my apple tree, my brightness

Friends only.

With exceptions.

Okay, how the fuck do I change background colour in Opera (ie., the latest version, downloaded approximately, oh, two hours ago)? That's all I want to do. BACKGROUND COLOUR. I would like page styles to remain as they are.

I JUST WANT THE FUCKING BACKGROUND COLOUR OVERRIDE FUCK FUCK TOO FUCKING WHITE MY EYES HURT.

And now I fucked it up and I can't figure out how to restore defaults. Google is not being friendly. because I can't READ IT without squinting. owwwwwww. Seriously, this white-default-override thing LJ's got going on? SUCKS.

Also, Google Chrome? No background colour change option? YOU FUCKING SUCK.

That goes for you too, Safari.

*puts on sunglasses*

*grumbles*

*cuddles totally-customisable fullscreen text editor*

*grumbles more*

What's the name of the black librarian in the anime version of Full Metal Alchemist? Does she have a name?

The Cool Bits Generator is fucking awesome.

I am surrounded by fucking awesome people.

That is all.

:D

I will not read anything that has been written, produced or edited by:

1. Elizabeth Bear
2. Will Shetterly
3. Kathryn Cramer
4. Patrick Nielsen Hayden
5. Teresa Nielsen Hayden

They will not recieve money or pageviews.

There is no place in my fandom for the condescension, arrogance, arseholery, racism and superiority they have displayed. There is no place in my fandom for people who are willing to go to such lengths to hurt, attack, threaten and deny the well-being, thoughts, feelings and very existence of people of colour. There is no place in my fandom for this kind of behaviour.

None.

I shun them.

I suggest you do the same.

Context here.

eta to clarify the issue I'm objecting to, which is the outing of a fan for her antiracist work and allying with people of colour, in order to shut down people of colour. Basically, this post is a big screaming agreement with what she said.

one of my favourite things about writing the Big Damn Novel is that I can write sentences like He's not apologising for the cactus blunder. with perfect seriousness.

:D

When I swap scenes around in my text files I'm always unreasonably paranoid that I'll fuck it up and lose everything. This is not helpful when you're making linear sense of something you began writing out of order. It's all pretty well figured out now, but still. Also, it is 322,000 words now and I am so close to done I can taste it. Only 20K-40K more, I swear! I love it when it feels like riding downhill.

In other news: I HAVE MOVED HOUSE. MY BOOKS ARE UNPACKED. THERE ARE STILL BOXES ON MY FLOOR.

AND I HAVE INTERNET IN NEW HOUSE AFTER THREE WEEKS WITHOUT.

\o/!

This ... thing.

The Big Damn Novel, I mean.

It's staring into my brain.

*cautiously stares back*

Words written: 241,155 (too many)
Amount of coffee drunk: n/a (surprisingly)
Amount of alcohol drunk: n/a (woe is me)
Amount of sleep gotten: do not ask
Words left until this thing is finished: 30K? 40K? 50K? (who the fuck knows?)
Days in the last ten spent slacking off and getting nothing written at all: eight. *facepalm*
Need this done by: ASAFUCKINGP.
Absolutely fucking final deadline: sometime in early December, I'm thinking, say, the sixth. Or the seventh. Or the first. We'll see which one I can manage first.
Preparation done to hand over first 25-30K to kishmet later today for her birthday since she will fail exams if I hand the whole thing over (and also, it is not done, much to my shame): n/a
Planned goal for end of today (19th Nov as of eighteen minutes ago) (before sample handover): 245,000
Percentage of brain devoured by this thing: 99%
Character I hate most right now: Both of my OMCs. FUCK YOU BOTH. FUCK YOU.
Character I love most right now: Anya, because she is a breath of sanity ♥
How much do I hate this story right now on a scale from 1 to 10: 5
How much do I love my Kish on a scale of 1 to 10: 11!

... right, bedtime.

A guy got elected in this one country somewhere.

In more important news, now I can finally get down to business on my Big Damn Novel. Two weeks left to finish this thing.

*stretches*

To work.

I am in that stage of writing where I obsessively read and reread all of the Writing Tips & Tricks sites out there in hopes of staving off the creeping fear that I am doing it terribly, terribly wrong.

*facepalm*

Onwards.

Bad: I have my period and it is wiping me out.

Good: My treatment is, as far as I can tell, working pretty well overall.

