Rodo's Journal

☞ It's been a while. I'm feeling a bit better now, but the last weeks were rough. My depression was really bad, I had the first full-on panic attack in years and my phobias acted up. *sigh* I'm still not entirely back to my normal medium depressed state. I didn't get much writing done and there are still 05:04:47 left. No idea how much I'll write today and tomorrow.

☞ I actually did work on my Merlin fic for the first time in months. I realised it sucked and that it needs a major rework. ( Spoilers for recent episodes )

☞ I think I finally found out why disaster films don't work for me. It's not the wildly improbable natural catastrophes, because those aren't necessarily improbable at all, it's the wildly improbable ways in which humans conquer nature and stop the catastrophes. More often than not by using a lot of explosives. I would like them if they showed humans surviving the catastrophe, I wouldn't mind if they showed humans fighting to survive and dying (The Day After Tomorrow I liked, despite the unrealistic premise). I do mind the age old "conquering the wilderness" trope that crops up again and again. It's not only inacurate, it also reminds me of how humans treat their environment in other situations.

☞ Yuletide: I really hope my recipient will like my story, since I haven't written for the fandom before and couldn't research as much as I would have liked to. It also won't be as long and will end rather abruptly. But I'm confident because we seem to like similar stories and share a few quirks, despite not having any non-Yuletide fandoms in common. Now I only have to find a competent beta and brit-picker who knows the fandom. Or someone who can tell me if the story works once I've typed it up, at least. (Why yes, I still use pen and paper for writing.)

☞ I just had the worst day in about half a year. Which says something, considering that my good days are everybody else's worst days. It started totally promising, of course, with eumelkeks liking the Good Omens fic I wrote (it's in English, btw), Star Trek being delivered and hardly having any problems at all with shopping for groceries. I hadn't felt that good in weeks. And then I spent the rest of the day sobbing, hyperventilating and wishing I would die already. I hate my life (I realise it's the second time I said this today). *sigh* If you have any ideas how to cheer me up (since it's unlikely that I drop dead spontaneously), I'd be grateful. Cute animals don't work at all, though.

☞ In other (happier) news: The Archive of Our Own is going into open beta soon, and since I already have an account, I might get invites to share. Anybody interested or does my entire flist have an account already?

☞ Writing month project isn't going so well, obviously. I didn't write anything at all today.

☞ For those of you who have my phone number: don't call me unless you told me so via e-mail before. The phone is turned off for the time being. I try to avoid any incidences like the one that led to my breakdown today.

☞ Unrelated just plain weird phone stuff: I got an SMS by a couple who wanted to have hard SM sex with me. They apparently got the phone number off a toilet door at some rest stop at an autobahn. Either they mistyped the number or I really don't want to know who had my number before me. It isn't as funny as the woman who wanted to schedule a manicure with me and wouldn't let me tell her that I wasn't who she thought I was, though.

Remember my last post on support requests?

So, my problem is that I want to update my website. I have wanted to for some time, but for some reason it's always an insane amount of trouble. I have to download a new client every time I do it, for example. The website is hosted by Host Europe, and the only Windows compatible FTP client they offer instructions for is FileZilla, which I use, because their login information is kind of confusing and I can't figure out where to enter what to use other clients. FileZilla is telling me, no matter how often I check, that my login info is incorrect. I double and triple checked everything; the login info is correct. It's not the firewall, I use the right settings and everything.

The Host Europe people checked and told me everything is working on their end (after I had finally managed to convince them that I'm not too dumb to type a password).

The FileZilla people are stumped.

I guess I will have to give up on the website. It's really not much good when I can't do anything with it. It's just sitting there and costs me money (not much, but I could buy two books a year with it instead).

*grrrrrrr* I hate my life.

I hate writing support requests. A lot. Mostly because for some reason, the person on the other end either assumes I am an idiot or doesn't read my mails at all. Look, I totally understand the need for IT Crowd like support answers, but I actually check if something is plugged in before writing a request. So telling me to check if I plugged it in is quite unhelpful. It's especially unhelpful if I already told you that I checked.

So when I copy the error message and tell you that I double and triple checked everything and that despite what the thing says, it's not the password, answering by telling me "well, the username is correct, please change the password and try again in 15 minutes" is really unhelpful.

And by the way, I checked again, it's still not working. Surprise.

☞ I think my city has a problem with vermin. I seem to see rats every few weeks now, when I didn't see any for years before. I don't really mind so much, because I think rats are cute and they are among the animals that don't scare me at all, but it really gets you thinking.

