Okay, I haven't said much in the past however, mostly because things have been getting a bit intense at Chez Us, and I've been wanting to spare other folks the psychodrama that is Moving House With Meg. So, a brief summary.

( Cut for the disinterested )

Oh, and I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft.

Over the past couple of days (say from about Saturday onward) things have been a bit stressful over here in Chez Us. The joys of moving house, I suppose, but on Saturday it was the cleaners and yesterday it was the house's photo shoot, both of which effectively required us to remove just about any trace of individualism from the place. I wound up feeling as though my sacred space was desecrated, my private space was invaded, and I was just expected to smile sweetly about it and nod. Not the nicest feeling. At the moment I'm relatively stable (although only in the sense that the gaping great chasms in my calm have been covered over with a layer of paper and paint) but I figure I need a bit of outside help with all of this. At the moment, it's like I'm bleeding copiously from a walloping great gash, and all I have to fix things are standard size Band-Aids.

So, first on the list is phoning up the doctor's surgery and making an appointment. When I get there, I need to speak to the doctor about getting all my various meds renewed (both the thyroid ones and the psych ones) and about getting a referral to a psychiatrist, psychologist or counsellor of some kind to get the psychological equivalent of stitches and bandaging done.

Next up is sitting down with my mobile and my message bank, and scribbling down the number the nice man from the job service left on my phone yesterday while I was in the middle of a breakdown. Yes, I'm back in the job market. Buyer beware. So I have to phone him, and find out what it was he wanted (and probably arrange an interview with the nice people at the agency he works for where I can fill out all their forms so they can put all the information in their database in the appropriate format, or at least see whether their database is up to date). If he wants to see me in person, he can wait until tomorrow. That'll at least give the glue holding my calm together another day to set.

Then it's back to the standard grind of applying for work. At least it's a lot easier these days, since I can just go to Seek, grab five jobs which seem interesting, send off applications with a copy of my resume, and not have to budge too far from the keyboard. That should take maybe an hour at most. Five job applications a day tends to be sufficient for my needs.

Finally, I have to get in the car, and head down to the shops in Claremont - most specifically, to The Cheesecake Shop. I plan on getting a large Black Forest Torte, because I need something that spells comfort and reassurance in big, friendly letters. Black Forest Torte does that for me.

Once I've done all of those, I'm going to jump back into World of Warcraft, and thump things until I feel at least a bit better.

So far today I have had to get up hours before my body wanted to wake up (we have cleaners coming in to clean the place - they were supposed to be here 45 minutes ago). I have a sinus headache starting. I'm going to have to go down to a local Medicare office in a few minutes and deal with the bureaucrats there about getting a new Medicare card issued (my previous one got stolen a couple of years back, and I haven't bothered to replace it prior to now because I haven't needed to).

I get feeling today is not going to be a good day.

So, I've been in a rotten mood lately - moving house will do that, and given Himself is busy looking out rental places for us, we're definitely moving. This resulted in me deciding to create a "damnit, I want to kill things" character in WoW. So I did.

He's a male, blood elf paladin (blood elves don't have the Warrior character type, they have paladins instead). The starting sprite was gifted with very pale blond hair (almost white). As per the standard WoW gender bimorphic standards, he's a fairly robust type (broad shoulders, solid musculature, arse you could crack eggs on etc). I named him Prettyboi.

Yes, I have a silver haired Prettyboi whose preferred weapon is a walloping great two-handed sword.

The name has already paid off giggle dividends - there's one mission where you're having to deal with a "stealth" assassination (yeah, right, so a Paladin is going to be stealthy... and if you believe that, there's a bridge in Sydney Harbour which is just crying out for a new owner) and you lure the victim inside a building to kill them by saying you have to show them inside. Having a character saying "Very well. Let's see what you have to show me, Prettyboi" is just too silly for words, right?

Oh, and every race in Azeroth has a few default sayings. The Blood Elves are not exempt from this. The ones which stick with me are "We will have justice" (what, for lunch?) and "Hold your head high" (which immediately triggers a mental loop of the chorus of "Hold Your Head Up").

