#my sentence structure is so legible

[cipheramnesia]

The internet purity police and callout culture squads really love to describe their latest sacrificial lamb as "openly" or "violently" or "literally" [some terrible thing]. But it always takes an arcane level of online search engine muck-raking (combined with several transitive layers of equating two very distant concepts) before you can find even the slightest idea of what they're talking about.

Far be it from me to rant against the evolution of language, however in this particular instance I wish I could put those words on the high shelf specifically away from online puritans. Casually hyperbolic use is one thing but when someone wants to raise a lynch mob and ruin a random life, I don't think they deserve the benefits of understanding deliberate misuse of a word for emphasis while also reaping the misery of another person's life through the literal intent.

[familyabolisher]

I don't think I've ever seen anyone say much about loveday before, if the mood strikes you I'd love to hear what makes her compelling to you!

oh god you can really pinpoint how long someone’s been following me based on whether or not they’ve ever seen me (or anyone) say much about loveday. i will try to make my handful of thoughts here brief—a lot of this is somewhat corollary to my fucking massive backlog of takes about cytherea, which i feel is fitting considering we can pretty much only get a sense of ms heptane through what we know about her terrible terrible girlfriend.

i think the main thing i find interesting about loveday heptane is her role as this kind of invisibilised governing structure that, like, scaffolds the discourse of gtn. if the core drive of the book is (as i would argue it to be) gideon “learning” cavalierhood, and by extension us as readers understanding what cavalierhood “means” relative to the discourse of the text, then part of how this process of elucidating cavalierhood-as-subject-position takes place is in this three-way interplay that happens between gideon, loveday, and protesilaus relative to cytherea. put simply, gideon, loveday, and protesilaus can be understood as cytherea’s three cavaliers, and placing them in this equivocal discursive position allows us to draw useful conclusions about how we might understand the nature of cavalierhood, and how that understanding might be informing the wider narrative.

because the narrative focalises gideon as our protagonist, we could argue that she takes primacy within this triad, so perhaps another way of putting it is that everything she does relative to cytherea (and, later, harrow, though i think it’s significant that cytherea acts as a catalysing force towards the creation of that cavalier subject position that drives the book) ought to be examined with reference to a) protesilaus and b) loveday. as i said, all three occupy a discursively equivalent position relative to cytherea—that of the cavalier. so when we see this kind of courtship unfold between cytherea and gideon, and take on the language of grooming, objectification, predation, etc., alongside this process of, like, subjugating her, subduing her into a position whereby cavalierhood becomes a coherent possibility, we can understand one dimension of cavelierhood as a subject position to involve a form of sexual subjugation made somewhat salacious by its being socially taboo. at the same time, protesilaus as functionally cytherea’s cavalier is a dead body being reanimated, wholly at the behest of cytherea’s will, and loveday as cytherea’s cavalier is long dead, mourned, batterised, and made into a symbol of devotional grief (‘cytherea loveday’). when gideon ‘learns’ cavalierhood, she is ‘learning’ how to become the reanimated corpse and the beloved battery and the site of sexual availability. all three are then operating in tandem to make the nature of cavalierhood legible to us.

(i think this is at its most salient in the avulsion scene, which is one of the few moments in the book where we see cytherea make a fairly straightforward reference to loveday with “I’m sorry. We take so much. I’m so sorry.” there’s also this—

She said abruptly, “Why did you want to be a Lyctor?” [...] The older woman was leaning against Protesilaus’s arm. She looked extraordinarily sad, even regretful; when she caught Gideon’s eye, a tiny smile tugged on the corners of her mouth, then drooped again. Eventually, she said: “I didn’t want to die.”

—preempting her much later and more straightforward claim to palamedes that she & loveday went through with the lyctoral process because she “thought it would make me live.” this alongside the suggestion that she looks ‘regretful’ and the attention paid to gideon in a sentence that seems to be covertly about cytherea’s grief imo makes a fairly solid case for reading this exchange as another passing reference to loveday; there’s an emphasis, however covert, placed on cytherea’s grief and guilt in this chapter that hasn’t thus far made itself especially apparent. & it’s significant that these references crop up alongside a scene which has gideon acquiesce to being subjected to a brutal process of batterisation which serves as a fairly efficient metonym for the entire lyctoral process, and arguably by extension the entire state of cavalierhood, and also sees cytherea use language like ‘darling,’ ‘good girl,’ ‘poor baby,’ ‘i’ve got you,’ &c. &c. specifically to facilitate that process; these complex, overlapping networks of sexuality & subjugation & death & grief & lyctorhood are being put to pretty significant work in that chapter.)

re. loveday specifically—i’m really interested as well in the fact that, like, the seventh house seems to have this specifically chivalric culture attached to it (more so than some of the other houses, though it’s seemingly present across the whole internal body of the empire to some extent). we see this in, for instance: cytherea and dulcinea are duchesses when a duchy is a medieval apportioning of land; protesilaus and [presumably] loveday’s title is ‘the knight of rhodes’; dulcinea’s name references don quixote, which examines and parodies the conventions of chivalric literature and culture in spain. gideon and cytherea’s relationship is conducted rather like a courtship between a knight and a lady; though this speaks more to empire-wide social conventions around cavalierhood as a whole, i think it’s interesting that the narrative focalises cytherea (of venus!) when drawing attention to dynamics of love & sexuality within the relevant social order. all this is to say that i think cytherea and thus loveday by extension fit pretty coherently into the chivalric cultural narrative that muir is working from, and i think this gives us a lot of scope for thinking about what the two of them are ‘doing’ wrt gender.

& i think it’s fairly plain that the text is, among other things, interested in interrogating contemporary articulations of ‘lesbian gender’ abstracted through the various lenses that allow for diegetic consistency. what i mean by this is that, for example, we as contemporary readers who attach meaning to ‘butch’ as a descriptor know that gideon is a butch and we are to make sense of her character as such, but that’s not a gender framework that she has available and thus not a meaningful diegetic descriptor; we can’t say that gideon says or does X or Y or Z because of extant cultural norms around butchness, because those cultural norms don’t exist for her. we can, however, notice how the attention paid to rendering her as legibly ‘masculine’ in-text run parallel to (among other things) a particular kind of masculinity articulated in the language of chivalry, knighthood, &c.—which is legibly present in the text as cavalierhood, and is thus explained, historicised, problematised, all while acting as a vector by which we can think about the legibility of butchness in an imperialist social order.