☞ Yesterday, Jehovah's Witnesses paid me a visit.
( They gave me a flyer. )
I can't help it; I ship it.

☞ eumelkeks is looking for people interested in her comment porn entry. You can leave a prompt and/or write a short fic for someone else.

☞ I actually really cooked today. Like ... something that is warm when you eat it. Nothing fancy, just potato stew (if stew is the correct translation for Eintopf, that is), but hey, warm food that isn't take-away, from a can or microwaved.

☞ Writing project is still going so so. 11:30:44 left, and at least I managed to work on Stigmata quite a bit. Now the chapter only needs a second beta and it should be done. Only took me about a year. *sigh*

This article by dodger_winslow with the title Angels V2.0 (spoilers for 5.08) reminded me of something that has confused me for quite a while: the assumption that angels in Supernatural don’t have a free will. It shows up in fanfic a lot. Now, this might have to do with the fact that I am not religious and certain religious assumptions generally just confuse the hell out of me, but I’m not sure it’s just that.

( Cut for Spoilers (Season Five) )

In conclusion: I really don’t think that the angels have more or less free will than the humans in Supernatural. Or did I miss something? If so, please explain it to me in the easiest way possible. I am that dumb when it comes to Christianity.

☞ Signed up for Yuletide.. Am simultaneously freaking out and really happy. Hope everything turns out alright. I would have signed up to write for more fandoms, but most of my anime/manga stuff is still at my mum's, so I wouldn't be able to reread it.

☞ How the hell could I possibly miss the creators of Hot Fuzz reccing slash fanfic? No, really. Btw, the recced story is really good.

☞ My writing project is going so so. I've 13:01:15 hours left. I'm not in much of a writing mood at the moment. I'm not really in a mood for anything at all, including eating, gaming, reading, watching TV, sleeping, being awake, going shopping ... well, you get the picture. I hate this time of the month.

☞ There are a ton of promising fan projects springing up everywhere, or so it seems to me. I want to participate in so many of them, but I'm not sure how much I can juggle. At least the Christmas related writing projects are temporary. Oh, and lian is looking for people interested in a shiny new OTW committee (post includes the loveliest tacky .gifs I've seen in a while) and the OTW in general is looking for volunteers. We're always glad to see new people. Really. Even if you don't have any experience.

☞ Kind of related: If you're interested in learning Python, a programming language, you might take a look at intro_to_cs, where we'll try to teach it to ourselves with the help of MIT's OpenCourseWare project. We'll start on lecture 1 on Monday, and you can participate once or twice a week, and if November doesn't work for you, maybe you'd like to start next year?

So, my sleep rhythm is out of whack again. This means that I sleep more or less the whole day. I was particularly tired today, so I slept during the opening hours of every shop. No biggie, I thought, after all I still have enough food for the night, I can go in the morning.

No. I can't. Tomorrow is a holiday where I live (and hardly anywhere else), and all the shops are closed, except for the ones at the station. Which means I'll have to stay up for at least six hours longer and fight my way to the shops because everyone else who forgot to buy something will be there too. People always act as if it's the apocalypse on those days. Then I have to carry all the stuff home again. And it's not as if I can just wait a day, because shops are closed on Sundays too.

The German Ladenschlussgesetz is a pain. Happy Reformation Day to me.

ETA 09.10.31: Turns out every shop but the grocery shops is open there. *sigh* Lets hope the Döner shop is open most of the day tomorrow.

I've finally decided on what to do for November, since I won't be doing NaNoWriMo this year. Barring unforseen circumstances I'll work on something vaguely creative for about 30 minutes a day at minimum. This means fifteen hours total, and I'll use the countdown tool on my computer to time it.

So what do I mean by "work on something vaguely creative":

• writing stories - either first or second drafts
• editing stories - third and subsequent drafts
• drawing, painting, icons, manips, etc.
• editing vids
• translating something (if you want to throw something my way, lian, go for it, unless it's the dratted reply comment)
• write meta or other lengthy and thought-out DW entries
• write other non-fiction that requires editing
• recording audio-fic

And what don't I mean by that (despite it being vaguely creative):

• researching for stories, pictures etc.
• beta something
• figuring out how to operate a program in order to do something mentioned above
• plotting, outlining, etc.
• short and rather spur-of-the-moment entries
• comments to other people's entries (unless they're fic)

Hopefully, this means that I will actually work on some of the countless WIPs, maybe that ancient Merlin story, or the Dumbledore/Lockhart fic, or the last NaNo projects. Hopefully the Yuletide story as well. There has to be something that'll be finished by the end of the 15 hours, right? Or at least closer to finished?

