Reading

I am surviving. Everything is kind of in hurry-up-and-wait mode. I am so tired of phone calls.

Currently I'm trying to make my old bedroom into a welcoming space. I don't think anyone has vacuumed or dusted in here since I moved out 14 years ago.

In my plans for the weekend that didn't happen, I was supposed to renew my DW account. At this point I don't even know where my card is for that. In my work bag? Which is? Hopefully at my place somewhere.

Anyway, could someone kindly float me a bit of DW paid time til I can find my own arse without a flashlight and map? Thank you. ;_; Truly.

Yesterday I made apple pie for the first time! Needs improvements, but I'll be doing more tests with other fruits as well in the upcoming week. Will prep dough today, might do a test with cherries too? Or will wait until another day.

My sleep schedule is also the most normal it's been in a while. Waking up early for Baldesion Arsenal is making things almost good lol.

Gotta get through my reading page properly today though... skimmed but put off commenting, sigh.

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( ff14: levelling to 50 and other levelling adventures )

Thought I escaped PEM but the answer was it was actually delayed and it's been hitting really hard Friday on, much to my infuriation. I even double slept on Wednesday and Thursday but no dice. I would really like to work on words already, at all, not even necessarily to counteract self esteem, but just so I can do something, anything more productive than 14 or OW mini goals because it's been that way for months. I need a break from being sick. 🫠

I hit Legend in Stadium support for the first time (hurray!) and have 3k comp points for another weapon again, which is in time for Drives next week. I may take a break other than just doing it with duo for a few days, I was testing out Vendetta and having fun with sword spinning but dps rank is just in freefall thanks to the -80 bug so... I focus on tank and support on a more casual level until drives when I'll be here undoubtedly for hours. I also poured enough time into Anran to get her progression highlight intro and I'm really enjoying playing her, partly as it's less of an issue to hit things with the altered aim if they're right in front of you LOL. Although I can get partly back to the way the aim was before the change, it's not 1:1, and I don't think I'll ever be able to aim in this game the way I once did and I have to begrudgingly accept it, which means a lot less time on Ashe and Freja which makes me very sad. Just another thing to have lost to add to everything else.

( family death )

fanfic: still water (rated M, 29k words)
fandom: TWICE
pairing: Minatozaki Sana/Hirai Momo

A few months ago I joined the kpop multimuses Discord server and got peer pressured into writing an overambitious epistolary fic (ok, 99% of the pressure came from myself, but still) (I love you all).

still water basically started as a dare to myself. The Discord server had put on a fic fest with the prompt:

"Character A is a celebrity that's left the big city for an extended stay away from their busy life. Character B runs the bed and breakfast they stay in."

And I decided to answer this with a constraint: could I write a fanfic using nothing but documents? No prose, no close third, just texts, journals, voice memos, etc. I've always been fascinated by books like The Lover's Dictionary or The Secret Astronomers (not to mention fics like Ernesto de la Cruz vs. The Court of Public Opinion) because I love the gap between what a document says and what actually happened. I love unreliable narrators, I love found media, and I love reading between the lines. So of course I wanted to try that, too. I wanted to write a story that existed entirely between the gaps between documents.

Or that was the plan. ( how it actually went )

... that I have ever read about, not just US politics, or politics in general, but arguably about the entire future of humanity: 

Dr Stacey Patton: "You Can't Raise Children to Obey and Expect Them to Defend Democracy" 

I have been trying to put together a post on this for, literally, years now, and having a failure more of nerve than anything, so I am completely overwhelmed and downright grateful to hear someone with standing and a following get there before me. And, as you may have guessed, I have a bunch of "yes-and" concurring opinions about it, but I'll let you all go read hers instead of talking over her.

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For once I'm actually seeing thefridayfive on Friday.

1. Do you enjoy reading?

Yes! I've been a big reader since grade school: fiction, fanfic, comics, manga, the occasional visual novel...

2. What is the first book you remember reading?

Absolutely no idea! Apparently when I was very little I loved Go, Dog. Go! by P. D. Eastman so much I basically had large chunks of it memorized and would recite it while flipping the pages. So that's kind of like the first book I "remember" reading lmao.

3. Who is your favourite author?

I'm bad at picking favorites, but I'm eternally fond of Terry Pratchett, and I'm a big fan of K.J. Charles.

4. What is your favourite book?

Another impossible question!! Once upon a time I might have said Good Omens, but Neil Gaiman.... Maybe I'm obliged to say The Last Binding trilogy by Freya Marske on account of owning the original books and two sets of special editions lmao.

5. What is the last book you read and the first you'll read next?

The last book I read was a graphic novel called DPS Only! by Velinxi, and the next book queued up after my current read (The Red Winter by Cameron Sullivan) is probably going to be The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes.

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