(i feel like a proper reading of what tlt “does” with gender is its own post—real aveheads will remember—suffice it to say that i think the above is part of the fabric from which that discourse unfolds itself.)

i bring this up because i think loveday is something like the ur-text for this specific reading—which is why i’m so interested in her and the force she exerts over the narrative in gtn. most people seem to lean towards reading her as a butch (as a character we ought to understand as a butch &c.), and i would agree; i think it’s significant, however, that we can draw that conclusion based on cytherea’s demeanour/preferences (lol) and a handful of characteristics attributed to her in the very sparing accounts of her that we have in-text. however reliable or otherwise the accounts we have of her might be, i think it’s noteworthy that her lover remembers her as a ‘nice girl [who] died for me,’ clearly agentive in the decision to effectively sacrifice herself for cytherea (“i didn’t want to do it at all [...] she and i thought it would make me live”), memorialised in what to me reads as a symbolic marriage (‘cytherea loveday,’ the taking of the partner’s name—this along with the fact that john misremembers cytherea’s surname as ‘heptane’ and we never find out her functional ‘maiden name’ means that i think my reading of it as a gesture to marital conventions is more than fair), whereas eg. mercy and augustine remember her as ‘looking like she wanted every one of us beaten to death,’ seemingly generally unpleasant and antagonistic. this idea of someone who comes off as aggressive, unfriendly, standoffish to outsiders, but is loving, self-sacrificing, devotional to an excessively servile degree in romantic relationships is very much—not stereotypical, necessarily, but archetypal, and especially archetypal to the ‘chivalrous butch’ that i think muir is employing. add to this the things i said above about the seventh house seeming to operate on a culture of chivalry, her title being that of a knight, the kind of necromancer-cavalier relationship that cytherea solicits from gideon closely resembling a chivalric courtship, and i think there’s a case to be made for loveday as a stand-in for this archetypal ‘chivalrous butch’ that the text then probes and problematises. 

this is interesting to me because i think it allows us to read loveday and her presence in gtn in particular as something of a discursive signifier rather than a fully fleshed-out “character”; i mean, crucially, she’s not fleshed out, she’s entirely subsumed by cytherea! if (and i realise i’m going a little crazy here; blorbo from my autism, &c.) we read the version of cytherea and loveday present as disciples at canaan house as representative of how butchfemme negotiations of gender can be subsumed into an imperialist social ordering via the conditions of chivalry, we can think about loveday then being collapsed into a signifier for a discursive position such that her presence in the text governs how gideon navigates cavalierhood and how we as readers understand and interpret it (cf. how i opened this piece, talking about the gideon-loveday-protesilaus triad), and how by extension the imposition of subjectivity via subjugation eschews the agency of the subject in favour of transforming them into a set of signifiers, symbols, representations, &c. (this is—i have to say it—this is the crux of the argument i make in salolita, and, as we all know, lolita is a huge part of the scaffolding of these books.) it also allows us to read cytherea as we receive her in gtn as a kind of unravelling or destabilising of that signifying dynamic, which we can of course extrapolate onto the destabilisation of the necromancer-cavalier-lyctor thing as a whole that gtn introduces and articulates through her.

and i guess i just—i’m interested in this! i think the gender angle and the subjugation angle are my two preferred ways of approaching these books, and i think it’s pretty easy to eke out some v compelling readings by kind of throwing loveday heptane at the frameworks and seeing what happens.

[muzanswaifu]

I’m sooooo tired of these little kids on this app rn man

They are all being annoying as hell and harassing people, then turning around and saying we are harassing them

Like what? Im sorry did i miss something?

Werent you guys the ones who were calling everyone homophobic for not writing the fics you want then calling everyone slurs?

THEN THEY THREATEN ME?

Wtf are you gonna do??? Ur literally like 13 and I’m a grown ass woman

Yall are saying we dont have lives bc we write fanfics but you guys are out here unable to write and trolling people online… sounds like you guys are the ones without lives

We all have jobs/are attending school full time and writing in our freetime while you guys are out here failing ur classes and trolling people on roblox for fun

Im a pedophile??? I literally told you guys to leave me and the other writers here alone bc we dont wanna talk to you yet you still continue to come back bc you have no life

This is my last time discussing it, i have better things to do and have a life so im no longer entertaining you

And goddamn can you kids learn how to write a legible sentence??? Couldnt even read anything yall wrote bc the sentence structure was all over the place

[emira-addams]

Hazbin Hotel - Carmilla x Rosie - Juliet and Juliet in Hell

Interlude: Ink-Stained Slumbers

Rosie sighed sorrowfully. Again and again, her restless gaze fled from the pages of her book and strayed across the lonely living room to the face of the grandfather clock. Its hands displayed an ungodly time well past midnight, while its heavy ticktocking reverberated unbearably through the darkness that reigned over the house.

The only other sound against the oppressive silence was the turning of the pages of the book, with only the characters from the story to keep Rosie company as she sat alone in the armchair in the living room, waiting for Carmilla to return home. Again, Carmilla hadn't been back home from work for dinner. This was the third time her dinner had gone cold in the fridge, Rosie kept count.

Rosie stifled an insistent yawn. Her patience was about to surrender to her desperate need for sleep.

A week ago, Odette had climbed through the living room window and for the past week, the Carmine house had been in a state of war. Every day for the past seven days, Clara had started setting her alarm clock two hours earlier so that she wouldn't accidentally get caught in the crossfire of the verbal battle between mother and daughter at breakfast. Even Zestial didn't want to voluntarily get caught in between the fronts and had canceled his and Carmilla's weekly tradition for leisurely tea parties. In the presence of Carmilla, Rosie avoided the word Velvette and any subject of the three Vees at all costs. For the last seven days now Odette was not allowed to leave the four walls of her room, except for food, and Carmilla spent long days at work, returning home late every time in the middle of the dark night and locking herself in her study with a pile of paperwork.

Rosie missed Carmilla's warmth under their shared sheets.

Her vision blurred again and again, Rosie blinked hard. Her eyelids threatened to fall shut as she desperately tried to refocus on the plot of her book, but the many words seemed empty to her fogged mind. Eventually the sentence structures disintegrated and the letters melted into a black mass, none of the original lines legible. The black splotches of ink slipped from the pages.

Exhausted from the effort of waiting, Rosie succumbed to her sleepiness. She closed her eyes a second too long and fell asleep sitting in the armchair.

The sound of the front door being opened with a squeak and falling shut with a thud startled Rosie out of her slumber. Drowsy, she heard Carmilla's quick footsteps in the hallway, the sharp clink of angelic steel on cold tiles bouncing back from the high walls. Before Rosie could fully regain her consciousness, she heard the opening and closing of the next door in the distance, the door to Carmilla's study.

