Rodo's Journal

I think I mentioned my obsession with Horrible Histories, although "obsession" might be a bit tame a word for the utter glee I feel when listening to the songs. And since I just found a couple of new videos to listen to, it reminded me that there was also great Yuletide fic that I don't think I linked yet. But first, the songs:

- Single Ladies, by Mary Seacole, way better than Florence, yo.

- David Bowie - ChangesCharles Darwin - Natural Selection. Hey, it is about changes.

- The Monkees, pardon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Diogenes - The Thinkers

- The RAF Boys debut with their RAF Pilots Song Watch out, Take That

The last two make me want to dance so much. I want more! I guess there goes the rest of my day. Again. As for fanfic:

- Cranky Cristmasses in HHTV's News at When studio.

- The Big Gay Episode - including songs!

- Merry Monarchs experiment with crossdressing

☞ For those of you who also read sevilemar it is not news that I visited her for a few days last month. It was fun, despite the stress and serious caffeine and cat withdrawal. (Typing this one-handed since the other one is occupied by a furball.) It was also much easier than I expected and I got stuff done for a change. For some reason I find that difficult to achieve on my own, as evidenced by the unbelievable amount of hours (six) that I managed to stay awake yesterday.

☞ I finally have the money for ME3, but I hesitate to buy it. I spoiled myself for ending, and given what I read I think that was a very good idea. I have to mentally work through that before I can actually play the game or else it will be the third season of Torchwood all over again, and I want to continue loving the games. Spoilers, I love them.

☞ I’m still obsessing about dramas. Prepare for another recs post in the near future. I also can’t get enough of Choi Si Won. It’s embarrassing, but hey, just look at him. Especially if he’s shirtless.

If I had known ordering books and mangas from YesAsia would be so much trouble, I wouldn't have done it.

I had ordered stuff from overseas before, with a credit card, and so far it hasn't been any trouble. Thus the letter that I received on Wednesday came as a surprise; apparently YesAsia doesn't put the receipt on the outside of the package, which makes it impossible for customs to figure out the contents to tell you the fee. I had to go to the "local" customs office in Bremen, with a copy of the receipt and credit card statement, the letter and possibly proof of identity. So I copied the stuff and looked up the route to the office. Center of Bremen. And because of the price of train and tram tickets, I would have to drive. This is probably where I should mention that I have driven a car in a city exactly once before, during the mandatory driving lesson on the topic.

Yeah, turns out driving wasn't really the problem. The problem was my navigation system, AKA mum. It's her car, she was even more afraid of driving into the city than me and she's the type who would get so distracted by a navigation system she'd crash the car within a day. My mother insisted I should drive left all the time until I figured out where exactly I was, which was nowhere near where I was supposed to be, on the opposite side of the city centre. Then, she couldn't decide whether I should turn right or not until it was too late and we ended up at the harbour, amidst a lot of cargo. When we finally arrived where we were supposed to be, I was dreading what would come next.

I had to open the package, that was all. Seriously, that was why I had to come, open the package, because apparently they're not allowed to do that on their own or something. The guy looked inside, figured he had no way of knowing whether those were the right books or not (the receipt inside being in romaji and the titles in kanji) and handed me the package. I didn't have to show any of the copied paged. I didn't even have to pay customs because the books weren't expensive enough. I bet it would be easier and cheaper for everyone if they just delivered the package.

Luckily enough the way back was mostly uneventful. Except for that pheasant that ran in front of the car and almost got run over.

☞ I’m supposed to be studying, I have far too few days left to cram two lessons of Spanish into my brain, I have a tutorial today and I still can’t manage. Doesn’t help that I feel as if I’m clawing at my skin from the inside to get out and that all I really want to do is hide under a rock somewhere until it’s done. Fuck depression (yes, finally got a preliminary diagnosis of that and sociophobia, but it doesn’t cover all my symptoms).

