( That this comes across as a taaad too sexual. )

First drafts suxxor. Furthermore, I need to choose/write a short story for my coursework by Monday and I still haven't a clue, I have a 1.5k word essay due in on Wednesday which I'm finding hard to motivate myself towards simply because it's so ridiculously short, and I want to find/write a few stand-alone pieces to submit for publication in the Nottingham creative writing volume. So, erm, instead of any of that I'm writing more tFoS, buying Doctor Who/Torchwood themes and making myself more Merlin avatars. Obsifail.

So, my camera is prolly worse than my phone's camera, but I care not! Observe the glory that is my desk!



Fairylights, speakers, keyboard and mouse ALL GLOW AS ONE. All hail. ALL HAIL.

...Just flipped back to the tab I was screenshotting in and found this.



Hee.

So... New Merlin episode, The Lady of the Lake, has me conflicted. On one hand, it was painfully predictable. On the plus side, the interaction between Merlin and the original members of the cast was awesome. Specifically...

( I'm in FIGHTING SHAPE. )

( I'm sure there's a logical explanation for this... )

( Merlin, what a man does in his spare time... )

( FLUFF. )

So, yeah. Screw it. The plot may have been predictable and the romance rushed, but these little moments made me love this episode nearly as much as the really gooooood episodes leading up to it. Gogo series two! I AM BUYING YOU FO'SHO, BITCH.

So, I just installed Windows 7. It was a quick and painless process, as OS installation goes, and I have noticed a marked improvement in performance (from 40-50fps in WoW to 65+; Dragon Age can run without major slowdown at max graphics; it starts up incredibly quickly; and my crappy wireless connection appears to have been fixed somewhat).

My only problem with it is that... Vista was prettier. I know, wut? Vista does something better? But... it does. I've spent some time trying to make Windows 7 look as good, but it has a number of retarded changes I just don't understand.

Firstly. Why is the title bar of a window still semi-transparent when that window is maximised? Similarly, why is the task bar semi-translucent at all? Especially when a window is maximised? Seeing the top of Arthur's head and a few rings of chainmail at the top and bottom of my screen is annoying.

Secondly, taskbar grouping options are retarded. "Never combine", "Combine when taskbar is full", "Always combine, hide labels." Are we possibly missing "Always combine, show labels" here? I am a lazy computer user, I dun want items on my taskbar reduced to a tiny icon I have to be intelligent to click on, but I would like my taskbar tidy. Bah.

Thirdly, Messenger no longer goes into the system tray in the bottom right hand corner. This is simply down to preference, but, eh, that's where it should be damnit.

Being pedantic, I've been messing with everything trying to cure these three ailments. I found that setting Messenger's combatability to Windows Vista fixed the third complete nice and easy but have yet to fix taskbar grouping. When combatting mindless transparency, however, I stumbled across a program called Taskbar Texturiser... and it let me keep my taskbar opaque. Not only that, though. It let me do ( this... )
It's probably the most despicably girly look I've ever allowed my computer to sport, buy holy shit. I love it. Some poor, repressed six-year-old inside me actually caused me to squee when I made it happen. If nothing else, I'm defintely keeping it like this until Simon sees it, if only to horrify him. xD

EDIT: ( Dragon Age is sexy on max everything. )

So, erm, yeah, I went onto Steam and may have ended up buying Dragon Age: Origins. Thus far, it's extremely awesome. I am an exiled dwarf warrior princess running around hacking things to bits with a sword and a dagger. I am amused.

The climax of The Waters of Mars in one line: I AM GODLIK- owaitno, my bad.

The actual scene was roughly as long as that sentence takes to read.

*bitter*

Stupid scene in tFoS tripping me up as much as stupid scene in Plague muttergrumblegah. This time I need to describe a lake that's frozen about a foot thick across the top, only for the water to be drained out about two metres underneath, causing the middle to fall in. With the style I use for tFoS, this is INFINITELY more difficult than it would be in my old Raven style. -.-

Oh well. I think the chapter I wrote for a few scenes later works well enough.

( Calysia verges on civil...? )

Additionally.

SHUT OFF YOUR FUCKING MUSIC SO I CAN WRITE, FOR GOD'S SAKE. I can't think with that dance shit on in the background. Jesus. Silence just doesn't exist here.