I present the Dead Hojo Sketch (as originally conceptualised here, enlarged upon here, and then further detailed here)

Original concept from Monty Python's Flying Circus (if you don't know what that is, Google will be happy to tell you at great length). Presented here with the original character names intact. For full brain breaking impact, consider the shopkeeper role performed by a Shinra co lab tech, and the Praline role performed by any of the following: Rufus Shinra, Old Man Shinra, Sephiroth, Zack Fair.

( Cut in the interests of preserving sanity )

I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone I own a franchise which sells brain bleach.

Edited 11 AUG 08 - removed an extraneous paragraph tag which had snuck in from somewhere.

Let's just say that when you attempt to combine Final Fantasy 7 and Monty Python, the results can be detrimental to your sanity.

Things like the "Bruces" as done by all Squeenix's Silver-Haired Pretty Boy villains ("New Villain, whatsyername, Vayne - is it okay if we call you Silver-Haired Pretty Boy, just to keep things straight?")
The "Bruces" as per the Squeenix hero corps ("I don't want to see anybody not angsting")
The Spanish Inquisition as performed by the Turks (imagine Reno running with the Michael Palin role, Cardinal Fang as played by Elena, and Rude standing in the background trying hard not to shake his head and sigh).
Himself suggested the Dead Chocobo sketch, as performed by anyone from SOLDIER (the only people who'd be able to lift the carcass of a bird taller than they were and bang it on a counter).
The Ministry of Silly Swords (Sephiroth as Cleese, Cloud as Palin, stand well back).
Keep Sephiroth as Cleese and Cloud as Palin and try not to think of the Fish-Slapping Dance.

I share all of these because I've just purchased a franchise in brain bleach, and I need to boost my profits. Also, I've suffered for my art...now it's your turn.

So, after heaps of waiting, I got a whole heap of new manga yesterday (my Amazon.com order arrived! Yays!). So I promptly stopped playing World of Warcraft (yes, there *is* something which will drag me away from games - it's books) and settled down to read them. So here's some quick comments:

( Cut for length and rambling )

I'd love to be ordering some more books, but unfortunately Himself has warned me the house is going to have to be sold, and we're going to have to move. This means I can't really go buying more books (much less the bookshelf to put them all on - and I do need that) until we're safely moved out and into our new location. At present, we're looking at somewhere in the Perth CBD-ish area, which means I'll have much easier access to any number of bookshops. This should probably not be as much of a selling point as it is...

Perhaps now is a good time to make my position on various games clear. It should be noted that while I'm a fan of certain games, and certain types of games, I do not agree one hundred percent with the depictions of women, femaleness, femininity, the female form, appropriate roles for female characters to play, and similar shown in these games. In my (admittedly rare) reviews of games, I'll tend to make my disagreements and annoyances clear. This doesn't mean I like the game itself any less.

I'm well aware that game designers have to work within the patriarchy. I'm aware that women haven't been a heavily courted part of the game market (except in the cases of female relatives buying presents for male relatives), and that the English-speaking game market does tend to pitch itself toward the typical "Hollywood" market (a fifteen-year-old male living in white suburbia in the United States of America). The Japanese speaking game market tends to be targeting what is possibly a "Tokyo" audience (fifteen year old male, living in his parents apartment in or around a major city). Neither of these audiences are particularly feminist; if anything, their tendencies run in the opposite direction for any number of reasons. I'm well aware that as a thirty*cough* year old Australian woman, I'm so firmly out of the target market it isn't funny.

But guess what? I still like playing games. I've liked computer games since the first time I was exposed to them (My cousin had an Amstrad machine that took cartridges, and he had a hacked version of "Elite" he'd grabbed from a friend) and discovered I loved role-playing games from the first time I got some serious run up on those ("Bards Tale" on my brother's AT/XT compatible computer - dual 5 1/4" floppy drives, no hard drive, and DOS 3, I think, as an OS) back in 1989. Guess what else? I have money that I like to spend on buying games for myself.