☞ RL sucks, sort of. Family trouble (my brother and I in the same house, yay!) and my mother’s friend has fallen off the wagon twice this month already, phoning when she’s in a panic and begging my mother to solve her problems. It’s not unexpected (everyone but her and her son saw it coming from miles away), but it’s stressful anyway. It bleeds over into my life too, since I have to console my mother and assure her that staying here and not doing anything is the right choice.

☞ On happier note: I splurged and bought a couple of things, among other things some books, one of which I already read and loved, and Skyrim, which does wonders for my sleep for some reason. I often get that with open world RPGs. If only I could choose between the factions, my character is a patriotic Nord, but she dislikes the racism, having grown up in the Empire.

☞ And last but not least: a recipe for mushroom bourguignon, via starlady. It is delicious, it is everything I’ve missed about meat and you absolutely have to try it.

☞ I went ice skating today. On my still brand new (15-year-old) skates. I lasted maybe ten minutes, fell on my knees once and I’ll probably have sore muscles later. I really am the least sporty person in the world, but maybe the weather lasts a few more days and I can try again.

☞ Rani is fine. Finally. She’s been spayed and her diarrhea is gone, hopefully for good. Since then, she’s been even more active and had a growth spurt during which her weight doubled. She likes to run around like crazy half the day and even toppled over my giant stack of books.

☞ I have an X-Box! And X-Box LIVE account (predictably called rodototal – in case someone knows how the friending thing works), that it took me three hours to set up because the help pages were singularly unhelpful. Yesterday, I tried a shooter for the first time (Crysis 2). I am still very bad at the shooting thing (why do the enemies have to move?), but at least I don’t die all the time in casual mode.

☞ If any of you have recs for Spanish language media or fic, now’s the time to tell me, since exposure has proven to be the most useful for me in learning and I am actually taking a course I don’t want to fail. I know someone on my dwircle recced a TV series with angels and demons a while back. I am also thinking about acquiring a book with poems, maybe Neruda, if the local shops have them. I am also open for comics and series/movies with subtitles (still a beginner, after all).

It's not everyday that your favourite poet dies. Yesterday was that day. The cat toppled over my stack of books as well, so when I got up this morning, I dug my copy of one of her books out of the rubble.

Rest in peace, Wisława Szymborska, and may your poems be remembered forever.

Freude am Schreiben.
Möglichkeit des Erhaltens.
Vergeltung der sterblichen Hand.

As translated into German by Karl Dedecius.

I've been working on these longer than it seems, but here all three prompts are, all on one post:

( I. Usage of other languages in your English fic (foreign characters, emphasis) - getting it wrong/right )

( II. What makes THE movie fandom (big, e.g. XMFC, Inception, Avengers) )

( III. Do you ever come across statements in fic that seem wrong to you, but aren't easily verifiable? )

☞ Due to RL troubles, I didn't get around to updating yet again. That's especially dumb of me because I have actually been writing fic. lian was kind enough to support me by betaing, so after years of not managing it, I wrote an advent calender (hopefully it's finished soon): Mass Effect Adventskalender 2011. As the name suggests, it's a series of ficlets, written in German, and the fandom is Mass Effect.

☞ While we're on the topic: I am hopelessly addicted to ME. Still. I can't wait for part three. I always thought shooters weren't for me, but I was obviously wrong. The more I play it, the more I think that Male!Shep is dreadfully boring too. Which is probably kind of odd, since Fem!Shep is more or less like Male!Shep, but she still rocks. Maybe it's because of the voice actress, or maybe because she does everything the male version does.

☞ I'm thinking of acquiring an X-Box 360 (mostly because it seems to have most of the games I'd like to play), but since the last gaming console I owned was... ehrm... a Sega Master System, if I'm not mistaken, I have no idea what is most useful or what type of equipment/TV I'd need. Any advice?

☞ I went to the Christmas market in Bremen today. Really late, but I still needed to buy food for the holidays (ramyeon), so of course I had to have fried mushrooms and garlic sauce (my favourite Christmas market food). Which meant I ended up buying manga as well, some paper, a ring that almost fits on my ring fingers and sweets. It's not as if I don't have enough Christmassy food, though. I made mincemeat pies for the first time yesterday, for example.

