Kaesa

...and then life ate me. Partly because I have stuff going on, partly because it's dark all the time, and partly because I'm steeling myself for the emotional exhaustion that is negotiating my family's utter bullshit this holiday season. It shouldn't be as bad this year as it has been in years past, but I know it will be a mixture of festively nice and awkward and mildly traumatic.

( Brief family ranting. )

Anyway. Um. Pretty sure I can't manage that Yuletide NaNo thing. Oh well. I'll still try for a nice high total Yuletide wordcount with lots of treats. Haven't yet written anything for it, but I am brainstorming on the main fic. I need to get past my insecurity here and just write.

Oh my GOD I have basically been squeeing inwardly about my Yuletide assignment alllll daaaaay.

Also, I'm going to try what chat has coined "Worst Idea Ever" -- do Yuletide as NaNoWriMo and try for 50k words in November. (Ideally separated out over different fics. I don't want to saddle my poor recip with a novel-length to read on Christmas Eve.)

And I'm going to try and make posts with approximate wordcounts to keep myself encouraged, and also because I never post anymore and maybe this will get me back into the habit. Obviously today doesn't count for NaNo, though.

So, current progress:

Treat #1: 1,197 (205 new)
Canon review for assignment: ~5%
Writing done tonight: None, but I took two pages of notes on canon.
Research placeholders left in writing: 2

So, okay, not impressive, but it's a start! (I'm hoping this treat will be 3-4k, but once I'm done with canon review I'll obviously be concentrating on the assignment.)

Hi, flist! Long time no see!

So, a lot happened IRL, mostly not super fun stuff. I could write a lot of excuses about how I was doing exchanges in the midst of a deep depression and then when I shook it off I was like "holy shit there is a whole world out there! I forgot I had friends IRL! hello friends!" and then I defaulted on something I really didn't want to default on, and then shame spiral, and then medical stuff, but that is mostly in the past, except for the medical stuff. I'll put that under a cut since medical stuff is deeply boring to many people:

( Medical stuff! Mostly for my venting benefit. )

So yeah, I guess basically I have to work on learning to cook more things, which means I have to work on putting my kitchen together, because after the move I realized I have this huge dining room, no furniture to put in it, and a kitchen with alarmingly little counterspace.

Ugh this post is all over the place. TBH I am kind of writing this because I NEVER POST and I felt bad about that. I am trying to figure out if there is anything actually interesting that I have done lately.

I've been playing a lot of Sims 4, which I actually like better than Sims 3 (Sims 3 did not play well with my gaming PC) and if you ask I will bore you to death with screenshots of my hilarious fannish sim families, my half-assed Roxy Lalonde legacy challenge, and the laboratory I made out of kitchen counters and bar decor.

OH and Bad Bang. Guys, let me tell you about Bad Bang. If you don't already know, Bad Bang is this amaaaazing Big Bang-esque challenge being run at irregular intervals by adaptationdecay where you write the most godawful piece of fiction it is within your power to write, and then someone illustrates it hideously. So far there has been one Bad Bang and one Reverse Bad Bang, and apparently there is a Telephone Bad Bang in the works where someone writes, another person draws, another person writes based on the art, and another person draws based on the fic. The nice thing about Bad Bang is you only get a few days to "create," so it's low-pressure and everyone is wanky in the comments. I haven't had a chance to dig into the Reverse Bad Bang fics but the whole archive is here, and my personal favorite Bad Bang fic from Round 1 is, I think, Darksound of the Opera, a Poem of Longing and the Barricaded Heart, which I explained to my visiting friend over lunch today because it was so amazing. (I am kind of disappointed the author stayed anonymous, but if you ever stumble across this, author, you are the best. <3 PLZ U HAV 2 RITE ME THE GRENADINE SEQUALL!!!) I wrote a Destiel/Sterek fic, and the art was amazing. It must be seen to be believed; you don't even need to have read the fic to understand it, because there are captions! And labels!

I also illustrated this short and sweet Theon/Ramsay tentacle fic with so many dicks, SO MANY, mostly in the comments and unsurprisingly it is surpassing most of the fics I am actually proud of writing wrt kudos, BECAUSE DICKS. Fandom, never change, you are 100% ridiculous.

Hi, flist. Long time no see! I have stuff to talk about! Not, uh, fannish stuff at the moment, but I'm thinking of restarting my biweekly fanmixes thing and probably also posting some themed polyfannish recs, because, recs. (I recently got into Homestuck, so currently I am uh, absorbing lots of angstilicious backstory fic and fun AUs, and also watching thinkatory read Homestuck and seeing her head explode. It's pretty great.)

Anyway, I figured now was as good of a time as any to do a general life update.

