Oh god, I've got the most urgent bug to write something, specifically fanfic. I've been writing more than usual lately already, having finally gotten back into roleplaying with my fiancée and our mutual friend from work, but no one ever...well, reads it. And I can't control all the characters, and sometimes, my focus on style is strong enough that I'd like to be able to. xD

Only thing is, I'm not terribly invested in most fandoms, and my main pairings don't really...exist in fandom anyway seeing as they're from panfandom/multi-fandom RPs. ...Using controversial characters hello, RPF mixed with fandom characters.

That and the Beatlesslash comms tend to have rather boring pieces posted to them most of the time, and I get the impression that fandom is largely girls under the age of 16, somehow.


Anyone in my circle/outside of it who managed to somehow find this entry: are there active fanfic/writing communities on DW? I'd like to stay here rather than migrate to LJ to post everything, but I suppose I could always just cross-post back to here anyway...

Also, anyone who I share a fandom with (I have an incomplete list in my interests on my profile) feel free to prompt me for a fic/ficlet, I need to get in the groove. xD If you're not sure I'm familiar with a fandom go ahead and ask!

I feel like it's been a while since I posted, and it's due mostly to me being too scatter-brained most of the time to feel like composing words into appropriate sentences to make an entry. They're either too whiney or too pointless, and I feel like I should be using my blogging space to be say...reviewing books or television shows, or expanding on and exploring religious/spiritual beliefs in a meaningful way, or just not being all about my moping and general uselessness. xD

This of course isn't one of those kinds of posts -shot-, but in the interest of an update...

Christmas shopping will finally get to start with me this Thursday (maybe Wednesday) depending on when my bank account registers my paycheck. It feels strange to know I'll be so crunched for time this season as last year, I was gleefully reveling in having a job and money and was buying Christmas presents starting in about August. Because I'm the sort of person that gets a high off of picking out presents for other people. (I'm so indecisive myself, that I can rarely pick what I would want, but making educated guesses/outright buying what more decisive people than myself want is really fun.)

Also, Kat (badkarma/my girlfriend) was nice enough to cover my shift for today - she wanted the hours anyway, but it still meant a lot to me. This Sunday at work, I hurt my tailbone in a hilarious story that should really not have such a serious ending to it. xD

Basically me, in my need to ignore basic ideas about safety, was standing on a chair (I'm a moron, I know) to reach something at work, and when I went to get off said chair, I managed to flip it forward with the shift of my bodyweight. The chair and my body then worked together to ensure the experience ended in a grade-A collision, as I both fell down onto the chair as the seat moved out from under my foot, and the chair propelled itself forward. You know how most simple chairs have a back that's supported by two slats going up above each of the back legs? One of those hit me in the tailbone, which aside from being a really awkward place to get smacked while you're in public (or alone, for that matter), was really painful. Really. Once I didn't feel like I was going to be sick anymore though (it actually hurt so bad I felt like I was going to vomit, which is new for me), I just went about the rest of my day, which was thankfully short.

I thought I was okay, and I still keep thinking that, but in the meantime I'll go through cycles of horrendous pain that eventually go away. Right now is one of the times where I've just got a bit of a lower backache, but earlier I had to go lay down because sitting and standing were both excruciating. I'm completely torn about seeing a doctor, admittedly mostly because I haven't actually switched to a new one (I recently finally left my pediatrician; I just turned twenty about a month ago) and I cannot stand my old doctor. So I'm not...quite sure what to do, since I'm sure I'd KNOW if I actually broke something. But I'm also not positive not treating it is the right way to go - on the other hand, the doctor will probably just tell me what I've already deduced. I strained muscles/tissue in my tailbone area/low back with the impact, and a doctor can't do anything for that except prescribe me more painkillers, which I already take far too much of. So.

Until I feel better though, I'm just thankful I didn't have to go through standing all day at work today - yesterday was an unexpected hell. D: I don't work again until Saturday (or possibly tomorrow, but I'm trying not to think about that) so hopefully...I'll feel better.


What really sucks is that even though I'm home, even just typing up this much has made it harder to sit at the computer, so I doubt I'll be getting much work done on the new roleplay comm Kat and I started. Ah well. I can still fold laundry and sort out summer clothes to put away, and in the end that's more important. xD

It's that time of year again! And no, not just the Day After Thanksgiving Coma time. I've actually never done this before, at least not by just posting in my journal for anyone to ask for one, but...I'm really in the mood to get something done this holiday. ♥ So!

If anyone wants a Christmas/Chanukkah/Winter Solstice/etc card, leave your address here! (Comments are, of course, screened for everyone's privacy.) And don't be shy about asking; whether you're a new add or someone I've known for years, I'll still send you a card.

And if you celebrate something other than Christmas/don't want a holiday card so much as a 'seasons greetings' one, just let me known in your comment what you'd like the card to say. :)

Okay, for anyone on my flist that hasn't heard of this, I need to share this link about the bill that is currently in the House in the US. It stands to severely limit internet useage in a way that I don't think will actually combat piracy as much as it will simply disrupt casual internet users who have non-commercial-use derivative works (for example, singing a song on Youtube) and anyone using sites that could get in trouble. Youtube, Facebook, Livejournal, 4chan, Cracked, and Tumblr all seem like huge potential candidates for that to me.