"Oh, Milly..." Rosie sighed, her voice thick with sleep. She quickly placed a bookmark between the pages, closed her book and got up from the armchair. This time she would not allow Carmilla to bury herself and her feelings in tears and amidst thousands of towers of paperwork in the darkness of her study. Her beloved Carmilla had an awful habit of abusing her work as an escape in stressful situations, the fight with her daughter surely being one. Then she would spend all her waking hours working, the bleached pages her refuge until exhaustion will finally catch up with her. She would either fall asleep at her desk over her work or try to suppress the fatigue with copious amounts of caffeine until the next morning, when she would again leave the protective solitude of her study at dawn to disappear back to work, a vicious circle.

Rosie knocked gently on the hard wood of the door to Carmilla's study and waited.

No answer.

"Milly?" Rosie whispered worriedly, opening the door. "Oh, my poor Milly..." she gasped as she carefully entered the room. Her heart ached at the sight she found. With her head on her desk, Carmilla slept hunched over ink and paper. Her face was twisted into a grimace and she winced, nightmares evidently plaguing her sleep.

Rosie circled the maze of piles of paper. "Wake up, Milly..." she whispered, gently shaking her shoulder. "My love, are you awake?" Rosie asked softly as Carmilla stirred and raised her head in surprise.

"R-Rosie? Where am I?" Voice hoarse with confusion, Carmilla looked around. Stray and sweaty strands of her snow-white hair hung in her pale face. Groaning, she rubbed her bloodshot eyes.

"At home in your study... You fell asleep over your paperwork," Rosie mumbled. She brushed the irritating strands of hair from her face. Carmilla looked so exhausted, so broken. Her sheer sight made her heart ache.

"Oh..." Carmilla looked at Rosie in surprise, then suddenly stood up from her desk. Her balance wavered precariously. "I really need some coffee..." She massaged her aching head, her whole body trembling.

"You really need some sleep," Rosie objected. "When was the last time you slept in a real bed?" Rosie knew the answer from Carmilla's silence, her lover could barely stand up straight. "Let's get you into bed, okay?"

Carmilla mutely agreed. Rosie gently wrapped her arm around Carmilla's waist and supported her stance. Without any resistance, her lover allowed herself to be dragged into the bedroom by Rosie.

"Sit down," Rosie ordered sternly. Carmilla dutifully perched on the edge of the bed while Rosie fished a fresh pair of pyjamas out of their closet for her. She quickly helped Carmilla change before gently pushing her onto the mattress and covering her up. "Please stay put... I'll be right back," Rosie promised. "I'll quickly make us a cup of tea to calm the nerves..." She pressed a gentle kiss on Carmilla's forehead, then disappeared towards the kitchen, humming some unnamed song.

The smell of freshly brewed chamomile tea filled the bedroom as Rosie entered the room and placed a tray on the bedside table. She quickly slipped under the covers with Carmilla. The cannibal pulled her lover into her arms and handed her her cup of tea as they leaned together against the headboard.

"Thank you." Carmilla kissed Rosie on the cheek. She slowly sipped her hot tea. The warmth crept into her bones, draining the tension from her whole body as Rosie's soft hand crept under her clothes and traced their gentle circles on her back.

Carmilla blinked sleepily, eyeing Rosie up and down skeptically. "Tell me, are you wearing one of my pyjamas?" Carmilla wondered in her utterly weary state.

"Can you blame me?" Rosie shrugged her shoulders. "I've missed your warmth under the sheets all week, your embrace and your sweet scent. You've been too busy with your work to come into bed with me..."

Carmilla cleared her throat. Her ashamed gaze fled into her cup, trying in vain to drown itself in the chamomile tea, avoiding Rosie's. "I'm really sorry..." she whispered.

"I know, Milly..." Rosie cupped her cheeks and locked their eyes into a soft stare. "But there's nothing to apologize for. I'm here, with you, and we'll deal with everything else together when you feel better. All I want is for you to talk to me. Please talk to me, Milly, will you?"

"Yes…" Silent drops of tears crept down Carmilla's cheeks as Rosie's tender fingertips ran gently over her cheekbones and she wiped away her tears again and again. Her hand drew caressing circles over Carmilla's back. Up and down her spine and back and forth between her shoulder blades. "I love you so much," Carmilla murmured half-asleep as Rosie pulled her further into her arms.

"I love you too, Milly, but now you need to try to get some sleep," Rosie whispered as she took the empty cup from Carmilla and placed it back on the tray.

Carmilla stifled a yawn. Exhaustion causing her eyelids to flutter and the last sight before sleep overtook her and she succumbed to a sound slumber was Rosie's loving smile.

"Please," Carmilla begged. Her shallow voice nothing the less than a soft whisper. "Don't let me go."

Rosie shook her head. She brushed strands of Carmilla's snow-white hair from her face affectionately. "I'll stay awake and by your side until the end of the night. Now get some rest, my love."

Chapter 06:

[xochitai]

Was thinking of sapphic Lotura again the other night and ran into the question: would fem!Lotor be butch? [ramble below]

This section is partially inspired by a headcanon [or maybe it was a theory; I can't remember] post I saw on tumblr [which I tried to find to link here but I could not] because canon doesn't give us much to work with when it comes to civillian Galran culture. Gist of the post was sexual dimorphism in Galra and links to gender. So traits like being larger and/or more colorful are perceived as feminine [ex. Zethrid, Kolivan] and being smaller with fewer colors is perceived as masculine [ex. Lotor]. The original post has more detail and expands on how fem-/masc- ulinity tie into Galran society, but back to the point. Assuming fem!Lotor looks the same as canon!Lotor, viewed through this hc/theory, she would be perceived as masc. However, just because someone has fem/masc features doesn't mean they identify with that or want to dress in a way that "matches." So we are back to square one.

There was a drawing made by one of the people who worked on the show that featured the paladins, blade of marmora, and sincline squad at a restaurant[?] in winter. [I could probably look this up and find it to put here but I am lazy]. Lotor is walking in, wearing a beanie and puffy coat. Very typical winter clothes in typical winter colors. Not much to work with here. Next.

For this part, I know I have the pic already on my computer so I'll insert it here:

The mix of greys canon!L wears don't seem to be gendered. Whether dress or tunic/overcoat/leggings combo, there's an even mix of dark and light grey. None of the Galra here wear orange or blue, so can't really do anything with that. Lotor's waist cape does resemble what some of the male Galra are wearing, particularly the ones behind Blaytz on the stairs, but those are an over layer being bound by a belt. Similar shape, different construction. Don't really have anything else to go off of though so I will give 0.5 point to team masc.

In terms of actions, I will not lie to you dear reader, it's been a while since I watched the latter half of the show so my memory is fuzzy. Maybe there is some big thing I missed. I wouldn't know; I missed it. Anyways. Ik it's a bit of a stereotype but Lotor designs and builds things. Would it be so far fetched for Ladytor to be a diy/builder wife? With all her little projects? She says she's gonna renovate the space porch but gets distracted and designs a house for the cat and builds a robot.