I may not be in the target audience. But I do spend money on games. Not quite as much as I spend on books, but more than I spend on DVDs and movies, or on music or clothes. I can't be the only thirty*cough* woman who does so, either. So is it so weird that I'd like to see a few more games which would be willing to accept a bit more diversity in female shapes, or a bit more practicality in clothing for the female characters (I'm sorry, but in no way, shape or form does a bunny suit constitute believable armour; nor do four inch spike heels seem sensible wear for walking most of the way across a godsdamn continent)? I don't think it's too much to ask.

I now have my flatscreen hooked up to the lappie, and a keyboard hooked up to it, and I can play all my games on the big screen and yays!

Excuse me while I find a few more walls to bounce off.

Of course, this does mean at least half of the kitchen table is now occupied by my computer stuff (laptop, keyboard, mouse, screen, assorted cabling, USB hub, portable drive) as well as the standard accoutrements of my presence (notebooks, scribble paper, pencils, erasers, tissue box, mug of tea etc). Good thing we're not planning any dinner parties in the immediate future. Himself is slightly less than gruntled by all of this, possibly because he doesn't want to be staring at the back of the flatscreen when he's eating his meals. Anyway, we're sort of thinking about possible options for what to do for desk space for me instead of using up the kitchen table.

The really silly thing is I *have* an office already. It's across the hall from my bedroom. The main problems with it as a location are as follows: it's hot in summer, cold in winter; it doesn't get much natural light (as opposed to the dining area, which has heaps of windows); the desk there is in the wrong spot (it faces the main wall, it's built-in, so I can't move it, and it means I have my back to the door, which I really dislike) and it's too far from the tea-making facilities.

So, today I wandered down to the local electronics shop (Harvey Norman, aka "Hardly Normal") and picked up both the normal edition of World of Warcraft and the Burning Crusade expansion pack. I also got myself a new normal-sized USB keyboard, because the keyboard on the lappie is so damn small and inconvenient. Now all I need to do is figure out a way of getting my flat screen monitor connected up to the lappie, and I'll be just fine. Unfortunately, the flatscreen doesn't have a standard serial port connection, but rather one of those wonderful digital ones (and the lapdog just has a standard serial port connection for an additional monitor), so I have to either wait for Himself to wake up (so I can find out whether he has any of the adaptors available) or I have to find some place that sells female-to-male digital-to-serial adaptors.

This could wind up being rather interesting.

At the moment, I'm waiting for another patch for WoW to download (having had about six different problems with installing Burning Crusade). Unfortunately, it appears my connection has been not so much throttled as restricted to individual, hand-delivered bytes (I'm at 325MB of 713, and it's saying I have about 22 minutes left). This is via ADSL. Yays. Ah well, I've used the download time to catch up on a bit of the housework, so there are clean dishes in the rack, the floor has been swept and the table has been cleared. So life, overall, is good.

I'm turning into a gamer.

After months and months (at least six of them) where I've been away from MMORPGs, I got all tempted yesterday and installed World of Warcraft on the lapdog. I had a 14-day trial account DVD to start with, so it wasn't such a chore. So, install; download; patch, patch, patch; shit, not another fsckin' patch; patch; gawd, they have to run out of patches soon, don't they; patch, patch; let this be the last one; patch; and finally I got to play the game. I am now the proud owner of a female night-elf warrior who has reached level 6 so far. Yay.

If I ever write a post in leet, I would greatly appreciate it if someone could shoot me.

This mostly has to do with my previous two purchases being from the Alchemy range (500mL pump packs, very nice, very economical, last damn near forever). However, all good things come to an end, and this includes the bottle of shampoo. So I had to get some more today.

I discovered it is very difficult to find a shampoo on a standard Australian supermarket store shelf which is just designed for getting one's hair clean. If I'd wanted something special to make my hair more curly, or more straight, or more shiny, or softer, or remove my dandruff, or which smelled good or where the bottle was talking to me (as in "blurb and instructions on the label in first person") I could certainly find that. But all I want at the other end of a hair washing experience is for my hair to be clean, and this is apparently far too pedestrian.

