Omnivore:

Yeah I'm still alive. I'm kinda fandom-ing again but everywhere on the internet is full of... How do I phrase this... I'm too old and weird and wonky for most people, and the people I'm not too weird for keep jumpscaring me with their breeding kinks and omegaverse headcanons. You've seen the men I like. They'd be terrible mothers! flippant comment to disguise fact I've been pinging between alienation and trauma flashbacks for past week because of fandom bullshit

Are there any general video game comms left on DW? I will genuinely cut my finger off before I rejoin Twitter.

I might post about real life again. One day. I don't have very much impetus to.

The one thing I find more frustrating than randomly stubbing my toe on mpreg, is the fact a lot of the support networks for the things my brain troubles me with, consist of hundreds of people talking all the ways living with my conditions is terrible and unable to be fixed. I saw some ADHD post the other night about time mismanagement interfering with social lives and that 'it stops us doing the things that make us human'. Corpus Christi, I didn't stop hanging out with people because I felt bad about appointments, it was because they were this exact kind of fatalistic all the time and they were miserable as fuck to be around. Anyway so that's a big reason why I have nothing to report save I'm alive and writing mediocre fanfic. I'd link my handle but genuinely who cares

NED

Wasn't doing well at all a few days ago. Sort of kinda doing better now. Last thirty six hours or so I've gone from super-energetic, to sleeping twelve hours and waking up tired and late for work, to scribbling madly on my hand with a pen and miming hitting my monitor with my keyboard, to feeling okay and handling these well, to reading Twitter forgetting that doing that invariably sends me into a massive depression for the rest of night. Whoops! That's where I am at the moment.

I had vivid dreams during last night's twelve hour stint. In one of them, a random short guy who found me attractive described me to my friend (who quoted it back to me verbatim) as 'a sexy power pole'. I've been thinking about this phrase all day.

I need to find something to fill the void left by games because I keep just sticking game-shaped things in there and getting upset. Maybe reading more. The last time I started reading one of the books, I dropped it in a freak accident and damaged the cover a little and freaked the heck out and I haven't dared to touch them since, which is ridiculous considering it was a paperback edition of Dracula featuring some 1970s art of a middle aged man in a tuxedo with fake-ass teeth.

Oh, I bought the Kodansha Humble Bundle and read all of Heaven's Design Team, that was a pretty fun light read. Volume 2 ended on an extraordinarily silly cliffhanger; I can't even find a synopsis of what happens next let alone the release date for volume 3 and this bothers me disproportionately ahaha. Maybe I'll read Mushishi. Or the Powershell cookbook. Mmmmmm.

At the same time as the previous post, I Feel this intense tug-and-pull, where I find what I'd roughly categorise as Nerd Shit infuriating to listen to but the other extremity that conversations I'd be in would go to is hardcore politics and bad things that happened to them lately and 'Hey have you heard about that latest case of internet men harassing people lately?' So it's like my choices are 'irritated at consumerism' and 'depressed AF'

It's rather laughable that I'm passing judgement on other people's statements, when I haven't seen more than two or so people IRL who aren't family for months, now.

Is it just that I'm imbalanced? That I don't know what I want? That I want some kind of Goldilocks zone of social interaction that is realistically impossible to achieve? I don't know. But other people I know can rely on their social networks when they feel bad; I tried that, and I came out of it feeling more dissatisfied and fucked-up and convinced that life is horrid and meaningless than ever before.

I mean, it doesn't help that they keep talking about the same dang cartoon crossover nigh-every time I see them.

Lots of dissatisfaction lately. Please excuse me.

Yowzers, that was probably one of the longer sustained periods of Everything Is Shitty I've ever experienced. I'm glad it calmed the hell down a bit. Life is still crap, but more like *grumbling under breath* rather than *screaming internally and externally*

This post is actually to say I'm going through with writing the NieR fic I mentioned. If anyone reading this is interested, it's here! I feel the writing quality is a little wonky--I have to compromise between 'the best writing I can possibly manage' and 'actually uploading something within the next ten years'--but it feels good to be doing it. I am curious to see how the unexpectedly enthused commenters I got feel about my weird old man gijinka lmao

University is going as well as can be expected in circumstances. The previous semesters, I crashed and burned hard in week 5. This semester, I only took three units and started booking appointments etc early, so that if I clagged out mid-semester again, I had measures in place to pick myself up much faster.

Except then I crashed and burned in WEEK 2 and the resulting brain funk hung around for two weeks, dragged out all the appointments and the massive anhendonia came back in a semester where every assignment requires me to be interested and enthusiastic about things. I'm a bit peeved at the ol' meat-shell.

It's been a while since I wrote a public post, because I every post I drafted, like the above, comes out as 'everything's the same except just that little but significant amount worse' and it gives me the shits.

Something odd happened in the last few days, though. Realising I've gone off games enough that I'm unlikely to buy a new console or a decent PC in the foreseeable future anyway, I looked up NieR Automata spoilers out of curiosity, and it reminded me of an over-ambitious NieR (original, not Automata) fan project I started years ago. I tracked down the old files and yeah, what I had going was over-ambitious and a bit crap in places and really enjoyable to read? Enough that the idea of leaving it on an old backup drive forever actually bothered me!

So, in between scouring the house for my lost student card and staring blankly at assignments, I'll see if I can bring this thing to life. I still get Kudoses on the regular for a Nier snippet I posted on AO3 (a rewrite of a scene from this project) so at least a few people will read it, and it's a good candidate for learning how to finish what I start.

(I actually flounced out of this fandom because I got sick of old men acting like video game fanboys but sshhh)

The quietness is fragility; I'm still not able to wander too far into the internet without seeing something that throws me into an anxiety washing machine for the rest of the day. But while I'm still fragile and my family is still headdesk-inducing, I got through university relatively unscathed, and discovered I can write essays (albeit with much whining and hollering) in the process. The next semester is bearing down on me already. I'm taking the little free time I have to clean the house and remember how to make things.

Something about the time around my birthday seems to make me want to scream and beat my head against the wall and get into fights with people.
(university stress, freakishly awful period cramps, broken phone and developing new muscle pains every time I attempt even the mildest of exercise also probably not helping)

Once I change, everything else will change.

I spend a lot of time whining here, and things abruptly became super-rough for me health and (as direct result) university-wise.

However! However. I overcame my social anxiety enough to go to a thing, and as well as having a good time, I became involved with a neat activism-related project, and have two (!) more events to go to this week, and I'm writing this entry to commemorate this achievement. Nice work, me! 👍