Omnivore:

Yadda yadda this year was an blowhole etc anyway

I don't do resolutions cos they crash and burn more often than not (I TRIED THIS YEAR. I REALLY DID). The vague plans for next year are:

- Develop more as a writer.
- Lose weight and get terrifyingly buff. Since all my other interests are missing, presumed dead, this is a good opportunity to get this out of the way, cos it clearly takes even more effort than I first assumed :U

And some stuff that's less interesting.

Will post more about writing. Not so much the second goal unless it involves picking up an interesting hobby. I don't need a cheer squad! As I have said before, my sense of self worth lies not in my physical appearance but in other bullshit subjective criteria :D

I should make more than vague plans though, or I'll get nowhere...

I just watched Gintama's Four Devas arc
Damn eye drops made my eyes water profusely

May have fatally misjudged applicable use of konmari method to my situation. Standard scenario Marie Kondo describes is: people who own far, far too many things, get rid of what they don't want any more to better appreciate what they do want to keep.
My scenario: I own very little and getting rid of the things I don't need is making me realise how even less substantial I am as a person.

My room has less dust bunnies and I found the receiver for my wireless keyboard, but the things I'm turfing up make me ill, like D-average school reports and drawings from 2012 that were better than what I draw now and a mountain of receipts I have to keep to work out how many thousands of dollars I owe people...

My current sense of self worth is on the level of a crumpled up Nestle-branded empty water bottle. It blows! And I'm going to have to listen to people talk about their Christmas purchases in a few hours. Pray for my temper.

Unrelated, unmitigated positive: I got to pet a really cute dog this morning.

I'm a bit worried about how much media I'm consuming lately and how much time I spent perusing AO3. Am I learning to enjoy things again, or am I regressing to the point I was around 2012-2013, where I threw myself into fandom and neglected everything else? The latter being better than how I felt for most of 2016 doesn't make it good...

I'm on an unemployment payment with a short medical exemption, which expires tomorrow. I think my recent job history gives Centrelink et al the impression that finding a new stable job will be easy for me, which for numerous reasons is a big NOPE. I'll ask the peeps at the job office if I can get more assistance, maybe an appointment with a counselor. Might not be able to achieve anything until after new year's, but that's fine.

Which isn't to say I haven't done anything productive in the meantime. I spent this week cleaning my room and getting rid of things I no longer need. My housemate bought the KonMari method book out of curiosity, and while it's not feasible to follow it to the letter, it's a good starting point for someone like me, who doesn't own a lot but has weird guilt issues getting rid of what I don't need. I see people ribbing the book a lot, but honestly, I find KonMari's occasional bizarre gender essentialism wwaaaaayy more off-putting than the idea of talking to my socks lol

In the next few days, I'll go through my old writing and make a plan of attack for inkingitout. I specified that my word count goal was for published words. I am capable of writing! What I need to work on is revising and getting stories to a place where people besides myself can read them. I also want to clear away the older ideas that resurface in my mind on the regular, to make way for new things, hence looking through old writing. I have the project I did for a rushed attempt at NaNoWriMo this year, ideas I originally had for games which I could convert into novels, some fanfic drafts...

Speaking of, I rewrote a vignette based on Invisible Inc, posted it on AO3, and got a few kudos-es, which makes me happy. Part of my brain craves more attention and I have to keep telling it, 'If you want more views maybe give me ideas based on things besides, you know, obscure computer games. Hell, I KNOW you've been watching Yuri on Ice, you have no excuse, get on it.' XD If I have luck and the result is actually suitable for public consumption I'll let you know XD

The main risk of thinking about writing is that I'll forget to do anything else. This post took a weirdly long time to write, for instance. I had better get back to cleaning.

Sorry last two posts so maudlin. I am legitimately in better state than I was, say, six months ago, but not much happening to write about (that's isn't too much real life detail). For a change I'll write stream-of-consciousness gibberish about anime I watched lately, instead.

Re:Zero: I marathoned this a few months ago. I liked the art and its gruesome take on the time leap concept, which is extremely gruesome in places, so take that into consideration if you're thinking of watching it.
I'm worried that its light novel/moe tropes will make it exponentially less appealing to me over time, but I enjoyed it enough that I'll give the next season a chance. I really couldn't care less who is best girl TBH. My OTP is suffering/Subaru.

Steins;gate: Hated the characters in the first episode (direct quote: "WHY IS THERE ALWAYS A FUCKING MAID"), but I kept watching based on the good reviews I heard, and aside from spending episode eighteen facepalming, the show won me over in the end.
I read a LP of the visual novel, and the main character is rather more unpleasant in it, which is disappointing (I'm not talking about that one ending, more his initial thoughts about Faris are really whiny and the authors have a bad case of Male Gaze). He's more interesting to follow in the anime and his English dub actor's actually pretty good.
OTOH I tried watching Occult;Nine and raged out before the end of episode one. :D

Mob Psycho 100: Good! Excellent animation. Protip: Reigen comes across as one of those annoying Mr Satan-esque 'weak imposter who claims all the credit' characters and he... Well he kind of is haha, but give him a chance.

Hunter x Hunter (2011 anime): This image sums it up. It's honestly one of the best things I've ever seen, but I have a theory that the manga keeps going on hiatus because it's so intense and bleak that it saps Togashi's will to live. An English dub is playing on Adult Swim atm if you're into that.

Gintama: Who the balls even is the target audience for this show??? I love the shit out of (most of) it but I wonder what the kids reading Shounen Jump make of the references to 70s television shows and porn actresses. Not to mention Heidi of the Alps, which I've concluded must be the M.A.S.H. of anime and reruns on Japanese television for eternity. The show itself asks who the audience is so it's not just me.

