terabient

HOW IS THANKSGIVING ONLY A WEEK AWAY?! Also it totally sucks that the week before Thanksgiving is the time when all the stores start blitzing you with CHRISTMAS SHOPPING ads and decorations and the like, since Thanksgiving is as early as it can possibly be and just ugh i am not ready for the false commercial cheer yet. I'M STILL MOURNING HALLOWEEN'S PASSING, DAMNIT.

I have been craving oysters on the half-shell for months now. I don't know why it started, but it's practically impossible to slake since the closest place that serves them (and that I would trust not to give me food poisoning) is kinda far away, and in a busy downtown area that has shitty parking. It is also on the expensive side, even for seafood, but I have a little extra cash to waste on something frivolous like an overpriced night out.

Speaking of nights out, my brother and sister took me out to dinner tonight to celebrate finishing my LNA licensing process (finally!) and I had the MOST AMAZING drink. It was a beer cocktail, which I have not tried because IDK, mixing beers and liquor sounds like it might be a bad idea? But this was just a chocolate stout mixed with a raspberry beer and sdlkfjasklenawofjkj IT WAS LIKE DRINKING A LIQUID CAKE. Well, okay, it wasn't as sickeningly sweet as it sounds, but that's a plus. The biggest reason I like beer is because there are like a bazillion flavored brews out there now, and they're not just glasses full of different corn syrup flavors, like most drinks (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic) these days. I like a little bite in my sweetness.

Thoughts on NaBloPoMo, having just passed the mid-way point:

GOOD:
-It's nice to look at the calendar and see all the days filled. (It would look even nicer if the calendar on this particular layout didn't get all wonky once the numbers hit double digits. Maybe I should mention this somewhere?)
-Good way to get a lot of unsorted thoughts out of the brain, haaha
-Remembered what's FUN about LJ/DW-style blogging after months of mostly tumblr'ing

BAD:
-Let's be real, some days there is just nothing to blog about. Then you're stuck making a post that you aren't really thrilled to do, and probably isn't much fun to read, either.
-If you're writing something you haven't really thought through, trying to make it coherent can take a lot of time. Which is fine, but it does take up a big chunk of my leisure time. OH WELL. There are worse things than having less time to flail about in video games. :P

GOALS FOR THE NEXT HALF OF THE MONTH:
Uh, to not miss a day and hopefully write interesting things?

Friday I went to the Harvard Natural History Museum with my sister. It's one of those things I'd meant to do way back when I was still attending college in the Boston area but never got around to.

Also Jazz in July started that day and I really wanted to see Yoko Miwa live. (This I didn't actually get to do, but she'll be performing again this month so I was only a little bummed out.)

SO! I wasn't entirely sure what to expect at the museum, because I only knew about their glass flower exhibit, extensive taxidermy animal collection and super-low admission price. Basically my sister and I were just hoping it wouldn't be a) boring and b) smelly/gross.

( cut for pictures )

THE END.

thrilling isn't it

Okay I feel like squeeing now!

Today kink_bingo opened for sign-ups and after refreshing the page like mad around 2:50pm I have my card now~ It's all very exciting.

( Here it is~ )

In less kinky matters, I think I'm going to have to drop hardmode and au_bigbang for a few reasons. For hardmode I cut out the female-centric part as much as I could, but as I came to the end I was faced with the following issues where, in the initial outline, the two plotlines would merge. Basically, I could have the two groups meet and have the women go 'oh we had a major crisis on our hands but it's okay now, WHAT HORRORS DID YOU SEE? OURS WEREN'T IMPORTANT,' or I could go with the old excuse of 'oh dear, communication equipment malfunction, sorry we couldn't help you and just sat here twiddling our thumbs because the author didn't know what to do with us.' Or not explain their sudden absence at all and just dig a big plot hole. None of these outcomes are appealing.

The other reason is that the more I consider submitting my work to a beta and media creator while its in the rough draft stage, the more nervous and anxious I get. It's probably unfounded but at this point, I'm still having a tough time diffusing that nervousness and I think it might be better I don't try to force the event right now. :c

au_bigbang is really far behind (only 5000~ words), my enthusiasm for the fic is practically gone, and the beta situation isn't optional there the way it is at hardmode, soooo I'm going to have to pull out of that one as well.

OH WELL. on the other hand, I did get a lot of writing done even if no one ends up seeing it, though I'll likely end up posting it...eventually.