Please consider filling out the petition on the above site, and here's a couple more links:
Mozilla censors itself as part of American Censorship Day
U.S. contemplates unprecedented internet censorship: Bill proposes web site closure
House takes Senate's bad Internet censorship bill, tries making it worse

This is a group that is linked to on the main site I linked, and while I don't agree with their complete attitude of ignoring the fact that artists made the works that they insist it is their right to have for free, it's... Well someone may find it useful or interesting, so here it is.


I'm still reading up on it myself, or I'd have a longer, more coherent post. Anyone with additional information/protests/thoughts/petitions to link to, please feel free to do so in the comments.

I just recently bought a book entitled "Ganesha Goes to Lunch (Classics From Mystic India)" by Kamla K. Kapur, and it's really, really been sucking me in. I read the entire Bhagavad-Gita: As It Is over the course of a couple months, as I wanted to really understand each section I read before continuing onto the next. For those who aren't familiar with translations of Hindu lore/literature, it's the incredibly long-winded version by Bhaktivedanta (founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness/ISKCON/the "Hare Krishnas"), and I read at least half of the purports he included, and I have to admit that while some of the text was incredibly interesting or exciting to read - it either made sense, was incredibly poetic, or echoed some views of mine that I had been worried I would never see etched out by any religious text - it was, for long intervening parts, incredibly dull and often, in the same breath, incredibly offensive, as far as his purports were concerned. This is of course in part due to Bhaktivedanta's translation itself, as he was a man with a specific agenda that I personally hold in contempt. I have no problem with members of ISKCON who are peaceful members of their faith, but Bhaktivedanta had a lot of views of misogyny, racism (in my readings, against blacks specifically) and strangely specific ideas about the human body which had no basis whatsoever in scientific research (that humans need only four hours of sleep, that women's brains are a certain miniscule size, etc). In fact I found one gem of a quote to really sum up my point for me:

"Ah, yes. So these English people, they were very expert in making propaganda. They killed Hitler by propaganda. I don’t think Hitler was so bad man." -source

I'd go on a conversation about what my views are exactly on each of his bastardizations of Hindu principles and what should be the simple guiding thoughts of reasonable people, but I actually started off intending to talk solely about how much I've been enjoying Ganesha Goes to Lunch and so I'll leave this with his own personal invocation of Godwin's Law and call it a day on that subject.


Anyway, this book's preface/jacket/back (Ganesha Goes to Lunch) specifically mention two interesting things. One, that the author is relating a lot of these stories, not directly from other written sources, but from oral stories she was told from a variety of different people, some of whom also only received the story from another's mouth. And two, that she is consciously modernizing the stories.

This means that she's taken a lot of "liberties", it feels like, with telling the stories, but it's in a way that I think is almost completely helpful. For stories as old as ones from Hinduism, a lot of things were implied rather than stated and even the stating of that could lack in a certain art form (at least in the English sources I have found). Kapur tells everything as if she were actually authoring a short story and artfully, I feel, she manages to convey more human emotion from the characters. I've often noted that recaps of certain aspects of the gods are very brief and to-the-point, meant to simply inform the reader what happened to get from point A to point B. In this book, though, it's novelised and it honestly makes a world of difference. I didn't realise this sort of "translation" of things existed and I actually stayed up late last night early morning reading, it was just so enthralling.

This is the happiest I've been with a book purchase in a while, I'm so glad I took the chance. ♥

I think I've mentioned this before (okay, definitely have) but Kat (badkarma) and I run a very small-scale roleplay set in a rehab/psychiatric hospital, open to both live-in and outpatients of varying degrees of severity. (Currently we have a serial killer Hannibal Lecter as well as someone just suffering from anxiety/insomnia/PTSD a very AU and time-changed George Harrison, for an example.) It's very laid-back and there's a lot of joking about with the character journals sometimes, even if the plots themselves tend to be serious.

If anyone's interested, it can be found here. As I said, it's pretty calm as RPs go (currently only four members, though as I personally play three characters and Kat plays two, it's less dead than that suggests) and while the profile etc is still under construction, the RP was live and well on Livejournal and our storylines are currently three years old as of this October, so I could expand on anything that anyone has questions on - if someone's interested in joining.~


However I'm a huuuuuuuge sucker for open-ended, end-of-the-world type scenarios and my fiancée and I have been chewing on an idea for a new RP. We're both fans of convenient!mutations due to [insert plot device here] that nontheless gets to be handled in a serious setting, and we're thinking of creating an RP where a nuclear plant of some kind malfunctions, killing or mutating everyone in a certain radius (probably the size of a small country), but which leaves people on the outside unaffected and terrified of the people who were hit. So there'd be in-world politics going on about what to do with the mutated people, a protected border (which means limited supplies, etc) - it seems like it might need a lot of planning and tweaking but I think it might be worth it if it seems like others would be interested. xD We're undecided as to the location of the blast, but it's looking like it may be a European country.

