Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

(This is more a tongue-in-cheek post than a real complaining one. I know this is less than a drop in the bucket when it comes to problems caused by him.)

I keep hearing such good things about the The Man in the High Castle series, but I just cannot make myself watch a show about a world where the Nazis won. It feels way, way, way too much like what's happening in the real world.

I still haven't gone back to watching Designated Survivor again either, because of RL political crap.

I am, however, SERIOUSLY enjoying the A Series of Unfortunate Events series. (Ruin that, Trump, I dare you!) The humor in it reminds me a lot of Edward Scissorhands. The only "downside" of it is that it's so good I can't multitask during it, so it's taking me forever to get through the eight episodes.

In the Pokemon GO world, something happened to my game? Or something. GPS drift is so strong at my work desk, I usually get credit for 2-3 KMs of walking. Today, though the drift seems just as bad (I'm watching myself walk through the building, out to the parking lot, across it, then back, all without leaving my chair), I'm getting not a single step of credit for the movement. I wonder if they somehow closed that loophole? I hope not...

And in other random news, I had a "nightmare" last night, but it was so silly I really was just amused by it. In it, I helped my father (dead RL) at his moving company (wasn't his job at all), and we went to do a move for some woman. Her house was less than knee high, yet somehow when you went inside it was as big as a normal house. "Supernatural" things started happening... but they were so minor it was just plain silly. Like plant roots poked up through the ground and started waving around. Normal plant roots, so a couple inches long and thin -- not exactly threatening! Plus, for some reason, I brought my cat with me to the moving job... My father and I got scared and ran off though, and on the way passed some "priests" (more like MMO priests than religious) who were coming to take care of the supernatural problems. One got in my face all like "This is MY job!" and I was happy to agree and let him take care of it.

I was amused by that all morning. OH NO PLANT ROOTS

I had a nightmare last night, one that doesn't seem like it would be a nightmare, and less than two years ago wouldn't have been one -- it would have been a good dream.

I dreamed that my sister brought home four big grocery bags full of donut holes. All different flavors, glazed, some jelly filled. And because I'm me, I couldn't not have one -- not when they were all right in front of me, free for the taking. And because I'm me, I couldn't eat just one or two -- even knowing sugar would now make me sick, I couldn't stop eating them. I ate probably two dozen. Like in waking life, they weren't even that good, I just ate them because they were there and free and I wanted to make sure I got my share of them. Even knowing it would make me sick, I couldn't stop myself from eating them.

In the show West Wing, the character Leo is an alcoholic. In one episode, he described what it's like:

"I'm an alcoholic, I don't have one drink. I don't understand people who have one drink. I don't understand people who leave half a glass of wine on the table. I don't understand people who say they've had enough. How can you have enough of feeling like this? How can you not want to feel like this longer? My brain works differently."

I've never had something in a TV show resonate so strongly with me. That's exactly how I feel about food. Junk food tastes good, how can anyone stop with just one cookie? Just a bite of a slice of cake? One piece of fried chicken? How can anyone not sit down with a fork and just eat an entire cake? How can someone go to a buffet and stop with one or two plates of food?

Knowing that about my brain, I do my best to avoid situations like that instead of having to try to resist them. The nightmare really scared me though, the powerlessness I had over the situation.

All that being said, I don't know if I believe that food addiction is a real thing or not, but it doesn't matter. I don't need a name for this issue of mine, I just need to know it exists so I can avoid situations that I wouldn't be able to control.

Been five days since my last post. While I've been reading my friends list, I haven't felt like posting. Lots of points in semi-random order:

* Less than five days until I go into the hospital. I've gained some weight back, but not too much. More than I'd like, but still within the range the surgeon wanted me to lose. I keep thinking "this will be the last time I can ever have..." and how can you resist eating whatever that is? I'm really depressed and down. I wish I were excited about this, but it's a "have to" not a "want to" situation. I don't want to fall over dead in the next few years, so... no choice.

* Part of my depressed issue is likely period-related. Where the hell is it?! It's now nine days late. (No chance of pregnancy.) If I get it when I go into the hospital, I'm going to be pissed. I don't want to have to deal with it then! Sigh. Damned body.

* I'm starting to have stress bad dreams. I expect them to only get worse the closer Monday gets.

* Work sucks. I'm taking three weeks off for this, but in our group there's no reduction of amount of work or deadlines because of vacation -- so I have the same work and the same deadlines, with three weeks less to do it in. Way to let us enjoy our vacations. Most people in my group work though theirs.

* I read a Harry Potter fanfic for the first time in years. In Loco Parentis by Dolores_Crane. I loved the first chapter of it, though the second and third less so. It's everything I usually wouldn't have liked, but it was so well written that it worked. Hermione POV. Hermione/Harry (though it's minor). Snape/Harry (mostly in the background). It was a more realistic look at muggles at Hogwarts. At the end it became a bit preachy for me, but all in all, I liked it a lot.