I wound up finding a shampoo and conditioner combo which weren't promising miracles (bottom shelf, very little display space, took three goes to find them), and they'll probably do nicely. But I'm beginning to realise there's apparently a profound disconnect between the way I see the world, and the way the marketing people would like me to see it.

One day, someone is going to come up with a way of recording dreams as they happen for later reference. When that occurs, I shall be a very happy bunny indeed, because I'll be able to get more of my dreams down than just bits like this (direct quote from my writing notebook follows):

Weird plotline from dreams. Can't remember all of it but elements included -

• Person who has to keep their existence a secret


• Characters trying to fit to scripted expectations but failing


• Someone involved in the coverup becoming part of the effort to evade it


• Person being hidden was female


• One of the other characters was male, looked like too many of the seme characters from various yaoi manga (dark hair, serious disposition)


• Person being hidden had some kind of paranormal abilities, appeared to be able to be present many times at same location.

I just wish I could have remembered more of that one. I know what fed into it, more or less - about a half dozen yaoi manga before bed, a day spent playing FF7, and reading two of Laurell K Hamilton's Merry Gentry books in the two or three days beforehand. Problem is, I have no idea how the hells they all got blended together in the back of my head to produce the above, and it annoys the hey hang on a minute out of me.

In other news, my brain has supplied me with about a dozen different scenarios for Fruits Basket sex writing. I have vague outlines for about four of them. I suspect at least one of them is writeable straight up. Watch either this space, or somewhere else.

Well, mostly I've been playing FFVII. I find myself kinda-sorta caught between "rush through the plot at high speed" and "slow down and complete everything" - on the one hand, I sort of know the plot, but I haven't actually seen it in detail for something like ten years. But then again, there's all the side quests, and the things which can only be obtained by using the correct type of chocobo, and all the rest of it. The problem is, I think I did a lot of my level grinding at the wrong end of things - I had Cloud at level 50 before we'd even reached Nibelheim the first time. From the look of things, the game is designed to have a lot of the level grinding done between the end of the first disc and the battle with the Diamond Weapon near Midgar, when the players have a good stock of materia to level up, and a decent assortment of weapons and armour to do it with. My habit of getting a lot of the grinding done early (because I'd rather be able to hit the monsters harder than rush through the plot) means I'm looking at a situation where it doesn't matter what it is I'm attacking, I'm getting piddly little amounts of experience and AP, and the materia aren't levelling up fast enough to suit me.

Yeah, bitch bitch bitch.

In other news, Himself isn't certain whether we'll be able to get finance for the house, so we may well wind up moving. Must remember to invite my brother's ex-wife over to visit the place while we still live here.

Genre: Explicit Yaoi Manga

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 10

Comments:
( Details under the fold )

Went to Supernova (Pop culture expo is how it was billed - what it actually wound up being was sort of a con without the hotels and such) on Sunday, and managed to get hold of the thirteen volumes of "Fruits Basket" I didn't already have. Saw lots of cosplayers (including two different Renos; two Tifas - one original game, one AC; a very good Naruto; and most of Organisation XIII - including Riku!) and enough black clothing to sink a small battleship, and had a lot of fun watching people come and go. Oh, and I managed to get hold of volume 2 of Saiyuki Reload (which I've been looking for for *months*) and himself got me the Fullmetal Alchemist movie. Plus I found the name of a new source for manga, which is always a good thing, given the size of the Australian market (or lack thereof).

(Must remember to update the various wishlists to reflect the new state of the collections).

Spent most of yesterday asleep - my iron levels have apparently been a bit low lately, and this combined with it being winter, and me having a very nice, comfy, cosy bed means it's sometimes difficult to prise myself out at anything approaching a reasonable hour. Today I was aiming for 8am, and managed 9am, which is still better than yesterday's approximately 5pm.

Hmmm... things I want to do today - well, I have to go and get a repeat on my medication filled, and I want to cook something for dinner (rather than having takeaway for the umpteenth time in a row). Probably hamburgers, done jaffle style - hamburger patty cooked up on the stove, along with bacon, onions, and egg, then drop the whole lot into the jaffle-maker, possibly with some beetroot, tomato sauce and pickled cucumber. Maybe even some sliced tomato, although at this time of the year there isn't much flavour in them - might go for semi-dried tomatoes instead. Yeah. That sounds good.