So I'm moving next week. It's gonna be crazy. I'm just moving four blocks but I cannot wait to get out of here, because, you guys, I live in Wrigleyville, and at this very moment my downstairs neighbors are starting Hour Fifteen of drinking green beer and partying. Some of their charming possibly-guests called me a cunt and a half when I refused to let them in because I didn't know them. Great, standup guys!

I was incredibly psyched about the apartment I was going to move to. It's across the street from a grocery store, a block from the nearest public library branch, and it is a little further in terms of my commute, because I either walk or take the bus those four blocks. The lease started today, so my parents helped me take some basic stuff into the apartment and unpack it in case the move ended and all I wanted to do was take a shower, eat something, and crawl into bed before unpacking anything.

But when we got to the apartment I was like "but... this isn't the apartment I saw. What is this weird layout? I've never seen this apartment in my HOLY SHIT THIS LIVING ROOM IS HUGE. IS THIS THE KITCHEN? ????? Wait there's another room. What... what is going on. This is not my beautiful house, etc."

I am not totally sure what happened, but I doublechecked the lease I signed and that unit I walked into today is definitely the unit for the lease I signed, which is apparently... not the unit I saw?

But this unit is better. The kitchen is pretty large and there's a separate dining area. I had been planning to have a separate office, which doesn't seem to be doable, but the living room is huge so I'm really okay with that. It isn't that much bigger, but it is definitely bigger and the closets are also bigger. Narnia could fit in that closet and there'd still be room for at least four homophobic politicians. I mean, I'd rather keep coats in it. But still.

So, that's super weird, right? That never happens. No one ever rents the wrong apartment and then walks in and it's better. I am slightly terrified I've done something wrong and they'll take my apartment away from me and reprimand me for moving into the apartment I leased because the rent cannot be this low, wtf, and I'll have to pack up and move again and all that glorious new bookshelf space will be reduced very slightly. Which I guess is a silly thing to worry about, because the landlords and I have both signed a contract.

On the other hand, I knew something totally unexpected would happen with this move, and now it has, and I can relax because it was a Bank Error in My Favor, right?

Anyway, I am trying to like, forcibly relax (yeah that's totally a thing you can do) and finish packing stuff so I can move and then fill my apartment with kitchen islands and bookshelves.

I received seven gifts. SEVEN. I am so grateful, because they were all excellent, but, SEVEN. I am not sure if seven is lucky or ominous here, given my fandoms.

( My gifts! )

And now, stuff that wasn't written for me:

( Recs for Analogue: A Hate Story/Hate Plus, a Calvin & Hobbes/Young Wizards crossover, an Elementary/Sleepy Hollow crossover, Fallen London, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and the Sims )

Dear NPT Writer:

It has just occurred to me that you should probably know I'm not going to be able to read my fic until tomorrow evening.

Actually that is a total lie. I will very likely read it sneakily while I'm working, or over my lunch break. But my point is, I really should be doing work, so I won't be able to properly review it until I get home from work. On the other hand, that means there's a slight chance my review will actually be coherent.

Anyway, thank you in advance!

Yours in exchange-fic goodness,
kaesa

(Dear my flist: HI! Sorry I never post. I would do that more often if I had anything interesting to say.)

There's a meme going around where people explain their jobs using the thousand most-used words in English. (I think it's mostly for people who do science. I do law, though, and I figure that's complicated enough that this was a challenge.) So, here's my job -- and what I did yesterday, which was a real estate fetch quest -- via the Up-Goer Five Text Editor.

( I work for a person who helps people figure out how to follow the directions of very important people -- or how to get out of trouble after they did not follow directions. )

( The day before today, I did a lot of hard work. )

MORE YULETIDE RECS. I still haven't made much of a dent in the archive with my reading, but here are 22 recs in a grillion fandoms. My discussion is a little shorter, just because I wanted to get these in before reveals. And also because it is my birthday, and I want to get back to the urgent birthday business of reading fic.

Fandoms:
Doctor Who RPF
Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Folgers "Home For the Holidays" commercial
Glitch
Greek Mythology
Hamlet
Hark! A Vagrant
His Dark Materials
Indiana Jones
Invisible Cities
Jurassic Park
Norse Mythology
Pushing Daisies
Robot stories - Isaac Asimov
Solar system anthropomorfic
Space vehicles
Star Wars
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
You Belong With Me (song)
xkcd 1110 (Click and Drag)

( Here are the recs! )

Chapter 32 of Between Here and Now and Forever is posted!
Fanfiction.Net
Skyehawke
LiveJournal
The Archive of Our Own

This is the last chapter of this plot arc, and as I've been working for most of November and December on my Yuletide fic (it's a very long fic), I haven't been working all that much on this. I PROMISE I KNOW WHAT HAPPENS.

Also, agh, Rowena is really amazingly self-centered in this. There are... no words.