wallwalker

GYWO comment

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 19:05:58 GMT

I'm super-behind on GYWO, even on the lowest word count. I blame work.

If I had a project this November it would make me on target, but I don't. Even if I had the energy I wouldn't try it officially, anyway. Smarter people than I have spoken about NaNoWriMo and its new sponsor. All I have are some vague thoughts about how it's kind of pointless to have an "effort-saving" tool* being pushed by an event where the effort is the point.

Anyway, I'm determined to write SOMETHING for Five Figure Fic Exchange, and I still have Fic-In-A-Box to finish. So it's not like I'll have nothing by the end of November.

*I put that in quotes because anyone who's read a long piece of fiction written by Gen AI knows that the editing will not be fun. Honestly, if NaEdWriMo was an actual event and not a joke offshoot, THAT would make sense to be sponsored by a Gen AI company. I still wouldn't like it, but it would make sense. Editing fifty thousand words of that sounds like a nightmare to me.

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still around somehow

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 02:05:07 GMT

It's been a few months, my attempt at monthly updates hasn't gone well. Currently sitting at home and not working, thanks to the dreaded virus (yes, that one,) which has finally caught up to me.

It sucks. ( mild tmi, very mild, but still )

Anyway I'm doing okay other than that, still sketching random things, posting most of them on my Pillowfort (which is very slow, even more so than here, but has image hosting that's useful.) Seems like a good idea to step clear of Tumblr a bit. Gaming-wise I finally finished Endwalker base game in FFXIV and am slowly working through post-EW so that I can actually play the new stuff, hoping to get through DW before the next expac comes out. Also replaying Yakuza: Like a Dragon in Legend NG+, which is much harder than I anticipated with me at lv 91.

They keep giving me more and more responsibility at work and I keep getting sick and having trouble with it. It's a hell of a stress test. I've been doing. Ok. Just tired.

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MM 2024 - Suffering

Wed, 13 Mar 2024 03:22:40 GMT

A bit more worldbuilding, this one about job interviews. (Yes, what the employers were doing was illegal.)

( Job Interview Woes )

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MM 2024 5: Misunderstanding

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:54:08 GMT

Prompt: Misunderstanding.

More Sedoretu worldbuilding. Shirya tries to get out of the house and find more friends at a mingle for people in her moiety, but finds her intentions misconstrued in a very offensive way.

( Misunderstood )

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Feb. goals roundup

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 01:51:49 GMT

(From these.)

(I did not get sick last/this month. However, I do mention someone who did.)

( Read more... )

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MM 4 - no prompt this time

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 18:45:43 GMT

Somehow I'm not vibing with the prompts, but I still have other ideas for these folks. More of the Sedoretu worldbuilding idea, this time about one of those shows where people argue with each other a lot, like Crossfire.
(Kris is NB but legally is Shirya's wife. The debate on the show is about another consequence of the same law, which said that people don't have to be legally or biologically a particular gender to register as "wife" or "husband." )

( Interview )

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MM 3: Negotiations

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 18:22:31 GMT

Part 3 of the Sedoretu original story. Mention of character death and also mention of dealing with immigration officials.

( Bureaucracy )

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MM 2: Hope

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 16:35:25 GMT

Prompt 2 for the Sedoretu story: Hope. (What is a Sedoretu?)

I didn't mean for these parts to be continuous, and the next few parts probably won't be. I just wanted to write exposition to set up the main issue of the story. This one refers to character death and sacrilegious relationships (in-universe.)

( Hopes For the Future )

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MM 1: Kiss

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 14:21:35 GMT

For Multiamory March 2024 I'm writing original fiction. It's about... how do I put this... how I feel Sedoretu would work in a society like the one we live in in 2024. I haven't decided if this is our world or a more generic world that follows the rules that Ursula le Guin put forth in her stories about the planet O; maybe that'll come to me while I write. The main storyline will be about three people who lost one of their spouses in the recent past, and how they go about finding a fourth.

More information about what a Sedoretu is here.

(This particular one is set during the group's wedding, so it's before their loss.)

March 1st: Kiss.

( Wedding Ceremony )

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3SF wrapup (for now)

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 15:52:04 GMT

Prompting for threesentenceficathon wrapped up today so I'm going to take a break and probably write for some other challenges for a while, and also work on some rainbowfic posts that I have half-finished.

Roundups of things I did for it:
Fanwork roundup
Original work roundup

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Jan roundup

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 04:01:18 GMT

Progress for January wasn't great, but that's largely because I didn't have any real goals until February.