It's a little bit inspired from a roleplay back on Livejournal that included a complete post-apocalyptic setting with most of the world's population dying out/everyelse being 'changed', but we thought the continuation of civilization outside the RP walls made for better possibilities of where the RP would go.

That and, while Kat and I want others in on the Gale Hospital RP, we worry it's a bit boring/slow/intimidating towards potential new recruits (as Kat and I know each other very well, and the only other members are a mutual friend of ours, and then that friend's friend). Starting new with a set storyline and with a gimmick like superpowers *shot* might help things along, nevermind that I kind of miss that setting from LJ and would love the chance to improve upon it. :) Especially considering the slightly-similar one on LJ was very poorly run and didn't have the best group in it, to be honest.


Anyway. I wanted to post about this to the storytellers community, but it looks a bit dead and I'm nervous about the reception, in some way? So I thought I'd post about the idea to my journal first to get a chance to see our til-now just verbal ideas actually written out. I'll probably be at least attempting to bounce this idea off of more people in the coming days, but... Any RPers out there: opinions?

That was exhausting and cold.

We just got power after losing it at midnight on Saturday night; details at eleven after I sleep in a heated house. xD;

Alright so, I need to remember to:

☯ create a 'mod icon' for the admins over at gale_hospital_rp
☯ fill in the profile, put up dorm layouts (and make them for the doctor's dorms), etc
☯ spam said community
☯ email the chiropractor
☯ call Elements back about the job
☯ clean the room/10% fish tank change
☯ deposit my ridiculous amount of coins (I think I have somewhere around $120+ right now, going off the size of the piles)
☯ make more Bombay potatoes to store in the fridge and use as food for work >8D

Or at least you know, one of the above. -shot- No seriously though, it's nice actually having three whole days off this week so I have a chance of getting anything done - though the incredibly late-night roleplaying last night sort of killed my sleep schedule. xD I feel so old in that regard; I can't go to bed after eleven and feel good after waking up the next day, no matter how late I sleep in. (Case in point: I went to bed at just past midnight two days ago, and couldn't drag myself out of bed til after 11. Usually, however, my work schedule has me getting up at five and I'm generally peachy then.)

I just got finished reading a 4chan (I know, I know) thread about "the 53%", which prompted me to read most of the thread as well as have to google the concept. As I understand it, the argument is about the idea, of course, of 'freeloading fucking libtards" (??) who don't pay income taxes vs. those that do. As a fucking libtard who does pay income tax, I feel sorely left out of this. ;)


That said I actually support the idea of democratic socialism, as I believe capitalism is inherently flawed. It not only supports and encourages economic classes (and large discrepencies between them, to be more to the point), but the expectation is for infinite growth. Aside from encouraging inflation of the money used (which I guess is something that would be impossible to stop in any society, really) it expects infinite growth from finite resources, which is...well, it sounds rather impossible to me. I don't exactly have a background in economics and I'd love to learn more about the subject, but as I see it, paying more in taxes (in a way that is bracketed to my own personal income) so that I can get more out of my government (healthcare, retirement, etc) just makes sense. Does this mean I'd be willing to come to terms with the fact that my own tax money could, in theory, be going to these 'freeloaders'? Yes, actually, that's a risk I'm willing to make, because I believe the majority of people wouldn't really be able to abuse a system like that. (In the US, minimum wage is hard enough to live on; I can hardly imagine living off of disability/SSI/unemployment for an extended length of time.)

At work, one of my good friends works just about 40 hour weeks and has a son who doesn't live with her because she can't quite support him on her own. She gets food stamps because of how little her paychecks are - is she a freeloader? I don't think so. Maybe getting a degree would have helped her, maybe it wouldn't have. Maybe she'll get promoted or find a better job someday. But for the moment, I know she actually does need the help of foodstamps while living on her own, and I'm glad she was able to get them. I know that there are some people who abuse the system, but it is honestly very hard even for qualified people to get financial aid from the government, so I can't see the small percent that sneak through with bad intentions actually pose a riskful drain on the resources of other Americans.



Ugh. Anyway. I actually opened up this page to mention how I'm trying once more to learn some Portugese, since working so much at Dunk's has me listening to it from co-workers constantly. xD Since two of them actually don't even speak English very well (one, nearly not at all)I feel bad and want to learn some. It'd actually come in handy for me at work, and I love languages anyway.~ (I'm more fond of French and Norwegian than, well, languages that sound like Portugese/Spanish/Italian, but I'm willing to give it a try. u______u) This is probably going to be my only opportunity of being in a workplace where the dominant language is almost not English, so I figure it's my best chance ever at actually becoming even somewhat-conversational in another language. ;0; My French has been suffering so much from being out of school and knowing no francophones, so...

I made this account along with Kat awhile ago, in the event that LJ ever became unusable and...it looks like we're getting to that point. There's too many bad attitudes and policing going on over there and after reading up on this site...it sounds like a more heartfelt sort of thing anyway. :)

And since apparently you can have 'parent' accounts over here, it sounds like it would be FAR superior as far as roleplaying is concerned! I heard I canimport all my journal entries and comments but I'm not sure how, so I'll probably be attempting that later.

This could be a nice new start for me. :)