However: It is coming to my attention that my hips, lower back and elbows are making themselves further known. Like, 'y halo thar, I see you're starting to forget about me. well. Y HALO THAR'. I do not appreciate this. I suspect there is something about my computer/chair arrangement that is making my elbows in particular hate me, but I have no clue what. I can't set my chair higher or it cuts into my stomach; I can't set it lower because then my hands and wrists whine at me about unfair treatment.

Further however: It is also coming to my attention that I need glasses, and not just because my minimum universal text size requirement is now officially blown to 20pt from 16pt, and I now have this update window to what I guess is 26pt and I still can barely read it. I suspect my eyes, rather than simply needing glasses, are finding it in themselves to bring up contrast issues. Also their dislike of Courier; how the fuck does anyone read this shit? (A while ago I set the html file of one of my fics-in-progress to light blue, black text on light blue, and the ease of it was amazing.)

Good: Codeine+paracetamol. Let us not mention the RDAs, okay? They're guidelines.

I am exhausted. All the white on this page is exhausting. Trying to think about my novel-in-progress is like thinking through a colander. I am exhausted and I am coming out of my depressive-funk of the last couple months and I do not feel better for it. I hurt. I am going to shut up now.

eta: screw it. I don't care if this is my mother's computer. *fucks with background colours*

son of eta: text size: Extra Large and Window colour 1: light grey + firefox's background also being light grey: godDAMN that's better.

Note to self: don't hold a seminar on psychological trauma while really fucking drunk. Actually, don't ever. Learn to keep your mouth shut, because seriously, nobody fucking cares.

I'm in that sleep-deprived state of mind where you say things like 'anemones, dear fucking monkeysuckers, the anemones!' and try to write really bad meta with lead sentences like '1. Drowning is bad.', '2. The problem is not that it doesn't mean what you think it means, it's that it does, and if it doesn't, that's somebody else's fault', and do things like come up with bad fanfic plots scarcely covering up the underlying outrage of realising that there are only twenty-three fonts on my laptop, and this is absolutely unfair.

On that note: does anyone know of a font that scales well? A sans-serif, readable font that doesn't scale into horrid blocky-thick o hai modernism at point 20 or so? I'm currently using Tahoma, and it's gorgeous at 16 and not-so-awesome-but-okay at 18 and it is ACK NO GO AWAY at point 20.

This font thing irritates me, but then again, most things irritate me these days. It's all very well and good going, 'oh, but that's just temporary, you'll get over it' but when you realise that you've been stewing in huffy-puffy outrage fatigue for so long that things like going out into the backyard in your bare feet after a long while of staring at nothing in particular coming to the awareness of it being fucking freezing outside sounds perfectly logical and reasonable when a) it's pretty obvious beforehand that, yeah, it's fucking freezing outside, and b) you should take advantage of this excellent power of forethought and c) not fucking go outside, well. Well, then we have a problem, don't we? Argh.

Which is why my lack of internet access for the last few days has been surprisingly helpful in that a) it gave me time to be weirdly strung out on sleep-deprivation and stare very intently at my laptop screen while Guys and Dolls lyrics scrumble through my mind on repeat, and b) write some more and c) cool off from aforesaid outrage (:O!!!! <-- my face, I tell you) it was also surprisingly unhelpful in that a) Guys and Dolls gets fucking annoying after the thirty-eighth repetition of 'pray no more, pray no more, put down the bottle and pray no more', b) I did not in fact get all that much writing done, and c) cooling off only works if you stay cooled-off, by which I mean that I am pissed off again.

On the one hand, this is a good sign. I have the energy to be pissed off. On the other hand, I actually don't have that energy, and it's coming out of my brain being deep-fried worse than a bucket of chips. Which implies that I should probably sleep more. Go to bed, or something. Except I don't particularly want to, because then I get huge long dreams that go on and on and on forever and have all sorts of interesting plotlines and emotional development and etc. etc. and I remember it just when I wake up, but then I forget about it before I've even mustered the energy to sit up. It's like, 'what the fuck was that?' and I can't even tell whether it was any good, frankly, whether any of them were any good at all, and to be honest they probably weren't because I'm in a very unoriginal state of mind right now and all I want to do is attack everything teeth-and-nails-first.