I've done sweet FA today. I've tried to write and found it impossible; I've tried to order uni stuff online and had Amazon spaz out at me; I tried to wake up and that just didn't happen until eleven. Ended up reading webcomics and being annoyed with myself.

On the plus side, I've been enjoying reading Mortipede's new piece about an egotistical sniper. He wrote it after reading That Flight of Sparrows. I like the idea of being inspiring. xD

...Still pissed off with myself. Still pissed off.

I played a bit of WoW earlier, anyway. The paladin I rolled to play with WoW_ladies is coming along alright; her gear's good enough that I four-manned RFK with a PuGed group of mage, two hunters and me. And no, the hunters didn't tank with their pets so I could heal, I tanked and healed. No one died, and we even did the escort event. It was kinda crazy. Her gear's all blues save for two remaining greenies, anyway, and she's ret-specced so she kicks arse. The economy on Saurfang-EU is brutal to rerolls, though. I made nearly 30g selling the items I made while levelling up jewelcrafting... then found myself faced with glyph prices of 15-20g. Just ouch.

My account is still set to run out in seventeen days. I've mixed feelings about it. I'm not playing much at all, but I really enjoy it when I do play. Cannae decide whether that's worth paying a monthly subscription for. ._.;

Ah well. At least I managed to get over my hatred of belves before quitting. Allé's scrawny but with ATTITUDE YO.

DBZ revamped for its anniversary? HOLY CRAP.



I am in love, even if the style is only like that for the credits. T_T They're cutting bits out and fixing the colours and such... apparently the story will much more closely follow the manga, resulting in faster pace. NO MORE STRAINING SCENES. Woopwoop.

EDIT:

I forgot to say. Merlin was awesome last night, if a tad predictable. Arthur is ttly pussywhipped by Gwen, Imeanreally. The whole thing was utterly eclipsed by the trailer for next week's episode, though. I cannot wait five days for that. I cannot!

...But that would probably make me gay.

In all srs though, Act left me a buttload of constructive crit on Plague just after I had a few days where I'd lost all inspiration for it... and suddenly I just wanna write and write. o.o Actually going over my work and picking at the flaws she'd pointed out was highly therapeutic. I've gotta train myself so I can more easily find them on my own; at the moment I'm too easy on myself.

Anyway, at the moment I'm mostly surprised that I don't have a monster headache. We went out last night to Pizza Express (again, because it's relatively cheap and O SO TASTY), then to Wetherspoon's (STICKY TOFFEE PUDDING) and then to the Pit and Pendulum, where people bought me birthday drinks. :3 Free alcohol is so much better than its expensive counterpart. Of course I chose cheaper ones because I hate leaching, but Tom was all "it's your birthday! IMMA GETTING YOU COCKTAILS!" He ended up buying me two pitchers of the Pit's incredible cocktails - they have a list of cocktails entitled the Seven Deadly Sins and he bought me pride and greed, which were incredibly nyommy. We shared those. I was very proud of my hormones; there was no weirdness when we were both drinking at the same time through straws, even though our cheeks were practically touching.

Tom was an absolute star, anyhow. He organised everything last night, striding on ahead to find us tables as we moved from pub to pub, going into town early to book a table at the restaurant, getting everyone to sing happy birthday... I love him. xD He made my night fo'sho.

Of course, my lecturer is a dicksneeze so the only Saturday workshop I have all year is today, the day after my birthday. I need to be setting off in fifteen minutes if I want to make it there in time. 'S starting at ten and going on 'till four, dear lord. I'm going to be late fo'sho, not because I desperately wanted to escape some of those six hours but because I need to print and Tom has the only printer I know of that still works. I'm just gonna wait for him to wake up. ^^;

...when I realise I'm such a kid.

"The terrible wind tries his breathing."

In 9,606 words, Raven left Malmarsh in a fit of fury, had a dream in a forest and met an injured Polienix.

In 7,379 words, Calysia bandaged a stranger's wounds, ranted about life, was summoned before a board of unfit governors, ordered on a dangerous mission, walked roughly thirty miles to a harbour, bartered passage to the war zone after her comrade pissed on their original vessel and annoyed the captain, was horribly seasick, had a minor breakdown upon realising how close she was to real combat, crossed into neutral territory, found it was actually enemy territory, made camp in a tree and went to fetch some water, all the while bitching and manipulating the narrative to make her companion look bad.