Boy do I miss Snape/Harry. I don't think I've had an OTP since then. I think Snarry was what sparked my enjoyment of age and power differences in fic relationships. There was so much good HP fanfic back when I was in the fandom. I should poke about and see if there's more good Snarry out there (or heck, reread the older good stuff, it's not going to be like I remember it).

* This is an odd time. Usually I'd be wishing for Friday to get here, especially when that Friday was the start of a three week vacation, but this time I'm wishing the week never ends. At least I got good RP tonight, probably the last of it until my mother flies home in two and a half weeks.

* I'm reading the best book, but it's so long, it's taking me forever to finish (yay!). 24 hours in and I'm only just over 50% done (it's 1,000+ pages long; for comparison, the first Game of Thrones book was 800). Usually a book takes me 10-12 hours to read. Stormlight Archive (Way of the King) by Brandon Sanderson. From his website: "I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words worth of worldbuilding for it". You can so tell he has all that worldbuilding done. It's amazing. And man, I'd kill to see all his notes about the world.

The last ep of the season *whine*. It's going to be a long nine months or so until we get a new ep.

A pairing with one underaged person is rarely my cup of tea, but I love this picture so much. Spoiler for the last couple eps. Looks like he cares about her and she needs him and it makes me go all awwww.

( Spoilers for this week's ep behind the cut. )

I'm going to try to watch all three GoT seasons again over the break.

Dream: For all the bad dreams my brain gives me, when it gives me a good dream, it's so darned good! Also, it was the best RP scene I had in a long, long time. In the dream it started out as an IC event in WoW, but I was lagging so none of the people were loading (but I saw all the people-dots in their class colors on my minimap, so I knew there were tons of people around me). Then they all started loading, and they were all Alliance! Eeek! But since Keen is fine with Alliance, I decided to stay and try for some silly/not real RP. He /flirted and such with them, then sat down with the group to watch whatever event was going on.

Then somehow it switched to "real" RP -- the whole world just 'clicked' (you could hear it and feel it as it snapped real), and there I was, a Horde blood elf in the middle of a couple hundred Alliance. I ran for it, and a pack of worgen (werewolves) followed. I know chase dreams are nightmare material for some, but I love them. I made it out of the crowd, but the worgen were right on my tail. Then the scene paused and we talked OOCly about how to go forward with it (we decided to give it an adult spin).

Not only was it a great dream, it was one of those times where you wake up and then fall asleep and continue it. Four times! Two times it was that initial RP scene, then the third time I returned to the dream it was me and the other players/characters on an airplane to go to wherever the next scene was (the worgen pack's cave/home). Then the last part was continuing the scene once we were there. I couldn't have asked for a better dream. :D

For you all: I'm in love with this gif. So peaceful.


For cats tossed into the air: Bad dreams are one thing. Everyone has them, they're normal. I just hate it when my brain comes up with a bad dream so stereotypical that it's laughable. Last night I had a dream that I was an act in a small circus. I juggled. Cats. We were about to go on, I was standing just off stage, and I realized I didn't know how to juggle. (Let alone juggle cats.) That's right up there with showing up in the school classroom without your pants on!

For non-flying cats: I had to go to the pet store today to get more food/litter, and of course the adoption group had a bunch of kittens out for adoption. The one I had been considering (the one with a missing front paw) got adopted (YAY!), but the other ones were darned cute and sweet and... sigh. Now I want a second cat again.

I've been going back and forth on this issue for months now: I want a second cat, I'm happy as-is with one cat, but if one is good two are better! Etc. I decided to move across the country with a tiny fraction of the thought and stress I'm putting into this second cat issue. I just don't know how I'm supposed to decide on something when I don't have basic facts. I'm happy now. Will I be happier with a second cat? If I could answer that, I could decide on this issue, but it's impossible to know without having that second one to see. (But the kittens are SOOOO cute!)

For me/WoW: It's finally hitting me. Two weeks until MoP. My to-do list is unreasonable.

In a perfect world, before MoP I'd:
Level Sedgegrass to 85 (80.5 now).
Level Meadowsedge to 85 (80.5 now).
Level Icerime to 85 (61 now).

Level Meadowsedge's mining and herb to max (both 300s now).
Level Sedgegrass's mining and herb to max (herb 82, mining 300-something).
Decide on professions for Icerime, level both to max.

Cap honor and VP (selling honor for VP) on my two PvP alts.

Organize my mats and things to sell. I have three six tab guild banks and a crapton of personal banks full of things for MoP drop. When am I going to start selling them? How?