Career:
Well, I've gotten better at bash shell scripting and finished a DevOps course. No luck yet on finding a good Java project. My current Big Project is... progressing... but I have no idea how to quantify it.
I've managed 3 days a week for going to the office. Which, honestly, should be enough.

Hobbies:
I haven't managed a sketch on the easel yet. I really should get some of my black and white charcoal and try.
On GIMP... not much, really. ( raccoon pope )
I'm on target for GYWO and can largely thank threesentenceficathon for that. As for games... nope, haven't started anything new yet. A lot of my video game time was spent on WoW, unexpectedly enough.

Fitness/Health: (Starting small on this.)
I've been able to manage the bike for the last week. The rest... I'm working on it.

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Three-Sentence Ficathon fills - original fiction

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 04:57:40 GMT

I'm trying to do some original fiction fills for threesentenceficathon, and this is the post for them, as fanworks are on the other journal. (Trying to make sure I have a record of them for GYWO. Not quite meeting my goal yet for this month, but I'm pretty close.) Some of these are probably getting crossposted to rainbowfic sooner or later.

( Read more... )

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Goals for 2024

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 04:21:15 GMT

Ok. Goals for 2024 for snowflake_challenge. I'm keeping these modest this year because work really is taking up so much of my time.

( Read more... )

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updating

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 02:41:19 GMT

Managed to update a few things (including making my welcome post sticky for a change) for the snowflake_challenge for day one. We'll see if I stick with this longer than I normally do. (A lot of it might be on the other journal.)

I'll make some goals later. I technically should be working right now.

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so tumblr is having trouble again I guess

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 16:38:29 GMT

I am still struggling with creating scheduled posts for this site, which is something I need if I'm going to remember to update something more than a few times a month. This is just how my brain works.

Honestly I don't expect Tumblr to disappear anytime soon. It'll just kind of fade away, much like ff.net has.

(I don't realistically expect to see a big surge in DW activity because of this. It would be nice to see more people here but if there was going to be a jump in activity it would've been on the NSFW ban, IMO. Still, considering that this site has BEEN here as long as it has and not had any major upheavals, you'd really think that someone would look at it and be like, "Oh, hey, this place is stable, let's hang out here sometimes.")

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FFXIV, mid-EW

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 17:19:41 GMT

More Endwalker reactions. I'm at Travelers at the Crossroads now (lv. 87.)

( spoilers )

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FFXIV, early EW.

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 14:11:35 GMT

Thoughts on Endwalker so far - I've finished the first trial (lv. 83) and have met the "pilots," who are adorable.

( spoilers up to the point mentioned above )

We'll see what I think once the shit really hits the fan, which I understand is about now.

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bacon hair ribbon

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 22:56:12 GMT

I've watched a fair number of art conversation videos, just because it's satisfying to me how to the paintings look after they're cleaned and retouched. The guy I usually watch tells a lot of Dad jokes, talks a lot about the process, and is very vocal about how much he dislikes when people try to cover up small mistakes with tons of paint.

Example: This one, which is just titled Art Restoration Fail, because the previous attempts at "fixing" the picture had turned into overpainting the entire thing. (This post title is related to the painting, trust me.) Painting over someone else's work and presenting it as an original is really weird to see in traditional media.

(To be clear, if I had seen the original painting on its own and not as an overpaint of someone else's work, it would've looked fine. It's the "paint over this to 'fix' it and pass it off as the original work" part that isn't great.)

Still, whenever he talks about how natural resins are fallible and synthetic ones aren't, I can't help but think that eventually we're going to find some drawback to them, in a few hundred years, and if there are still art conservators then they'll be just as annoyed with some of those materials that he's used, as he gets about some of the older ones.

My husband actually suggested I might try oil painting, if I want a creative outlet, but I don't see how it could work. About the only place that we COULD do it is on the balcony, because we live in a small apartment and I am fairly sure that you have to have a lot of ventilation for those.

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Friday Five: Music

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 16:14:39 GMT

thefridayfive: Sept. 8th 2023

1. What song do you live for at the moment?
Dead Man Walking by David Bowie right now.

2. Is there a band or artist that you attach to a particular memory? What memory is it?
A couple come to mind:
- "Another Day in Paradise" by Phil Collins, driving home from ice skating with a church group when I was young. I don't know why - probably the line about blisters.
- "In Your Eyes" by Peter Gabriel - dancing with a boyfriend after making a drive up to Philadelphia to see him.