...:D

So I've always been a huge fan of mixing description in with action. "What is this?" I used to cry when I was a frequent reviewer on SPPf. "Three whole sentences of nothing but description? Add some action and work in the surroundings through that!" Because yes, I did get that pedantic.

Woe is me when I found I had done just as I always preached for a short underwater fight between Tziir, Siira and seven Anorith, only for it to fail to give a strong sense of just what they were fighting over at all. Obsid sucks fo'sho. For the first time ever, I just edited something in a way that gave a pause from the action to convey details.

The Kabutops' graveyard had nothing to do with gravestones or burial. In a natural basin in the seabed, rank upon rank of their corpses floated in slack, weightless suspension, tethered with braided seaweed. Some had decayed to nothing more than empty shells years ago, their hollow helms nodding in the current with the last ghostly curls of membrane blooming from their eye sockets. Those closest to the shore were victims of the plague: over fifty corpses all dead for less than a month, all perfect feeding places for every hungry sea creature from Remoraid to Krabby. What rigidity their remaining flesh provided for their limbs failed to keep them still in the face of hundreds of burrowing jaws; the newest dead jerked and danced in the water like poorly manipulated puppets.

The perfect hiding place, Tziir realised with disgust, and the perfect place to drag Tmiriin Jakinzaa. No self-respecting Kabutops could enter the Kiteraan save to tether new dead; its sanctity was one of the few unspoken rules never to have been questioned in living memory. To plunge in there with violence in mind was unthinkable.

On a side note, I notice I do a lot more telling when I'm writing Plague than in other third person pieces. I'm wondering vaguely if it's a result of Calysia's habit of thrusting things down the reader's throat as facts. When I'm writing as her I quite frequently have a bit of action, a pause for her to issue a bitchy statement and back it up with her usual tenuous logic, then back to the action again. Hohum.

EDIT: My journal style does funkyawesome stuff with the blockquote tag. Shi'damn.

Freshers, if I can see a whole inch of the darker fabric at the top of your tights, YOUR SKIRT IS A BELT. Christ.

So I spent my lecture today feeling particularly worked up and emotional because my lecturer demanded that we write from personal experience and, instead of quickly coming up with an elaborate fabrication like I usually do, I actually gave it a shot. As a result I completely ruined a good memory for myself when she asked me to try and write it from the other person's point of view in first person. Just ugh.

Then I got back and this made me go huh:

( wuh )
I've never seen that graph so distorted before. I spent a good few minutes confused (which handily moved my mind away from the uncool of my lecture) before I realised it's cause I updated That Flight of Sparrows... and people who clicked on it actually read it through. Usually The chapter specific list has fourteen or so hits for chapter one, then none down to the most recent entries, where I suppose the readers that are actually following along as I update create the numbers. Instead I didn't have a single 0. I'm all wut. People actually liked it enough to read it through? Awesome! Of course, there were plenty of people who read the first chapter and hit the back button, but shi'damn! I'm psyched there were some that kept going.

To top off this nice getting-home-after-nasty-lecture cake... Ben just came through with a handful of comics and was all "I think you'll like these!" so now I'm just plain feeling loved. Hoo.<3

EDIT: ( IT'S GETTING CRAZIER )

Ugh. Barely slept last night. I kept having nightmares. At one point I had such a bad one that I legged it out of my room and hid in the kitchen, apparently waking everyone else as they came through one by one to see if I was okay. I hate my imagination sometimes.

Been writing That Flight of Sparrows for NaNoWriMo thus far. The chapters are so short that I'm going to have to put out two a day to keep on track, but hopefully I'll be okay. I can come back and tear them up and fix them later, after all. Having found a load of files I dun want to lose again, I made a community to post them into, anyway, along with everything else. Reading stuff I wrote in 2003 is kinda fun.

Having Arthur as my avatar is also rather fun. Rawr, sir. Rawr.

I've been such a drearypants. For flavour, here be the fruits (hurhur) of our Halloween labour:

( PUMPKINS )

This was my first time carving a pumpkin since I left the States and Tom's first ever. It was fun. I'll post some photos of 'em illuminated when we actually have some candles. /misses Halloween entirely