☞ If anyone has a recipe for marzipan, especially low sugar marzipan, please tell me. I tried to find marzipan for my mother, only to find out that the EU outlawed diet food. Which means my mother now has the choice between no sweets etc. ever or run of the mill sugary stuff she's not supposed to have. I'd rather try to make some on my own and substitute sugar with artificial sweetener or something. My mother loves her marzipan.

☞ Cat news: Rani still has a bit of diarrhea, but she didn't poop anywhere in the last week. She's got E. coli in her bowels (you know, the EHEC stuff), and if the current treatment doesn't help, she'll have to take anti-biotics. She's otherwise healthy, though.

I think I mentioned that I now own a cat already? And at least some of you have already seen her. She's cute, black and called Rani. She's also very into human slaves and beds (meaning me, mostly) and that makes it sort of difficult to type a lot, work on stories or anything useful. I need two arms for that and one is occupied by a dozing cat about 50% of the day. Right now, Rani is dozing on my legs, so I can still not get up, but at least I can type. Oh, and she goes berserk when anyone tries to eat human food near her. I know, I tried. And ended up with a cat in my stew.

Unfortunately, she also has diarrhea. She has had it since I fetched her two weeks ago, and I think it might be getting worse. We went to the vet twice already, but he just gave her something against worms and said it would be fine. The next time, he took her temperature and looked at her teeth, and apparently didn't see anything wrong, so he gave her her shot (which she coped well with). I hope it's just something harmless like food intolerance, but it definitely doesn't help that my first pet, a guinea pig, died a week after we got her. From diarrhea.

So if any of you have any advice: I'm all ears.

( And to save your dwircle, a photo of Rani in her favourite sleeping place behind the cut )

Now I hope that the OTW archive will be a lot like Animexx (which is for fanart and dōjinshi as well, and which is the website of an association), but with less focus on anime fandoms and better rules. I have also been told by someone in the OTW that they want to make it more international than ff.net, which is what I volunteered for. My Thoughts on Yaoi/the OTW by rodo, 13th January 2008

First off, this is not an election post. It is an evaluation of sorts, and an explanation as to why I do not think I can justify working for the OTW for longer if there aren’t some drastic changes. This is not me being dramatic, in fact, I feel rather sober about it all. I did cry over my keyboard, but that’s not why I write it. I did have volunteer burnout, but that was years ago. I just came to realise that within the organisation, I am powerless to express my dissatisfaction on a wider scale, and that my hopes for the OTW will likely never be realised. I can not change that, which is partly due to the communication culture within the organisation, a culture that I am not equipped to deal with.

( 1. Forced Positivity – the OTW’s equivalent of Newspeak )

( 2. What I Came To Achieve and What I Didn’t )

After about four years, here I am, trying to figure out the chances of the OTW becoming what I dreamed of. And I think they are slim. I fought windmills for years and failed. So unless somebody can convince me that there absolutely will be radical changes soon, I don’t think I can justify my continued involvement. Because after four years of development, how can my priority not be an afterthought?

Okay, so I have been silent for ages again. I didn't exactly plan on it, but I kept putting everything off, and other stuff I'm not supposed to talk about, and... well, most of you probably know what it is like.

So, to ease myself back into posting, I'll post some pictures of my Shepard from Mass Effect 2 a great game that I've played way too often, although Rani isn't particularly fond of all the shooting. Rani would be my new miniature panther who is currently running around somewhere, probably trying to catch her persistent stalker (AKA her tail), or begging for human food (which she isn't allowed to eat). So far, she seems to be a powerful anti-depressant. Maybe I'll post a little video with her under flock.

Anyway, lian, I hope you are happy:

( Four Shepard pictures behind the cut. )

Maybe I'll elaborate on me quitting the OTW later, or rather most likely quitting, because I don't see the board doing what I need them to do to stay on. Well, we'll see next month.