I feel like I'm reaching the part where I'm grasping at straws. Clothing analysis can only do so much because Lotor wears ONE OUTFIT FOR HIS ENTIRE ADULT LIFE. Not even death can separate him from that damn armor. But does it matter? Do I need canon approval to draw fem!Lotor in dapper fits?

Deleted a little bit because I started to lose the plot. I guess the conclusion is: data inconclusive. Requires further discussion.

As always, hope this was legible enough. I fixed some spelling errors but that's about it. I'm not going through this again to clean up sentence structure.

+ can't remember how many total rambles i have. not sure if it is time for a ramble tag. i don't think anyone reads them enough to warrant one but idk.

[olderthannetfic]

Do you think tone, or content, matters the most in a fanfic comment?

In my native tongue written language is a lot more formal, and my only two modes in English are really school learned very formal or tumblr learned very informal, and I rely a lot on lowercase and a lack of punctuation for the latter, which I'm aware also makes me less legible.

I pretty much do very lowkey literary analysis in my comments (except i'd obviously never criticize something negatively) so I tend to drift into more formal language than I would prefer to use online. I'm always trying to sound as casual as possible because to me it reads as friendlier, but I struggle doing it organically, I always have to edit myself.

Usually I think it doesn't matter and just send the comments anyway because it's rare enough for me to take the time to actually type it all out and I assume most writers will be pleased I engaged with them and their works at all? But sometimes rereading myself I feel like I deserve a bad grade in language registers and I can see how it makes mw sound standoffish or maybe even almost pedantic and I thought I was trying to say something nice to a writer but maybe I just come across as an asshole.

Are my insecurities just being stupid, or do you think style is as important as content here and I need to make more of an effort? Can a comment come across as offensive or rude when it's literally complimenting you, if someone is bad enough at tone modulation? I really can't tell at all

--

I think content is more important than style.

Could something come across as rude by being formal and stilted? Sure, maybe, but I don't think it's worth worrying about in this context.

But also... if you're worried about style, like 95% of what makes something actually read a certain way to a native speaker is word choice and how complex the sentence structure is. Unconventional punctuation may be what people point to because it's more obvious, but a lot of what they're responding to is someone choosing more everyday words, often with Germanic roots, over more highfallutin ones, often with Latin roots.

[jacqcrisis]

why is it the second I post a fic, my brain starts spiraling and I convince myself Ive actually just posted something so badly written and incomprehensible that I should delete my whole account and never write ever again? why does this happen every fucking time?

i read the damn piece like 30 times. I wrote the damn thing. I know the sentences have structure and the story is able to be parsed. why is it I believe my self-perception is so skewed that i've gaslit myself into thinking the thing I just spent for fucking ever on is legible to normal people and is not, in fact, the offensive ramblings of a squirrel stepping on a keyboard?

the answer is imposter syndrome and severely low confidence but I wish this wasn't a fight every time I post fanfic that only somewhat concludes when someone pops in and says 'hey, this was legible and comprehensive and not the worst thing i've read :)'.

[br1ghtestlight]

forever pissed that my most popular fic on ao3 EVER is literally written so badly 😭😭

not like in a thirteen year old who just learned to write fiction but doesn't quite grasp metaphor way. its BAD. the sentence structure is too awkward and there's a lot of overuse of bigger words and the phrasing is just. unnatural which i know bcuz i still do this now due to weird ocd compulsions but ITS BAAAAD please god why is it so popular. its barely even Legible. it actively pisses me off to read and there's still people telling me in the comments it changed their life...... Its Not Good

[thessalian]

This is a day in which I hate everything.

I was left with almost every single shitty bit of typing on record. Two eleven-minute monstrosities, a dozen or more five-odd minute monstrosities, plus all the ones that nobody else actually likes doing (because the request we made that someone talk to two of The Annoyances so that they'd maybe stop being less annoying went absolutely fucking nowhere). The slightly good news is that we did get all of yesterday's stuff done and at least a little ways into today's typing ... not helped by New Girl, who not only held off on picking up new stuff out of the queue until the scary long stuff was gone and started haphazardly doing individual cases still in the general queue a half-hour before the end of her working day, but also sat on a long-ass prostate report by one of The Annoyances until we'd gone well past its spot in the chronological order, at which point she dropped it back into the main queue so that someone else would do the fucking thing, but never mind. The real issue is that, because there are so many doctors reporting and so relatively few typists typing (and some of them being deliberately slow with shit they shouldn't be slow with, since they're taking so much care to only take easy dictation), the queue is up to nearly 270 cases.

This, as you can probably imagine, has left me in a state of just ... everything can just fuck off. I note that I am being a lot less generous in my dealings with things. Which I'm not going into because vagueposting is bullshit and generally hurtful. But it just means that I am soooooooo far past done and I have no real way of getting back into a state of absolute piss-off.

The stress isn't helping my whole fibro thing, either. It seems that the whole ... well ... *gestures to everything* has put me in such a state of frustration, rage, stress, and underlying misery that it's kicked off a pain flare and a migraine. And I know damn well that tomorrow is going to be worse. By, like, orders of magnitude worse. 270 cases in the queue and I know damn well that at least a few of the doctors are going to keep working until at least 6pm, possibly later, so the queue is going to be worse tomorrow morning. The fact that they start at 8am at the latest when very few of the secretaries start that early doesn't help either. And it being Friday doesn't help because they work weekends. And the "We need to hire someone new" item on our staff meeting agenda kind of vanished into the aether at some point, or possibly it was "We dealt with that by hiring New Girl as a permanent member of staff". That isn't a solution, though, because a) we needed more staff when she was temping and getting her paycheque from our organisation instead of a temp agency does not change that, and b) it's NEW GIRL, and she's a lazy mare on a number of levels and I do not understand why they hired her.

The one tiny shining point in my day ... well, it was sort of a mixed blessing. See, one of The Annoyances is ... a pretty big annoyance on a number of levels. He's a) a junior doctor so not entirely comfortable with the big things he's reporting on, b) not from this country so his accent is heavy and his English sentence structure is ... lacking, and c) somewhat inept at technology so he often ends up in a situation where his headset isn't linking up via Bluetooth to the computer he's using, so his voice always sounds far away and garbled because the in-built mic on the monitor halfway across the room is the only one picking up his dictation. No one likes to do his. I am no exception. The difference is, I can do his, and fairly well. I've dealt with most of those issues for a large percentage of my professional life. I don't like doing it - it's frustrating, it's time-consuming, and it's generally speaking a pain in the arse - but I am pretty good at turning word salad into a legible report or letter.