If anyone is curious, I was using Liquid Story Binder when planning and writing the big bang stuff, and I'd highly recommend it. It's a little confusing at first, and some of the features I found completely useless or redundant, but for planning out a huge storyline with lots of characters and locations and research I found it incredibly helpful. I only used the outline tool, the dossiers (where you can create and store stuff like character bios, using as much or as little information as you want/need) - I used it for location descriptions and MONSTAAAAAR creation, and I'm endlessly tickled that I have this folder full of murderous vines and gigantic swamp fish - and the typewriter tool, which is very much like the Write or Die site but without the lurking terror of horrible noise or losing what you've written. In typewriter mode the screen is blank except for what you type (you can't see your toolbars or minimize the window) and there's no copy/paste tool, so you're forced to either backspace manually if you want to correct or change mistakes, or keep on typing. If you're like me and agonize over word choice/organization and sentence structure to the point that you only get like 200 words done in an hour, the tool is pretty good at stopping that. I was able to write 500~1000 each session which honestly I have never been able to do before, so! There's your infomercial testimonial, flist.

To wrap everything up, here's a checklist of fannish/internet-ish stuff I'm going to try to do every day in June:

-Write 500-1,000 words a day
-Finish, and publicly post, something of 1,000 words or more by the end of the month
-Journal post! (the almost-all November posts were pretty fun...for me. I don't know about my flist since those posts got pretty boring at times. :p )
-Do photo_treasure_hunt's June challenge

Aaaaand that's it for now. c:

If there is one person or more on your friends list who makes your world a better place just by existing and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this in your journal.

<3 <3 <3

ps nekocrouton thanks so much for the v-gift! :')

so!!! i have recently received a great deal of monies, for my own personal use and pleasure. but i do not know what to do with it! this, Dear Reader, is where you come in.

[Poll #1659888]

in all seriousness, though, i'm probably going to get um.

uh.

...i dunno, Turtle Beach headphones? i have been eying them for awhile but that still leaves a sizable amount of cash. how sizable?

in other news, i had a super-duper pre-Christmas party for my brother because he is working on Christmas. i am not going to lie, pre-Christmas beats the pants off of regular Christmas. it's all the joy of Christmas Day early, but since it is early i get to spend the next few days leisurely doing whatever i want instead of running around like crazy searching for gifts, then panic-buying some outrageously unfunny shit just to have something to cover with wrapping paper.

my brother got me a Dinosaur Comics dry-erase board which sold out very quickly and apparently there are only a hundred or so that were made in the first run? basically i have the thrill of owning an EXCLUSIVE NERD ITEM that i can also use to make notes! see how i cleverly reminded myself to do laundry today! i know, i know, mine is a life to be envied.

my sister got me a makeup kit that was labeled 'face makeup kit' which is pretty excellent because now i can go say i have to go and put on my face, which i have always wanted to do. she also got me a zombie calendar full of invaluable information about the inevitable and fast-approaching apocalypse, which was very thoughtful of her.

i am going to take a nice eight-hour nap now so i can get some SERIOUS ROOM CLEANING done tomorrow. also i may have an Ugly Sweater Party to go to? Also if the weather is not douchebaggy, mom and i are going to ~Montreal!~ for Christmas/New Year's so if you do not see me on that much, THAT WOULD BE WHY. of course, this is hardly set in stone so maybe nothing out of the ordinary will happen. WHO KNOWS.

MERRY CHRISTMAS ♥

Last weekend my sister and I went to Amherst, MA, where my brother is currently living. My sister's graduation date is still up in the air due to a botch in a credit transfer, but she will be graduating within a year and a half, and she's been looking into grad school. Since my brother attends UMASS Amherst, she decided we should visit my brother to see his new apartment and check out the UMASS grad program at the same time.

For those who aren't acquainted with the area, Amherst is way out in the wasteland that is Western Massachusetts. Ok, wasteland is pretty harsh. It just happens to be covered in trees and mountains - basically, it's like the rest of New England once you leave the Boston metropolis - and everything that is not nature out there can be placed into two categories:

-Colleges
-Businesses and housing to service attendees of said colleges.

I am not exaggerating here. Off the top of my head, in the Amherst-Northampton area there's UMASS, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst College, Hampshire College...and I'm fairly sure I'm missing a few more. Those schools are all within 30-45 minutes of each other, and UMASS alone has an undergraduate population that crushes the permanent population of the local towns surrounding it. I can't imagine living in the area permanently, but if you are young and a hipster douchebag unsure of what you want to do or where you want to go in life, it's a fun and enjoyable place for the most part.

The weekend was pretty interesting.

( Beer, car batteries and cocks )

Tomorrow's topic: I have no idea, but I suspect it may involve the reunion of my sister and Mr. Mutey. ;)