I still haven’t finished my current dorama binge (hey, I haven’t even worked my way up to the Chinese and Japanese doramas), so I decided to do a recs post every time I have five series to recommend. I have a type when it comes to series that I do watch, so some elements are bound to repeat themselves. So here are two historical dramas, one about conmen, one about revenge and one about an unlikely couple. Not in that order.

( City Hunter, Iljimae, Oh! My Lady, The Return of Iljimae, Tazza )

☞ I'm sick. I'm a terrible sick person. I'm as whiny as a stereotypical man, only I get way more clingy. So I try to compensate by writing an entry.

☞ My entry for parallelsfic: The Taming of a Crazy Horse (2278 words, fandom: Sungkyunkwan Scandal, pairing: Yong Ha/Jae Shin. I'll repost it once I get around to sorting the epic amount of screencaps I took during the rewatch.

☞ Another series you should definitely be watching is Teen Wolf. You didn't see that one coming, I bet. But seriously, it's good entertainment. Not necessarily intelligent entertainment, but good anyway. It's also definitely a series for girls. There's just no other reason for featuring so many half-naked men. Apart from that: the series plays with your espectations (Lydia!), there's a star-crossed romance, the dumbest main character ever (which is awesome, I promise), a best friend with ADD (<3 Stiles) and decent horror and humour.

And now I'll crawl back into bed and curl up with Ghost Story. Or maybe I'll watch Personal Preference instead. Way too many choices.

Okay, so I disappeared again. I swear I didn't mean to, it's just... well, you know. Shiny that distracts you, like City Hunter, the awesome Korean drama that ended yesterday, my meds and the weather, who I think might be responsible for me requiring 16 hours of sleep per day some weeks, the fic exchange that I sighned up for (more on that later) and me just generally being distracted, lazy and short-attention-spanned.

So what have I been doing? I finished the fic for the exchange, which is now in need of an English native speaker who could beta read it. Because it is due on August 1st and I my English has become worse lately. And possibly rather purple. So if any of you feel the strong need to procrastinate on something important by betaing fic, I'm the person to talk to. I also have two Highlander drafts in German (triple drabble and ~10k) to offer by the way.

Regarding the fandom of the exchange fic: I will reveal it next month, and I took a lot of screenshots while I did the review, so I might post a picspam too. Provided my laziness etc. doesn't get the better of me.

And now I have to go earn some money, since I'm all out of reasons not to. And drink some sparkling wine to fight the tiredness.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted a lot lately. One reason for that is, as I mentioned, my recent obsession with dramas. Another reason is far more difficult for me to write about, since I lack all the vocabulary. Which is odd, really. My English is very good by now, but in some areas, I just don’t know how to express myself. Two of them being cooking/baking and gardening.

So while I spent a lot of time outside, I thought about what kind of flowers I would pick as a child, how vicious some weeds are, when which herbs were to be planted, which flowers to pick and so on and so forth. Oddly enough, I found out I already know most of the words – I might even feel confident in using them in fiction or a poem – I just had no idea what the thing behind the word is supposed to look like. I knew that lady’s smock is a wildflower with small blossoms of a pale violet, but I didn’t know that I used to pick them and arrange them with buttercups (which I am not supposed to call that, since this particular flower is only called that in the southern parts of Germany, according to wiki). I knew parsley was a common kitchen herb, but I didn’t know it referred to Petersilie. In a way, I think my knowledge of these words was as theoretical as the knowledge a blind person has of some visual terms.

( So this post means I’m working on my vocabulary, mostly. )

My next project is going to be the old herb garden, which is … well, there is no ivy and an immense redcurrant bush (my fault, too) instead of holly, which means it should be easier, right?

So, I’ve been watching dorama again. This isn’t the first time, but this time I’ve actually managed to finish more than one series because I didn’t have to rely on my ex-flatmate to supply me with new material. She always gave up on everything after the first couple of episodes. Memory like a goldfish, attention span of a fly.