Now, this particular Annoyance ended the dictation by asking whoever typed it to email him when the report was done. Another few minutes out of my day, but fuck it; fine. So I emailed him. First I got an email saying, "Thanks for that". I figured that was the end of it, but nope! Then I got an email saying, "Oh, wow; I was going to log in to make changes but you wrote what I was trying to say so I don't have to! Thanks!"

I was a little bewildered for a moment ... and then I remembered that the rest of my colleagues (Goblin in particular takes great pride in this) tend to type exactly what is said. No editing as they go, no matter how badly a report needs it. Now, I'm used to being a PA, and to transcribing letters rather than just reports; in a lot of my jobs, I'd have been sacked if I'd ever typed out a letter or report exactly as written. Editing as I go is second nature, because so many doctors need it. Even the ones who have English as a first language are sometimes really bad with sentence structure, never mind those with English as a second or even third or fourth language. So I can't imagine doing anything else. But apparently the other girls are so set on typing only what is said, exactly how it's said, that he has had to ask us to email him when one of his reports are typed so that he can edit the thing. With me, he doesn't have to.

And see, that's why the warm fuzzies are being badly marred by an "uh-oh" feeling. What happens if he decides that I should be the only one that types his stuff? I mean, I do a fair bit of his anyway, but if the response to the few times when someone else types his is, "Lemme go back and edit the whole thing", and the response to me typing it is, "It's cool, I can leave it alone and save some time"... I've had it happen before, where a particular pain in the arse has basically demanded that I be the only one to type their reports and letters. Really don't want to give the girls another excuse to leave me with The Annoyances. Because you know they wouldn't take more of The Annoyances that aren't this guy to compensate.

Okay. I feel a little less like I'm going to murder someone for breathing too loud in my presence (which is good because the kids living in the block of flats are playing on the hill-lawn and there's the kid-shriek noise and it is not helping my head even the tiniest bit). Still miserable as hell, mind you. Somewhat uninspired as to what to do about it, though. Ugh.

[the-everqueen]

for the writing ask: 13, 18, 22, 33?

13. rate your worldbuilding skills from 1 to 10 okay on a scale of "c.s. lewis" to "ursula le guin" i'd say i'm at a solid 5, aka martha wells. i think i pay marginally more attention to place than your standard writer (and "place" here meaning not just geographic detail but the systems that create and shape a sense of "placeness," like economy and social hierarchies). and i'd say i'm thinking a lot more about worldbuilding than most fic writers. how are people making money? what is the timeline? what systems are in place for the world? i don't know that it always translates into the words on the page - i definitely think it influences my choices but how much of that is legible to/resonates with the reader isn't something i can say. so like, LA guard dog has a lot of worldbuilding, which might not be super evident, whereas the gay coworkers fic is very much Vibes, but internally consistent. internal consistency matters to me! and at the same time what i choose to be lazy about varies.

18. first, second, or third person? depends on the context! third person almost always for fics, unless second is doing something rhetorical (there's a lot of potential power in conflating the narrator with the reader, as well as evading name-usage). first person is usually a nope for me in fics, mostly because i suffer from a chronic, debilitating case of He Would Not Fucking Say That.

22. what is it about watching the same two idiots falling in love over and over again? "maybe it will turn out this time"! also my probably autistic ass LOVES clocking similarities and differences between fics, series, authors, etc.

33. give your writing a compliment my writing shows i think a lot about rhythm and cadence. on a sentence level, primarily, though i have an awareness of what this feels like structurally and try to listen to my intuition about number and length of scenes.

[moonfeatherblue]

Readability is (not) overrated

I'm so much better at throwing down entire stories in note form (being ridiculously detailed, well-structured notes, not sparse bullet points) than writing in legible sentences. No matter how many times I tell myself this is just a first draft, the important thing is to keep the story moving, I get so hung up on making every sentence just so, reading them over and over and over... and over. Cue stress palpitations.

But throwing down notes is fun. For me, spewing out wild creativity at top speed, unrestrained by readability, is such a thrill that I can barely type fast enough to keep up. Cue adrenaline shakes. Plus, writing this way, I can actually move forward without feeling increasingly ill over 'does this sound right'.

After reaching a certain point in my current WIP, I thought I'd try writing the rest of the story in this way, hoping it might help, with the plan to go back and refine the resultant glorious mess into a proper first draft. I got the rest of the novel down, slapdash detailed note form style, within a few months.

It took a year to turn those notes into something remotely readable.

I'm still working on the second draft edit another year later.

Clearly, this isn't the solution. I'm not yet sure what any solution would entail, or if there even is one. Maybe six to seven years per book, devastatingly, is just my pace.

Given the number of books and series I have planned... I fear.

[bassds]

Star Lovers Ꝏ: How we got here, and where we’re going  Welcome, all; BassDS here after a long time lurking around in the Undernets of tumblr and Twitter, mulling and contemplating several things I want to do that luckily I’ve gotten the ball rolling on, but it’s now time to focus on the one thing that has been neglected during these past few years, and to give those who don’t know a crash course into what led to the creation of this project:

Star Lovers Ꝏ.

Time for a history lesson. AND pretty much an autopsy, because oh boy, I’m gonna tell you how stupid I was in some of these design choices that took place during the original installments.

The one thing I was notoriously known for in the latter part of the 2000s was my set of stories based within the Mega Man Star Force sub-series of the Mega Man franchise, that being my original creation, Star Lovers, which centered around a small budding romance between the main hero of the games, Geo Stelar; the titular Mega Man in this case, and the heroine/side accomplice Sonia Strumm, also known as Harp Note, who essentially served as the Roll.EXE of Star Force.

So, before we progress any further, I do have a SMALL confession to make.

At one point, for a small and VERY short time, I shipped Geo with the other female character in the series, Luna Platz; but hear me out here; this was a time when it took time to get games released over here between Japan and North American, so info on these games and the story was limited, as you had to wait for people to slowly translate info. On a whim, I saw some art of them and thought they looked cute; that was all.

THEN enters Sonia, and soon more of the game’s story is translated and we get to know more about her, coming to find out she’s dealing with the loss of her mother, just as Geo has spent the previous 3 years lamenting the loss of his father in space; they have relatable backstories with each other that helps them to understand the other, and in the end, Geo and Sonia form a Brotherband; with this being their first for each other, and Geo’s first main interaction with anyone since his father’s supposed death. It really showed just how DEEP the character development in this game was.

With this, my eyes were open to the truth; Geo and Sonia were the shipping successors in this sequel series just as the original Mega Man Battle Network games constantly nudged romantic feelings for Lan Hikari and Mayl Sakurai in the previous series, and it seemed they were bent as hell on repeating that again, and I punched my ticket along for the ride.

With this, a few days after I had beaten the first Star Force game, I wanted to write a small continuation; my own thing, to tide myself and many others over until Star Force 2 released the next year.

