a really crappy Reality TV show was the nadir of his posthumous career, but that was before he ended up on a Weiss Kreuz icon. I suspect he is spinning in his grave.


• 'Oh shit, we're trapped in a plot hole' - do I even need to explain this one?


• Aya Fujimiya is Inigo Montoya. Except he's not, because if I ever get round to writing that Princess Bride parody I randomly worked out the castings for once upon a lengthy shower, he's actually going to be Buttercup. Youji is Inigo in that. But that wouldn't make for a funny icon.


• As regards it sucking to be Ken, this is a private joke that has ill-advisedly gone public. Once again the source is cards_slash and her awesome, though these days she is largely aiming her awesome at the Dukes of Hazzard fandom. Her Five Ways series is still some of the funniest things the Weiss Kreuz fandom has going for it, though. Anyway, the joke in question relates to Ken's total inability to catch a break, at least where fanfic goes - if he's not being horribly tormented, it's because he's being completely sidelined. Because he hits Aya, you know.


• The story referred to in 'Omi and Ken discover slash fiction' exists. The original is actually a fic arc, but that's really not much of an excuse. I think just about the only person who got away without being raped was the cat.


• The OC referrred to in 'Aya Sues: The Truth!' also exists. Her full name is Serenity Raven Kath'rynn Sakura Enigma Hikari Akegata and, if that wasn't clue enough, she was conceived (though, admittedly, it was by me) as The Ultimate Weiss Sue. She really is meant to be that bad.

quietladybirman

Gah.

pichi, it's a good thing you did want to write.

So there I was, innocently wandering downstairs in the hope of wasting an evening by going online and doing stupid things, the same way I ususally do, because anything else requires money I quite clearly Do Not Have.

I log on, open a browser (MSN, homepage of the Gods, how I fucking hate you. If this was my own computer you eould not get headroom for a second, you portal of all that is vapid and ridiculous and stupid) and try to fire up MSN messenger and a website that doesn't suck. Or at least sucks in marginally different manners. Livejournal. Of course, nothing happens and the net goes down with an almost audible crash.

The net came back up a few minutes afterwards for about half an hour - just in time for Steve to come back from holiday and ask to check his emails. Time I personally would have used to post this old circular and let anyone who cared to know that my net hated me and I probably wasn't going to be around. The net going down then back up again a few minutes later normally portends a downtime of five or six hours at least, and I feel it only fair to try and forewarn people of this eventuality because nobody likes wasting their time.

Call me an idiot, I feel like I'm letting people down if I don't sign on when I say I will. It always feels like breaking an appointment.

So. I tell him to let me know when he's done and go waste time.

Of course, the net considerately then crashed again just in time for him to finish up. (I think.) Certainly it didn't give me any time to warn anybody.

I must be getting saner, though, because at the end of last year my response to net death was far less sanguine than it was tonight. A dead connection is becoming the mild annoyance it must be to most other adult human beings, and not an excuse for a deathbed vigil (booting the computer up over and over again, muttering 'work, you motherfucker!) and a period of protracted mourning. So that, I suppose, is something.

Anyway. If I'm not around tomorrow - well, tonight, really - presume it's the computer being a poop again. If I am, expect an icon dump the like of which will make your head explode. Or something.