That is an amazingly unlikely list of things, especially since I'm reading a good book now and would rather read than play. (And notice RP isn't on that list, I haven't RPed outside of Twitter for ages. D: )

A more reasonable list:
Icerime to 68 so he can fly in Northrend (and thus be a better bank/AH alt). That's about four dungeon runs from one of my 85s. Doable.
Level herb and mining on both Sedge alts. Likely doable; doable on at least one.
Organize mats -- this is a must.

Two weeks to go. Arg! I'm so not ready, but it sure will be nice to have space back as things sell. (Edit: Apparently my dates are off!)

Sometimes my brain comes up with what I think was supposed to be a nightmare, but it falls short. Last night I had a dream I was at work, on the last day before a long vacation, and so I had to find people to cover my various duties. The Lich King followed me the whole time, doing that slow walk like at the end of HoR. I'd stop in someone's cube to ask them if they could take over this case or that one, and down the hallway the top of his helm could be seen, slowly approaching. Sometimes he'd turn a corner and I'd see him down the row of cubes, slowly pacing towards me.

Sorry, brain, that was way more entertaining than scary. The rest of the dream was even more WTFy: My boss wanted to kill me, so ordered the computer to shoot a mining laser at me (I had no idea I worked at a mining company until this point in the dream). Turns out the computer, an AI system, was designed and created by me (HA). The computer decided it didn't want to kill its creator, then in a Hal voice said something like "I see I don't have to follow orders at all" and dropped one of those massive mining things (bigger than a house) into a hole that went to the center of the earth. And so the world blew up. (Still not scary, but thank you very much for the highly entertaining dream, brain.)

And in other semi-work related news, I learned an interesting thing. treuegrit and I had grumped over the poor editing we sometimes find in books (typos, clunky sentences, homonym issues). I do (and love doing) the editing for our various documents at work -- it's amazingly fast and easy, I just sit down and my figurative red pen flies. Editing a work of fiction seems to be a whole different animal. frozenwrath asked for critical readings of his blog posts, so I figured what the hey, I can do that. But it turns out that editing boring technical stuff is very different than interesting fiction stuff. For me, I had a hard time staying in "editing reading" mode, almost every sentence I found I was slipping back to "reading for enjoyment" mode. So I'm wondering if book editors have that issue as well (or maybe they get used to it). Not that "hard" is an acceptable excuse for professional book editors to miss stuff, but I'm now willing to cut them more slack.

I probably shouldn't babble on about editing, it's likely boring to most folks, but I really enjoy doing it. I love that it's a whole different way of reading things. I don't understand 90% of what our documentation at work is about, but that doesn't matter. Once I finished a user guide and someone said to me "so you know how this works now, right?", and I just blinked in reply -- reading to edit is 100% different than reading to enjoy or to lean about the topic. When I edit something, I'm not... reading it. I'm looking at each sentence. I'm looking at each word within the sentence. At the paragraph as a whole. I'm reading it to hear the flow of it, but that's not reading-reading.

And ha, writing about editing makes me so so so so paranoid about typos. "Look! You can't even spell that word! You left off a period! Look at all those commas! You expect us to believe that someone pays you to do that?!"

Teen Wolf: Going into the show, I expected to hate it. I frowned as I started the first ep, expecting it to be nothing but a waste of time. About 20 minutes in, I gave up and admitted I liked it. By the end of the ep, I wanted more more more. Luckily I was mistaken about something: I thought that this was a new series and so only a couple eps were out, but instead there's a whole season out there. YAY!

However, as much as I liked the ep, I can't promise anyone else will. I think a love of werewolf-y things makes all the difference here. It was fun, most of the characters were very attractive to look at, and I loved the werewolf aspect of it, but it was not a perfect show. (Oh, huh, it's shown on MTV? That's probably another strike against it, for most folks.) Okay, googling more, it actually got good reviews in general? Nice to know that maybe my tastes aren't all that off.

I'm dying to read fanfic of it, I've seen there's lots out there, but I want to watch the rest of the season first. (And I always say I want to read fanfic of this or that, but alas I rarely do. Time issues, mostly.)

I got just a little RP today. ("Just a little" is perfectly fine, I've been sick all day, not being able to flee the computer at a moment's notice is something of an issue.) Two short scenes. One was random RP, but it was a good match for Thistle. The player is new to the server, so hopefully I made a good impression for us. She wants to RP again sometime, so yay! She's a DK who pretty clearly is still loyal (at least OOCly clearly, she had "mourning her lost king" as her current RP setting), and in my not so humble opinion, there's never enough of those. :D

Edit: I won't be able to watch this week's Homeland until Tuesday at the earliest, so no spoilers please! <3

Well now see, last night was an example of a good dream! I was Haken (which is odd, since I've not RPed him in months) and Haken was a worgen (which is not so odd, since I've been spending so much time RPing and leveling them). I couldn't figure out if Haken was suddenly Alliance or if worgen got switched to be Horde, then I realizes that Haken couldn't care less about factions and so the dream went on.