This led to the creation of the original Star Lovers story.

And looking back now, UGH, it was so cringe.

I DID NOT know how to write a story properly; sentence structure, paragraphs, all that stuff; for all intents and purposes, I was a goddamn noob at it, despite having done some other failed previous ventures with other series of fiction.

Yet, despite it hardly being coherently legible and having the story that just honestly felt all over the place just to enact a confession from both characters...it proved popular. Today it still stands as one of my most viewed stories on Fanfiction.net; nothing else I’ve done even comes close, apart from a story I did featuring them that wasn’t even a part of Star Lovers at all; but people liked it, and looking back at it, to this day I’m still mystified as to how it even got to that point.

A year later, and Star Force 2 comes out, so naturally it was time to create a sequel story to act as a bridge for the impending release of Star Force 3.

And this is when things REALLY started going off the rails.

The story of Star Lovers 2 took the postgame from Star Force 2 and I turned it into my own thing...though in hindsight there were MANY choices I regret so damn much…

Geo and Sonia having alternate counterparts that went by their Japanese names, calling Rogue, Solo’s EM wave form who was introduced in Star Force 2 by his Japanese name Burai, because I thought it sounded cooler...and this was around the time I found Super Sentai, and delving into Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, that had a character named Burai, but the most CRINGEIEST thing I could do...was be influenced by another series I still enjoy to this day; Digimon, and implement a character that had an EM Wave Parter who was a reformatted Omnimon...and I… Sometimes I really hate my younger, inexperienced and impressionable self for stupid stuff like this; incorporating something that had absolutely zero business being a part of it…

It’s not the first time I’ve hated my past self for stupid shit either. Sold my entire Pokemon Gen 3 collection because I was scared using an Action Replay corrupted the cart’s code and could be detected by Nintendo and I’d get banned even if I started a new game, and LOOK how much those things go for nowadays...I still need to rebuy them, and it’s going to kill my wallet.

Anyway, let’s get back on track, shall we?

This is where the first seeds for Star Lovers Ꝏ were planted, a story originally titled Star Lovers R; a short lived idea that was meant to be a more...proper rewrite of the original story, but that got quickly abandoned by the release of Star Force 3, and in turn, Star Lovers 3: Crimson Advent.

Now, in hindsight, my writing had gotten a bit better at this point; I can say I was improving, for what it was, Star Lovers 3 was a story that didn’t really deviate from the norms of the Star Force games; the plot was a bit decent, characters were okay. It was fine. Just fine.

At this point, the last sort of presence Star Force had in general was a small crossover in Mega Man Battle Network: Operation Star Force, which involved Geo going back through time to save Sonia by a newly created Net Navi called ClockMan, and winding up right in the middle of the original Battle Network; which is all OSS was: a small Battle Network 1 update.

And it never left Japan.

After the release of the Classic Series entry, Mega Man 10...Mega Man as a whole just went into a LONG hibernation; Star Force in total sold less than Battle Network in general, and as we know now that we didn’t back in 2011, there WAS a Star Force 4 in pre-development, but was ultimately canceled upon the low sales numbers of Star Force and the dismal amount OSS sold.

Not knowing if a Star Force 4 would happen or not, it was time to take things into my own hands and give a definitive end to my story and Star Force in general.

The results were Star Lovers: Black Hole Crisis, and Star Lovers 4.

And ONCE AGAIN, the faults that plagued Star Lovers 2 came back in full force, as by this time, I was HEAVILY immersed with Kingdom Hearts, so much so that for the villains of both stories, I unapologetically based them off Organization XIII; a faction of traitors ala Chain of Memories in Black Hole Crisis, the main villain using the common X in his name except twice, because you know, for good measure; don’t want to make it TOO apparent, and you know what, let’s throw in Geo and Sonia’s time traveling son to help his parents defeat this evil and save his future from being ruined.

Now gee...where have we seen THAT before? What a mystery…

The end of Star Lovers 4 served as an end on two fronts; the first being the end to the original story I had written and expanded upon 3 years prior, and a personal end on my side of things as I was finishing high school, and it was time to start adulting.

But during the last couple months of high school, the idea to redo my original story, and now possibly the others re-emerged in the form of the Star Lovers Final Mix series…

See that? That’s the Kingdom Hearts influence trying to rear itself into my works again.

Needless to say, that idea didn’t last long, as a more, ambitious idea soon came about: I wanted to tell a coherent and exciting story that made sense, that took place in the reality of the series it was based on, while also taking my own creative liberties to flesh out the story.

This led to the creation of Shooting Star Lovers; the precursor to what would eventually evolve into Star Lovers Ꝏ.

Between 2011 and 2013, some decent progress was made on Shooting Star Lovers; but it met an unfortunate end due to a multitude of things. The first was, seeing as I was out of high school; I was working now, so that meant most of my free time was gone, seeing as how I mostly wrote the stories while at certain periods during the school day.

The second was an unfortunate one. In early 2013, my grandmother who I was living with was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and was given only six months left to live. Needless to say, it was hard to want to do anything productive watching her go through that before finally passing that following November. From there, I just lost interest, wanted to do different things to get over, which led to me attempting many times to become a Youtuber focusing in Let’s Plays, which lasted a while, until I burned myself out and stopped.

But the idea of reinvigorating Star Lovers as a completely new story; one that I wanted to serve as a true end to Star Force since the series was presumably dead by this point; that seed was still in my head, so while Shooting Star Lovers got too close to the sun and like Icarus, lost its wings; it’s failure set the stage for what would soon become Star Lovers Ꝏ.

I wanted to plan every detail out, make sure I followed the canonicity of Star Force; use them to my advantage to craft the story I felt those that were still waiting around for something at all from me deserved.

Part 1: Beginnings was the first act to a planned total of five overarching and interconnected stories in my plans, and was published in July 2020, right when the world was deep in the COVID-19 pandemic.

It would receive two more updates in 2021 before being put on the backburner once again, as I wanted to focus on other aims, mainly attempted to amass the equipment I would need to attempt being a streamer; but Star Lovers Ꝏ was only merely resting, though I had no idea when I would get back to it; but the roadmap of the story was still laid out within my mind. I KNEW what I wanted to do with it, I just got sidetracked by other ventures.

Then, a realization hit in early 2022, when I abruptly lost my mother, and I’ll admit, it did have me depressed for a good long while. It made me mull over the choices I had made in life to that point, and it made one thing vitally clear to me.

I don’t know when my time is coming. It could happen tomorrow, or even 15 years from now; it can happen on a whim just like that.

But I know that if that was every to happen, I would not be able to rest in peace knowing something I worked so hard to formula in my mind, what I considered to be my magnum opus that no one else would know about; I REFUSED the notion of letting Star Lovers Ꝏ be incomplete.