3. What's the most beautiful song lyric you've ever heard?
I don't know - this one's been sticking out in my mind lately:

Don't ask me why I'm doing this
You wouldn't understand
You're asking the wrong questions
You couldn't understand
A bridge is not a high place
The fifty-second floor
Icarus would know
A mountain isn't far to fall
When you've fallen
When you've fallen from the moon

Marillion - The Great Escape

4. If you could choose any band/artist to cover any song, which combination would you pick?
I really don't know - I'm not a huge fan of covers, so it's kind of hard for me to make that call. I've heard quite a bit of Boyce Avenue (who got their start doing covers) through my husband and I wonder if they could do a good cover of "Thirty" or "1979" by Smashing Pumpkins.

5. What's the best concert you've ever attended?
I haven't attended very many so I have a small pool to draw from. Shinedown put on a pretty good show the first time I saw them, though.

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how long is a month again?

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 01:14:21 GMT

It's hard for me to do monthly updates anymore. I'm always busy and time is meaningless. Work feels like it's getting better, but it's still hectic, and time is blending together; I'll think of an issue I'm pretty sure I worked on a few weeks ago, and it'll turn out to be three months ago. This is what life feels like.

I'm proud of being able to write what I did the last two months, and particularly the original work I managed to write. I'm looking at Neocities and trying to decide if I want to have a small site there for more original universe things, like story bibles, things to keep track of my own ideas. I definitely realized there were a lot of ideas that I lost in the multiple years between starting them and now, when I managed to complete a few story arcs.

(In particular, The Witch and the Tower is probably never going to be finished, or if it is it will look very different from the actual original idea. I don't identify with the character I identified with before so the driving force behind it is gone now.)

Unfortunately it's been a few weeks now and I don't have any real inspiration to write, mostly because of being busy or tired from being busy. I hope it won't be another seven years before I can come back to this with any kind of energy.

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Sun, 06 Aug 2023 20:17:49 GMT

Meatloaf cake with bacon roses.

I can never help but be amused by things like this. Although getting meatloaf when I'm expecting a cake would be slightly disappointing.

(An even better example: April Fools' Day Meatloaf Cake. This is closer to the example I remember seeing in some magazine from the 70's, complete with pretty piping to make it even more cakelike.)

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this new web thing

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 16:01:03 GMT

I am still trying to decide what to do with the Neocities account I created. If I ever finish one of the Twitch games, I'll probably post it there. (I had an entire story in my head a few years ago for something about an abandoned mall, but never wrote it down. Or if I did, I lost it in the great archive crash ten years ago. So I'm trying to reconstruct that from what I can find, and it's just. Not working. Maybe I should try something else.)

A personal archive/gallery would probably be a good idea, considering just how many things are done are just scattered on the web these days. (I made a personal discord to help with scheduling and upload some art things there, but a web site would be better for that.)

I really can't help but wonder how many people would be happier with a non-social-network gallery for their stuff, whatever it might be. I've seen people get all kinds of nasty aside comments on things like Tumblr lately - like the whole "You know I can see tags, right?" thing I see from multiple people once in a while, many of which I completely agree with, there are some things that people say in tags that are dickish and I think Tumblr made a mistake making them visible by default. Anyway, it really feels like they need a place where they can put their stuff out for people to look at, and the comments people leave can be on their own space if they choose, unseen by them.

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I seem to have a type

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 21:33:25 GMT

Apparently in MMOs I'm happiest when I can play a giant green man.

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July Break Bingo Card

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 03:48:55 GMT

July Break Bingo card.

Putting it here so I can share it with rainbowfic.

Columns: BINGO
Rows from top: 12345

Postage Stamp 1: Posted on rainbowfic
N1, N2, G1, G2
- "Why don't you stay?"
- "You should've said that."
- Sex while high/intoxicated
- Zombies or Came Back Wrong

Link: https://rainbowfic.dreamwidth.org/1586984.html

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cake

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 22:32:17 GMT

I went to a cake shop yesterday, where the big gimmick is DIY cake decorating (and you can get classes there, etc...) I know where I want to go for my next significant birthday party.

I always kind of wanted to learn to decorate cakes when I was young. But now that I could potentially afford to do so, we don't really have the space. Although I could probably figure something out if I did some work to clean the kitchen. I've always liked cake decorating and all the neat things you can do with it.

(Apparently one of my most-read books from my childhood was the 1974 Wilton cake yearbook.)

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