I'm a real underachiever this year, but since WriSoMiFu seems to be LJ-only, I'll do this on my own. Any ideas what to call this project?

Okay, so I posted a story a few days ago that probably only a few of you noticed. I got reviews, and they're generally positive. The review that spawned this post was positive too, but since it was the first of its kind that I received, I felt the need to talk about it. See, the story was 1200 words long. And the reviewer critized the following:

1. You're only writing short stories to avoid criticism. Translation: You're afraid of playing with the grown-ups (but you don't have to be, I swear!)
2. Your short stories are so great, but they're just short stories. Translation: You're wasting your talent on X when you could do Y.
3. You'd get more reviews if you only just wrote longer stories, simply stretch the material. Translation: Why are you doing this? It's totally pointless because nobody appreciates you!

Okay, so my translations probably aren't that accurate, and I didn't exactly quote her review either. But it's what I got out of it, and it reminded me of something I've heard before: Why are you writing fanfic when you could write a real book? ( The answer, of course, is because I want to. )

Okay, the obvious answer to this question would be: “Because not everybody in the world knows English and the AO3 is meant to be for everyone”, and that’s a good answer. It’s not the only answer, though. I know people who never learned English in school. I also know people who have difficulties learning languages and thus never really understood English. But generally speaking, I’m from a country where many, many people learned English in school (it’s compulsory for everyone in my state, for example), where many advertisements are in English, just like shop names, product names and many, many more. In theory, all these people should be able to navigate the archive.

( However, being surrounded by English all the time evidently doesn't mean people understand it. )

Okay, so I actually nominated a few fandoms for Yuletide this year and hope that I will be able to participate too. I would definitely love to, since I won't do NaNo this year and I would really like to have a fanfic as a present. And of course I'd like the challenge of writing something in English for someone else too. My nominations:

Four Brothers (movie)
Jim Butcher - The Dresden Files
Kings (tv)
Let Dai
Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere
Velvet Goldmine

These are mostly fandoms I'd like to read and not necessarily fandoms I'd like to write. And it isn't even all of them, but I hope someone else will nominate the rest. I'm not very obscure either. *sigh*

☞ Dear writers of FlashForward, please don't ever use German again. It was grammatically correct and the actors were actual German speakers (or plain awesome) and all ... it just wasn't really German. It sounded more like English. Imagine Japanese -> English translation that's grammatically correct but still not English, I'm sure there are a few.

☞ A propos German: Nobel Prize in Literature! Whoo! I'm always in a party mood when an author who writes in German gets the prize, because our language needs all the PR it can get (yes, even Tokio Hotel). There really isn't as much of a market for German books, and compared to English, few books get translated. Seriously, every idiot who writes their book in English can get it translated (e.g. Cassandra Clare), but German -> English is much rarer, I think. I haven't read any of Müller's books, but I think they sound interesting. I guess the east/west conflict is not of much interest in the US, but for me, it really is.

☞ Also: Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not sure how to feel about it. I kind of wanted Hu Jia to win.

ETA: Can someone explain to me why this post has a scrollbar?

Does it really make me mean and elitist that I think that Sturgeon's Law applies to fanfiction? Even my own? Because it's wrong and insults the average fanfic writer by calling them incompetent (which, btw, I didn't, I was talking about stories, but apparently story = author).

I really, really should stay away from the internet for a while, or at least certain parts of it. It's just making things worse for me at the moment. Because whatever I try, if I'm feeling even remotely positive about it someone else comes and tears it completely apart.

The only problem is: I don't have anything better to do at the moment.

*whiny post is whiny*

☞ Okay, so my computer crashed. I finally ruined the poor thing. Anyway, I had to buy a new one, and I still haven't managed to save my data and install all my programs. Hopefully soon. Also: Vista looks pretty, but is a bit difficult to handle.

☞ Supernatural keeps being awesome. ( Spoilers. )

☞ New and better computer means finally being able to play videogames I wanted to play for a long time. Which is what I've been doing, since my beta is still working on my stories and I don't feel like starting anything new while so much is unfinished. Anyway, I'm playing Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which will probably keep me busy for a while. If anyone has recs for games that don't require more than a 2,1 GHz processor, I'm all ears.