Gakuen Handsome: Gintama has spoiled me for bloody stupid gag anime, alas. But Mitsurugi looks like my drawings of Sephiroth when I was 14 and that in itself is hilarious.

Yuri!!! on Ice: I avoided this cos I don't trust anime with fujoshi appeal to not pull bullshit, and I guess it might still do so before the season ends. For now though? Actually pretty good. Yeah I'm surprised, but pleased! Pichit is a QT

I read some books too, like I mentioned before. Dune, for example. A few days after I finished it, we were talking about thighs chafing when you wear a dress and get sweaty in the summer, and I said 'It's basically the gom jabber'. That's the only reason I brought that up tbh. Walk without rhythm.

I've been using this account a lot, mainly for private notes and writing crap first drafts.

Besides that, I've functionally vanished from the internet and meatspace:
I ditched Twitter and (besides the invisible-inc tag) Tumblr
I have deliberately avoided everything to do with gamedev, even projects I knew people were hyped for
I haven't been to any local meets; and
I have barely hung out with anyone IRL

The reasons are myriad and not, as one may initially suspect, due to bigots on the internet (although they give me the shits). I tried a few times to describe these reasons, but words fall short. There's a part of me feels that if only I explain how I feel in The Right Way that the problems will stop, and I'm well aware that part of me is mistaken.
The most succinct explanation would be: 'I choose to no longer spent my precious time around people who think The Onion is a good website'

Anyway! I'm not dead. I'm of reasonably good health. I adamantly refuse to go anywhere for Christmas. I attempted and so far have failed a fun craft project. I am writing and reading more (a lot of Ursula K Le Guin and a tentative return to AO3). I watched all of the 2011 Hunter x Hunter anime which is a Trip.
I'm aimless, confused and more often than not terrified, but I'm doing okay and even capable of having fun on occasion, which is good enough for now.

I'll be making public posts now and then, to become reacquainted with stating my thoughts in more than 140 characters.

When not cleaning or stressing about employment, I've been drawing. Mainly backs; they mystify me. I have a cheap-o anatomy book I should bust out.

Also drawing real people. Not sure why. I have some silly 4-koma ideas but none of the people I've drawn lately feature in 'em. I appreciate the challenge, I guess. It's incredibly hard to draw real people without making them look super doofy, so observation is key. But also, simplification, otherwise it's jammed in the anime/realism uncanny valley... oi.

The guy who draws Yowapeda doesn't appear to give a shit about accurate jawlines so I'm not sure why I'm this hard on myself!

I told someone about a particular breathing exercise I found helped with menstrual cramps but I can't find any good instructions on the internet. The only sites I've found are not quite right, are very vague, or are selling a product. This is my step-by-step version.



NB 1: I'm not a doctor!

NB 2: This was originally taught to me as a relaxation technique. I think it is derived from Taoist breathing-oriented internal martial arts, but I've lost contact with the person who taught it to me originally, so I wouldn't be able to tell you any specific names, sorry.

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EDIT FROM FOUR YEARS INTO THE FUTURE: The book The War of Art is absolute 'Big Pharma wants to eat your creativity fix your mental issues by working harder if you don't think about your project 24/7 you will fail' horseshit garbage and I still regret spending $3 to buy it.

The one good thing I got from it is a great plot bunny for a story about a sinister cabal of internet entrepreneurs.



( Original post under cut )

Tumblr's atmosphere is wigging me out a bit. Instead of sitting around grinching about the inherent terrible-ness of Tumblr like most others, I'm dusting this off and keeping an eye out for alternative means to communicate.

I don't have much to say though. It's a problem. I have several alternatives to social networks that piss me off (my irritation at Tumblr isn't even an iota of my irritation at Twitter)--snail mail, IM, Skype. I see people I should throw a message at quite often. I just don't have anything to say! "I'm still muddling along," over and over? The very thought is off-putting.

When I do have something to share, the feedback I get is... less than overwhelming. I feel like I'm grasping for attention like back when I was a miserable off-kilter teenager, when I put it like that. I accept that a lot of is nothing to do with other people being inherently terrible; rather, it's the way I deal with things being a lot different to the way other people deal with things. But part of accepting that means I'm avoiding sites where I know, from experience, that I'd achieve nothing but a sensation of being slighted, overwhelming irritation, or both.

I hope all this avoidance doesn't mean I miss out on something super-important or useful to me, but my patience and my subconscious are thanking me for it.

I've been thinking a lot of deep, weird thoughts lately. I'm in a good mood but some of the thoughts I'm mulling over concern me. One of the stories I'm kicking around deals with a person being in a situation I found myself in, and I can't stop thinking, "This is such a fucking self-insertion my-life-is-pain pity party, who is going to have the patience for this?" But you know, as melodramatic as it is, it literally happened to me. Real life can be stupid and melodramatic!

Um, what else... Last night I had a dream about being in my old high school (not the one I usually have nightmares about, the one before that). The place was teeming with students at ten o'clock at night. I walked towards where my old home block of classrooms used to be, munching on a hot dog (red frankfurt sausage, tomato sauce, no mustard or onion). I rounded the corner to see a huge glass enclosure where giant, uncanny four-legged hot dog bun beasts lumbered back and forth. One of them turned its massive head towards me to stare me down with the pink steamed meat where its head presumably had been. I looked down at my hot dog, also missing its tip, then turned and ran like the dickens.

So no change there then.