I should know better than to read unknown fanfic when I'm feeling off.

I should know better, because I know perfectly well that my responses to poor word choices are somewhat over the top at the best of times, and when I'm feeling tired, sore, grumpy and bitchy for reasons I can't articulate, it becomes even worse. Yet I persist in doing this to myself.

So, I'm slowly working my way through inappropriate paragraphing, incorrect word choices (how someone managed to muddle "assumed" and "amused" is somewhat beyond my comprehension at the moment), misspellings, poorly placed apostrophes, prose which verges from the palest lavender right the way through brightest heliotrope onward to dark aubergine and occasionally shrieking fuchsia, and all the other wonderful catastrophes of fanfiction which go to prove editors are a godsend, and that Sturgeon was an optimist. So far I haven't started yelling at the screen. But it's only a matter of time.

*sigh*

1) Even if you have the letters in the correct order, it may not be the correct version of the word. For one example, see my prior post regarding "pique", "peak" and "peek".

2) English is a bastard language which has appropriated words from all over the place, so sometimes the tense formations of words vary from the standard pattern. As an example: "grind" or "grinding" is the present tense; future tense is "to grind"; however, the past tense is "ground".

3)"That word, I do not think it means what you think it means." Sometimes, even if the word sounds correct, or looks correct, or shows up as being the correct spelling in your spell check, it still isn't the correct word. My guaranteed "aargh, no no NO!!!" here is "taut" (means "tight") and "taunt" (which means "tease") - the two words aren't interchangeable for each other, and it's annoying when people get them muddled.

A dictionary is useful here. It not only helps you to get the spelling correct (or for those of us who are living in Commonwealth countries with word processors with USAlien spellcheckers, confirm the spelling is correct), it also helps you get the tense correct, or the actual word matched with the meaning you want. My own dictionary of choice is the Concise Oxford English Dictionary - I managed to pick up a copy a few years ago which came with a version of the whole darn book on CD, installable as a program on PC. I've since installed it onto every single PC I've used regularly. I use it when I'm spell-checking documents (it's open along with the word processor, and I double check all the words the spillchucker notifies) and I also use it when I'm not certain whether the word I'm using is the correct one in context - just type the silly thing in, and read the definition.

I appeal to as many fanfiction writers as possible - learn to use a dictionary, find a good one, and use it often. It makes your work so much more pleasant for me to read when I'm not banging my head on the table in frustration about things like "spurned my interest" (no, you wanted "spurred" there) or "taunt muscles" (*small explosion*).

... aaand I piked out at about sunset (5pm-ish). Still, I managed over 24 hours awake, so I guess I did what I was aiming for in spirit, anyway. But yeah, at about 5pm, while I was playing FF12 (so I'd have something to keep the brain ticking over) I was getting messages from my body saying "hey, if the brain wants to stay awake, it's welcome to go for it, but we'm outa here" and messages from the brain saying "y'know, if the body's able to stay up any further, that's great, but I'm knackered". So I crawled off to bed and collapsed and didn't so much as budge for about 7 hours (woke up around midnight because my bladder was screaming at me).

Then I read for a bit (about 4 volumes of "Fruits Basket" worth) and fell asleep again until about half eleven this morning. I'm now wide awake and functional, and possibly back to a vaguely reasonable sleep cycle. Another pot of tea, and I should be firing on all cylinders, and able to figure out what I want to do with my day, such as it is.

Yup, happy winter solstice. And welcome to Meg's biannual madness of trying to remain awake for the full 24 hours of the solstice day.

In this case, I've been up since approximately 3 or 4pm yesterday, and I'm going to have to remain awake until at least 7.16am tomorrow. Yes, I know, I'm crazy. But it's the nice kind of crazy that doesn't lead to me ripping up phone boxes or anything like that, so I figure everyone can live with it. So far I'm up to two cups of coffee, three pots of tea, and counting.

Happy solstice to everyone, and may the next six months prove safe and pleasant.