And now, that brings me to today, and I’m glad to say that after a year, Star Lovers Ꝏ IS back in production, with a new chapter just having been recently release, and another on the way.

No one wants to leave the world with unfinished business...and I’ll be damned if I fall into that same category.

So for all those who enjoyed my works before, seen the false starts I had attempted, those who share the same love for this ship between Geo and Sonia as I do, one way or another, it WILL see a conclusive end, and it will be on my terms as my best work of art.

Unless something happens to me, in which case I really am fucked.

But those of you that I have piqued your interest or reinvigorated your excitement for this project; join me, and let’s see this through to the end. To Star Lovers Ꝏ https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13635841/1/Star-Lovers-%EA%9D%8E-Part-1-Beginnings

[arwamachine]

For the ask: 6, 12, and 22! Love your work!

Thank you for the aaaaask!!

6. do you have any kind of consistent writing schedule or just hoping for the best?

I'm incredibly fortunate to have weekday evenings free, so I usually get my writing done then. I try to write some words in some project at least once a day

12. do you ever have trouble focusing on writing? how do you get around that? 

I've definitely had some days where my attention span really isn't playing along. I'll sometimes set one of those distraction timers that keeps me off certain website (hellsite included), and even though I've learned that listening to classical music shaves off the edge of the inattention, I rarely use it. I just try to tell myself that some days aren't as productive as others but it all balances out in the end ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think the trick is to learn what works for you and your brain, but ultimately not to force it. Putting too much pressure on performance is a sure-fire way to get the yips

22. describe your writing process from scratch to finish.

Ohhhh boy...you asked for it. I'm going to put this below the cut, because it is involved 😅

(remember how I said I'm neurotic? Yeaaaahhh...)

1. Splat. I word-vomit an idea into my Notes app, usually in a single disjointed paragraph. Notes to myself, character descriptions, plot-points, and possible lines of prose are all muddled together, sometimes within the same sentence. Some ideas never make it past this stage, some hang out in this stage for months before getting picked up and transformed into a real boy, some get picked up immediately. You never know which it'll be. That's the beauty of the Splat

2. Murder board. I generate something that can be called an outline in the roughest of possible definitions. This has a general plot structure (although not necessarily in order) mixed in with character descriptions, any research I have done on the story (with reference links included...learned that the hard way), various ideas I have, and whole paragraphs of prose that get written out whenever they come to me. Picture the crazed Charlie Day string-and-pictures conspiracy meme, just with words. As soon as this document contains both a beginning and an ending to the story somewhere in its sprawling notes, I start writing.

3. Actual legible outline. Once my murder board exceeds 30 pages and is near impossible to wade through, I create an actual outline. Usually I have written like half of the story at this point. This outline is basically a distilled version of the murder board, with single-sentence bulletpoints of what happens in each scene. Everything is in order and nothing hurts. I rely heavily on both this outline and whatever hasn't been used from the murder board until the first-first draft is written.

4. First-first draft. The point of this draft is to get the general events of the story onto the page. The first-first draft is complete when I have something like a beginning, middle, and end written. I don't allow myself to get bogged down with research, naming characters, finding perfect sentences/words, connective tissue (I call this "A to B"), or any scenes that are throwing me for a loop. If I find myself getting stuck on something, I make myself a note and move on.

5. Second-first draft. Here, I go back through the first-first draft and curse myself for not writing all the parts that I didn't write. I do the research I ignored, write the difficult scenes that threw me for a loop, figure out all my A to Bs, and name the goddamn antagonist. The point of the second-first draft is to get 100% of the words on the page.

6. Set it and forget it. I do not touch the story for a specific length of time, which is determined by the length of the work. Shorter pieces have a set-and-forget of about two weeks. Longer works are set-and-forget for a month or more.

7. Come to Jesus. After the predetermined length of time, I pick the story back up and re-read it. Is it actually good? Does it make sense like I think it does? Did I use the word "whole" 17 times in one paragraph? And--more to the point--is it suitable for other people's eyeballs?

8. Other eyeballs. If this is fic, here is where I'll send to beta if I'm using one (I tend to only get longer fics beta'd). If this is professional writing, I send it out to folks in my life whose opinion I trust. I receive feedback and make additional edits accordingly.

9. Tinkering. I do another full review before step 10, usually with the help of a text-to-speech app so I can hear how it sounds (this also helps identify some typos). If this is a fic (single chapter), I do one final read-through before posting. If it is a multi-chapter fic, I do a read-through of each chapter the week before it posts.

10. Fly, my pretties! It this is a fic, it gets posted. If it is professional writing, it goes Out. Either way, may god have mercy on its soul.

11. Immediately discover a typo.

[leam1983]

Not autistic, but I've had learning disabilities in the past. I fully understand that struggle.

Math is... basically my gorgon. My bugbear. Math just ain't mathin' for me. French, English, composition; even programming - that I can do. If numbers come out, out comes the calculator. I'm saying this because I needed years of remedial education, and needed educators to realize that the standard, textbook-grade way of delivering math concepts just didn't work for me.

In a sense, I was a program running and most adults spent years trying to brute-force me. That gave me anxiety attacks on evenings before math classes, flashbacks, verbal abuse from educators that couldn't handle me - and tears. Tears aplenty, like in the comic.

Up until someone had the balls to basically look at my case and go "Wait, what if we zigged instead of zagged?" I'm simplifying, but that's basically it. It took a diagnosis from a specialist in neuro-psychology and an afternoon with the first decent math teacher I'd ever know for all the morons from the years prior to think: "This might sound weird, but what if it weren't his fault, actually?"

Turns out you couldn't just unpack Algebra in my face in three sittings and expect me to be solving variable equations two weeks later. I needed to use similes and scenarios to sort of simulate and roleplay my way into Algebra, so that I'd get to develop my own sense of understanding of the concept.

What did it for me was a conjunction of two things, namely:

realizing that Math is, effectively following the same logic as Grammar. It's entirely arbitrary, and holds itself together purely thanks to the general consensus that Numbers Work in a Specific Way.

realizing that Math is, obviously, very close to programming, which itself borrows a lot from Grammar in its structure.

I approach Math as a language, and not as lump sums moving around. It's why I can do quick multiplications in my mind not because I'm computing something, but because I intuited that the inner logic of math demands that 9x3 equals 27; the same way a sentence comes with certain requirements to be legible. All thanks to consensus, or the general rule of what looks sensible and practical.

All of that, and some idiots still had the nerve to ask if I'd been "fixed", after getting my GED six months on the coattails of my then-honorary High School degree. You're never fixed, when you have a learning disability, just like autistics can't be forced into behaving like neurotypicals. Fuck, I pull panic attacks when my accountant asks me to put a few things together before Tax Season! I'm serviceable at Math, now - doesn't mean I like it!