☞ The current season of Heroes is actually somewhat okay. ( Minor Spoilers. )

☞ Today is our national holiday. I just had Merkel's speech on (mute - because I can't keep my mind on whatever she's saying for more than half a sentence anyway), but I'm really, really unenthusiastic about it. Maybe it's the somber organ music my neighbour is playing. Maybe it's the election results. Four years of CDU/CSU and FDP in power is looking so great right now. *sigh* At least the people in my village voted for the left parties with an overwhelming majority (not really news, we are a leftist enclave). Shows that there are some sane people left, and maybe the results will mean that the Linke will finally be accepted as an existing political party. With possibly constructive ideas! Only took, what, twenty years?

So, my mum's visiting again at the moment. We went shopping and she bought me a lot of shiny new things, for example:

• A new coat. I really needed one. The old jacket is practically ancient. And the zipper didn't work properly anymore.
• New jeans that actually fit.
• A sweater. Now I own ... three that I can actually wear outside, the others are ugly.
• A lovely new shirt.
• My favourite biscuits. I would share, but I've never met anyone who's as fond of them as I am.

I also have a new haircut. It's short, and I like it. I really hated it when my hair was in the way all the time and wouldn't do what I wanted it to do. My hair is really stubborn (the hairdresser agreed, we were there over an hour), and no matter how lovely long hair might look with my hair colour in theory, it needs a crazy amount of work.

We also went to Burger King, because I insisted. I've been reading a lot of Supernatural fic, and Dean is very, very fond of fast food. So I got kind of hungry. I even dreamed about fast food.

Please do not link to this post in newsletters.

Warning: As per skuf’s wishes, it’s more informal and also more straightforward than my meta usually is. PS: I hope I managed to write about the topics you people were asking about.


( i “loser” canon characters who become fanon heroes (223 words) )


( ii sex-god!draco in fanfic (248 words) )


( iii fannish entitlement (252 words) )

☞ There are some things that you just don't expect on a Saturday morning. A pneumatic drill next to your flat at 8am is one of them. I'm currently waiting for the paracetamol to kick in.

☞ skuf is looking for participants for her Mini Meta Fest.

☞ logovo posted about what the term "aca-fan" might (not) mean.

☞ Supernatural owns my soul. I've spent the last days in a Supernatural-shaped bubble and I hope I can stay there for a bit longer. Reality is so extremely unfunny.

☞ A Supernatural fic rec: And I Wake Up Blind, Like My Dreams Were Too Bright by strangeandcharm. Vaguely Dean/Castiel, but mostly narrated from Jimmy's PoV as he tries to help Castiel, who lost his memory and is stuck in a mental hospital thinking he is human.

Wow, almost a month since the last post.

☞ The most annoying thing about discussing feminism: It's not the men. They are priviledged, and I know from personal experience how hard it is to constantly work against it. I expect them to try, but if they fail, at least I understand why. The most annoying thing are the women who buy into the lie of achieved equality and who think that everything is how it should be and that they are not underpriviledged in any way.

☞ The Stargate post, oh how I hate it. I've rewritten it yet again and I'm still not happy with it.

☞ I was never a fan of zombies, but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies changed that. I really liked the book.

☞ I hate the weather. It's almost September, and I'm sick of 25°C and higher. I can't work on anything that way, which is probably why I worked on the OTW translations in the morning. My brain feels like mush at any other time of the day.

☞ Tacos are evil. But at least I'm down to a more or less normal weight for me and unless I eat them every day, I probably won't gain any again.

☞ A Torchwood fic rec: The Theory of Two Centres by copperbadge. Summary: "Ianto Jones woke up in a bed that wasn't his, in a flat that wasn't his, wearing clothing that definitely wasn't his." This is the first sentence of the fic, and it actually summarizes the story rather well. Warnings/Labels: amnesia, violence.

☞ Please remind me to never try an old fandom ever again. I just finished the Hornblower TV series and was desperate for fic. Well, I looked and found a number of promising rec lists, an archive and a very long list of stories. The very long list of stories, unfortunately, contained no useful information beyond title and author. The archive had no fics that interested me, but at least it wasn't frozen in 2002 and about the rec lists ... at least half the links were dead. The others led to stories that I had no interest in. It's especially sad because the first link I clicked on seemed to be exactly the kind of story I was looking for. The author seems to have deleted all her fics, of course. I tried ff.net too, but the Sues put an end to that. *sigh* Never again.

☞ PS: Has anybody any idea how the ancient file size label translates to word count?

☞ Why the translation exchange post on ff.de is doomed to fail: People offer to translate from English to German and authors offer stories to be translated from German to English.