Okay. Solutions: write more. Sleep more. Be awesome! Even if I don't feel like it, at least I'll have been fucking awesome, goddamnit. And remember to, like, eat. And drink some water. I think I might be a bit dehydrated. I get a bit loopy when I'm dehydrated. I kept myself dehydrated all through primary school because I hated the taste of coffee then and it was a relatively inexpensive way to go through the entirety of it with few memories other than some bad lingering impressions and not much of anything to show for it. Don't be dehydrated, you FORGET EVERYTHING! Or you never learn it in the first place. Either way. Yes. I'm going to get some water to drink and probably some painkillers for my absurd headache, and I am going to see about sleep and possibly be lucid enough tomorrow to regret how fuckwitted this entry is.

Things I have had to look up in the last hour for my current opus:

1) Exchange rates between Japanese yen, the United States dollar, and the Euro
2) The history of South Korean civil activism
3) The structure of the human foot & penis
4) Hit pop music in Japan the late eighties.
5) The history + appearance of former Yugoslavia's currency, the dinara

May all gods bless the internet.

Explanation can be found here. Over at bOING bOING, elfwreck posted this comment: "Definitely time to write some AP/RIAA slashfic. With extensive use of AP quotes."

And thus, it is written. Badly, but nevertheless!

( 'But someone is a terrorist pirate on the internet!' )

Just writing blather, really.

There's something fascinating about writing AUs for your AUs. I took an accidental break from my main fic-of-the-moment a while back and I've been getting back into the swing of things with AUs - musician aus, genderbending AUs, artisan AUs, serial killer AUs, just riffing on this or that and writing them out off the cuff.

They're all different permutations of how things could've been and couldn't've been in the main verse, really, and it's interesting how some things translate and some things don't, especially when it comes to screwing with gender and class divides, as well as how the characters deal with this or that changed aspect and still remain, to my mind, recognisable as themselves.

Which isn't something that happens in RL, generally speaking; people do tend to change a lot, often unrecognisably, but I think part of it is still answering to the name you knew them by, if that makes sense. It's often easy to pick out who they are now from who they were and join up the dots.

The original AU concept has always been a sprawling one with zillions of possible offshoots, and there's always been AUs scattered here and there, ten-minute ones quickly fired off in IM, and I'm sort of considering some crossovers, too, just to keep the gears going. My writing isn't quite back to the point where it's smooth enough that I'm comfortable working on the main narrative again, but it's definitely getting there, and I'll probably get around to the opus tomorrow night and actually, you know, write the thing. Whee!

It's somehow comforting to start a numbered list from 0.

How I know I need yet another cocktail of B-vitamins:

a little while ago I spent a few minutes staring at the chair opposite me at the table, convinced that it was pulled out at a 45-degree angle like someone just upped-and-left, and I looked away and forgot about it. Soon after my eyes twitched so I couldn't see for a few seconds, I blinked and cursed, and presto! The chair was pushed in right to the table edge. As it was this morning. I haven't touched that chair all day, and yet I saw it pulled out at an angle, clear as anything, for about forty minutes and noticed absolutely nothing wrong with this. The eye-twitching is a symptom. The random unremarkable weird-after-the-fact hallucinations are another.

In combination? Injection time.

Note to self: take your damn vitamins.

Moment of the day: I associate the smell of burnt toast to one of my elder sisters, one whom I don't see very often. It feels like she's right there in our kitchen, a thing that makes me smile. It's just so strong, like I could reach out and touch her.

My reaction to hitting 75K and getting within gasping distance of 76K, said aloud when I did the wordcount:

"Well, shit. Looks like I'll have to finish this."

Which actually is code for a whole lot of butt-wiggling and bad dancing. This will probably finish out around 90-100K, maybe 120K. The main framework's almost all been laid out; it's writing in supporting scenes now, carrying this or that detail from scene to scene, scenes with additional characters, rounding out my POV character, the stuff just before the end, all the fiddly little stuff inbetween this and that. Never mind my nattering; it'll grow, find its own progression. I can feel the shape of it now.

This is a far better state of mind, believe me. It's kind of a headrush, like cresting at the top of a hill seeing all the way down and all of the ways I could fall off my bike and die. But it's still wicked fun. Whee!

I have been crying all over the place. Everywhere. Buckets and buckets of tears. I am so over this. SO OVER IT.

and now I go cry myself to sleep yay. oh, emotional upheaval, you suck. You really, really suck.