The sad part is that nobody of any condition can just stand up for themselves and say "look, this thing you're trying out with me isn't working". Trying to wave a red flag never works; the normies always end up thinking you're trying to excuse laziness or reticence.

an experience

[spock-smokes-weed]

My friend in my Japanese class tried so hard to tell me a sentence I wrote was wrong because you can’t “go to shopping” (かいものにいきました。)

But I kept insisting “but you can ‘go shopping’ so what’s wrong with it 😭”

I finally called sensei over and she was like “‘go to shopping’ does make sense. Japanese is just like that.” and I felt so proud that I had written something legible cus I’m always inside my head about sentence structure.

[thessalian]

Thess vs English Grammar

Ah, back to work. Not exactly the high point of my life, but it’s something to do, I guess. My increased hours are starting to tell, honestly; we’re doing way better than we have been in terms of backlog. Then again, this is a difficult time to use as a gauge for that because of the commonality of taking time off around the Easter weekend. Also I have a feeling that things like doctors’ strikes are probably going to have an effect on our workload. If doctors are striking, they’re not sending people for biopsies, after all.

Anyway, work got done - I still seem to end up with all the long complicated bullshit but that was ... probably less deliberate than usual. Probably. Still, I don’t feel the least bit bad about dumping ten short ones back into the queue fifteen minutes before the end of my shift because I hadn’t realised I had two eight-minute long bits of dictation and a half-dozen more around the 4-5 minute mark in my queue with an hour and a half to go before shift end. I might have been able to handle the shorter ones if the longer ones hadn’t been the ones who skip around in the dictation (the ones who start with the block key should go die in a fire, especially when they add a note mid block-key that should go in the main report, so I have to reorder the whole damn thing so it makes a damn bit of sense) or make corrections at the end for a mistake made in the middle of the document. I mean, I can understand it sometimes, but we’re talking about doubling one of the measurements for a lesion and flagging up that it’s in one more slice of specimen than originally stated; how do you not notice that when you’re slicing the damn thing?

Sentence structure is also a bugbear. I don’t say anything because I don’t see most of these people face-to-face anyway and English isn’t their first language in most cases, but ... simple rule when you’re talking about multiple things and giving the measurement of one is that you put the measurement immediately after the thing that has those measurements. If you say that, for instance, there’s a lesion near a duct margin, and the lesion measures 5mm diameter, it makes sense to say “a lesion measuring 5mm diameter was seen near the duct margin” instead of “a lesion is seen near the duct margin measuring 5mm diameter”. How is anyone supposed to know that you’re not giving the measurement of the duct margin if you do it that way? It’s the ones whose first language is English that astound me; I thought that was pretty standard for sentence structure, making sure that you make very clear what that modifier - size or shape or colour - is actually modifying. Don’t even get me started on less numeric modifiers. I could go on all day and I don’t feel like it right now. Suffice to say that after 25 years of medical secretarial work, it has become very clear to me that even the medical professionals whose first language is English forget their basic English grammar rules immediately after their GCSEs. (They also forget how to do legible handwriting. I mean, I’m used to most scrawl now, but they continue to challenge me.)

Not a great time in general, honestly. The pollen count is through the fucking stratosphere at the moment, and not even my one-a-day antihistamine is helping that much. Oh, and I had to give up on even looking at the news when I took a peek and found that this new “school guidance” that obliges schools to out trans kids to their parents is also going to allow teachers to deadname and misgender their students, even if the parent knows and approves. Also the guys in the flat opposite mine - the ones who are apparently really into weed - are having their windows replaced (by the same chaps who did the ones here and in flat 13, in point of fact; I waved hi when I went to check the post this morning) and it’s ... noisy. And they’re not done yet. I wish the neighbours had slipped a note under my door warning me and apologising for the noise, y’know. Then again, I’m not sure if we did that for them when the windows were getting replaced here, but I take no responsibility for that; I had like an evening’s notice and I was not about to knock on someone’s door at 10:30pm about it. It’s not my fault my stepfather didn’t give me any warning that I could pass along.

Still, there are high points to just about everything, and as messed up as my life can sometimes be, it’s no different. This season’s planting is sprouting nicely, for one thing. My dill and coriander / cilantro are starting to show their adult leaves, and I think my black-eyed Susans and marigolds are budding. I say I think because I’ve never seen those kinds of things in anything but full bloom before. I think that’s been the best part of growing my own stuff from seed - learning things like ... well, the fact that these things have baby leaves. Baby plants are just cute, in my view.

It’s not the pet rats I will have someday, when and if this flat ever gets properly renovated and I can settle into it without the horrible carpet, painful plumbing, horrific light fixtures and depressing peach walls ... but it’ll do.

Also there was dinner, and meds, and now I will do video games. I’ve done all the tense parts of DREDGE and am just going for various achievements and pursuits before I hand over the last relic and ... well, whatever happens after that, because I cannot imagine that it will be anything good from the clues I’ve been picking up. Which is what I’ll do if I decide I want and need Zen ... or possibly to kill time while I wait for the water to heat for a bath (yeah, we’re back on the idiotic “switch on the day boost for an hour if you want hot water at all” thing, this time with added “and there’s no shower pump so it’s baths only no matter how much getting into and out of one hurts”). Because my other option is Total War: Warhammer III, which was thrown at my head last night, and I probably want to make sure I have a good long time to poke around in that one without interruptions.

...Okay, there are a lot of other options. But ... you know. Thrown at my head. And I should check and see whether or not I should whinge about having to buy more DLC when the top three Must Have items on my wish list come out in May. Then again, I’m working an extra five hours a week now; surely at least one month of that extra can go to “a little extra fun money”, right?

I do have other plans for May. Like, I’ve discovered that making gluten-free bread at home is actually really easy because it does not require kneading, so I am going to bake gluten-free bread in the hopes that it will be better than store-bought gluten-free bread. I’m also going to expand my Indian cuisine repertoire and try tandoori chicken (which used to be the only thing I’d order at Indian restaurants when I was a kid ... and oddly enough, I haven’t had it since I was a kid), and possibly cabbage rolls - another one I want to see if I can do well because it was Mum’s favourite when I was a kid and I’d like to cook them for her. And while I should learn to make Japanese curry roux on my own someday, I should probably start with store-bought if I want to try this instant pot Japanese curry. Of course, that took some Googling to find some gluten-free Japanese curry roux, but I did it, and that’s what counts. Also even found some gluten-free panko - apparently regular gluten-free breadcrumbs will do for chicken katsu but c’mon; might as well do it right.

...Hmm. I wonder.

Oh. Hey. I just found a gluten-free tempura recipe.

Heeeeeeeeeeheeheeheeheehee.