Anyway, after a few tries, I found out what I disliked about the dorama that I watched a few years ago. Many have love triangles or – if the authors feel like it – love dodecahedrons, and for some reason I almost always dislike the main guy that eventually ends up getting the girl. The second male lead is nice, far more attractive and really awesome, while the male main character is an asshole that treats the female main character like shit. Yeah, not so much my thing. Some series can make it work for me, but most can’t. I don’t think I’m the only one with this problem, so here are a few dorama recs from me:

( Coffee Prince, Hong Gil Dong, Powerful Opponents, Strongest Chil Woo, Sungkyunkwan Scandal )

☞ Yes, still around, more or less. I'm still watching a lot of K-dramas, and there's the draft of a recs post on my hard drive somewhere. I'll put it up when I've finished another two or three dramas, which could take anywhere from five days to five weeks.

☞ The timeline is this vague because a lot depends upon the weather, which happens to be very much not April weather at the moment. And whenever it is a sunny day, I have to work in the garden. I'm not very useful there (allergies), so I get to weed (more like de-jungle) the flower beds and watch over the herbs and stuff. My mother doesn't like doing that, so she hasn't done it in years. My father had the bright idea of planting ivy too, which means that I now have to weed the garden using a saw, among other tools. I probably killed the crocusses too, which had been MIA for years because they were buried under dead grass, ivy, leaves and weeds, but miraculously still alive. If the weather remains good, I might be done in a month or so. With the one flower bed.

☞ My mother isn't that much of a help either. I had to drive her to get X-rays yesterday because she fell off a ladder and "I'm fine" isn't very convincing when she can barely move. She is fine, except for some bruises, and hasn't been whining as much since.

☞ I, on the other hand, have been feeling better healthwise, so maybe I will manage to do some research (I have to give the books back in two weeks ...) and work on my stories. I hope, at least. And wait anxiously for rain.

Titel: Schminke
Fandom: Highlander
Autor: rodo
Länge: 100 Wörter
Rating: 6+
Charaktere: Methos, Silas
A/N: Diese Geschichte ist Teil meines Beitrags zum Projekts Twentyfive auf ff.de, bearbeitet wurde das Stichwort "Wer schön sein will muss leiden". Eine Übersicht gibt es unter Et in Arcadia ego.
Inhalt: Eine Szene aus dem Alltag der Reiter.


( „Muss das wirklich sein, Methos?“, maulte Silas. )

... where did that month go again? I swear, it was around here somewhere. Anyway:

☞ I have been vaguely sick. Meaning that I am too tired to stay awake for an entire day for some reason. If I stay awake for too long, I get a headache that will only get worse until I get to sleep for an hour or two. No clue what exactly is wrong. Maybe it's just the time of the year.

☞ I completely forgot to mention that I participated in the Lunar New Year Exchange on white_lotus, didn't I? Well, I did! I got a lovely picture of Toph by zephre and I wrote Less Than a Day in Paradise, which follows Azula after the end of the series. I swear I will get around to replying to the comments some day.

☞ I caved and started playing Echo Bazaar, even though I said I would never do that.

☞ And finally: I rediscovered my love for dorama. I watched Sungkyunkwan Scandal and it is just adorable. Must rewatch Coffee Prince (with English subtitles this time), and if any of you have recs for me, please comment!

☞ Interesting survey at http://survey.scimitarsmile.com/

☞ I finally read Side Stories, the Dresden Files short stories book. And I really, really wish Butcher would not write in the PoV of people other than Harry. ( Cut for spoilers. )

☞ Mostly over the shock I got last Sunday. Still haven't replied to the e-mail, but I will show up at the meeting tomorrow and talk with the others. Hopefully I will successfully attack Neil's behaviour with my passive-aggressive, defense-focussed style. If it doesn't work - well, no more meeting with other hobby writers in RL. Probably won't stay as long because I will need anti-anxiety meds that only last two hours too. I hate being afraid of people I like.