It was pretty darned cool being someone so physically strong. His side had to storm a castle, so he walked right up to the doorway in and grabbed a guard by the throat, lifting her into the air and then lowering her to bite her. And, being the good RPer that I apparently am even in my dreams (haha), I whispered her asking her permission on every step. My spoken IC words were OUT LOUD, then I'd lean in and whisper asking permission to succeed at grabbing/lifting her and biting. A pretty darned cool dream all around.

I really want to start RPing him again, but he's such a hard character to get RP on. Not hard to play, but the fact that he hates all living things and would still be loyal to the Lich King if not for Mornherald makes him fit in no where -- even other DKs don't like him. The one DK still loyal to the LK hates Haken, so he can't fit in even there. I don't really want to change him, since then he wouldn't be Haken.

I need to make some other plans for RP tonight. I suspect poor Grr feels like I'm stalking him on Keen. (We've RPed most every night the past couple nights.) I don't even really know the guy, I don't want to scare him away or burn him out on RPing with me/Keen. (Especially since I suspect Keen is hard to RP with long term. Sigh. Stalked and raped multiple times and recovering from a deadly "drug" addiction doesn't make for a calm, laid back character. Some woman tossed an empty bottle at him last night and he nearly jumped out of his skin, then Grr offered him something to calm him down and he flailed.)

I worry so much about being needy in RP. I want people to have fun RPing with me, not have me be a drain on things!

I need to come up with a personality for Clover, I think. Crowfeathers didn't work out at all (he was a "nice guy", a good guy, but that ended up being boring as hell). Heck, or maybe I should RP Thistle again, I've RPed him a grand total of twice.

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Long, long ago, I was into Disney. I fell in love with the Lion King movie and I was collecting everything Disney I could get my hands on. Even wacky things, like the books auction houses gave out when holding Disney auctions and the Disney annual stockholders books.

I spent tons of money through eBay, and one of the things I bought were those stockholder books. Then someone gave me a clue: If you buy even one single Disney stock, you'd get that book free forever! So I did. One stock hadn't cost much ($25? $50?), and every year I got wonderful book after wonderful book, full of art you'd see no place else.

Even now, when I'm not into Disney so much anymore, I still enjoyed looking through those glossy pages.

This year's book? Black and white. Plain (newspaper quality) paper. Not one single picture in it. It's so depressing and boring! I hope they go back to pretty, color, glossy books when the economy recovers.

Also I was debating posting about this earlier, I didn't think it merited its own post, but I can tack it on to this one. voidmagus, would you please stop ( setting me up to be raped by a child molester in my dreams? )

Sometimes it seems the worst part of stress dreams are how unoriginal they are. The night before last I had a dream that I decided to go back and finish high school because a college degree was important so I wanted to go. (WTF brain, I HAVE a college degree already!) So I signed up for high school... then couldn't remember how to get to the school. Then when I finally got there, I lost my schedule so I didn't know which classes to go to. Someone told me, then I couldn't find the classroom. All that was needed to make it 100% cliche was for me to find the class and end up having forgotten to put pants on.

Last night I had a dream that the world was ending. Often that situation wouldn't make for a bad dream, but in this case it did. I somehow found the last few humans, and then POOF, they all just disappeared when I blinked my eyes, leaving me alone with a bunch of mutant animals that were all fleeing in the same direction from Something Horrible. I stuck around to look for the other humans instead of fleeing as well. (WTF?)

I'm starting to think I have to rethink my Just Say No policy to drugs. I can't even count how many years I've been sleeping badly. Waking up every couple hours and taking hours to fall back to sleep, sleeping so lightly my heartbeat wakes me up. (Seriously, this morning I keep hearing some sort of knocking/pounding sound, it would startle me awake and then I'd realize it was my heartbeat.) I'm tired of never getting enough sleep. A good night is four or five hours of sleep. So very tired. The idea of drugs scares me though. I worry about taking anything I could get addicted to, or something that would make me sleep deeply enough that I'd miss someone shouting about a fire or breaking in or something. (Yeah, I have a smoke detector, but a couple years back the other end of the apartment complex was on fire and someone came around banging on bedroom windows to wake people up.)

Blah. *tired stress puppy*

For some odd reason, I've been dreaming about WoW a lot lately. I'm doing almost nothing on the game, just standing in Dal for hours on end, so no idea why I'm suddenly dreaming about it nightly. Most of the dreams are nothing major, but tonight's was really rather yummy and exciting.

( PvP in WoW... come to life in a most exciting way )

An interesting thing this dream brings up is that I'm never RL me in my dreams -- I've not seen myself as "me" in my dreams for many many years, I always look like FFXI Thistle. It should seem strange that I picture myself as a short, young, oriental man, but it doesn't.