Rodo's Journal

☞ I wanted to shake my Yuletide present this morning and discovered that my writer apparently defaulted because there's no gift uploaded for me yet. :-( Either that or there's a glitch in the AO3 software.

☞ I'm constantly tired at the moment. No idea why. It's just as if my mind never quite leaves this fuzzy state between half asleep and awake. And then there are these brief moments when I'm almost awake and should do stuff but they never last long enough. I suspect it might be low blood pressure again.

☞ Need to prepare for Christmas, mostly by buying food for four days. *sigh* My mother also threatened to send me a useful present, which is probably not the best idea ever. Her idea of a useful present are pans and pots and such and I absolutely hate getting useful presents from her because they tend to make me feel bad. The last time she tried it I would rather have had one present less instead of the one I got. It was a pot, and getting a pot as a Christmas present is really depressing. I'm afraid she bought an electric kettle this time, tbh, despite the fact that I repeatedly told her that I neither wanted nor needed one.

☞ Finally finished watching Jeeves & Wooster, which I loved, except that it's really difficult to keep track of all the characters. I frequently forgot about everyone but Jeeves, Wooster and Aunt Agatha.

☞ My Yuletide beta (I had to write to a second person, who actually answered) promised me she would be done by Monday or Tuesday, so I am now glancing anxiously at the mail symbol of my browser every few minutes while I wait for the weekly party downstairs to quiet down a bit. I'm really nervous because I still have to look for a Britpicker and won't be in LE for a few days. My mother and I are visiting the relative of a relative of a relative in Göttingen for a few days and I don't think my mother will book a hotel with internet access.

☞ In other news: Chuck ate my brain. I only watched it because I was a bit bored, it stared Adam Baldwin and because I caught an episode on TV a while ago. I love it. Chuck is adorable and Casey is like Jayne only more clever; I like Sarah and Ellie and Morgan and Captain Awesome. Also: Awesome likes to run around half naked. Overall, the show is sweet and funny, even though it hits my embarrassment squick sometimes.

☞ I actually found a decent story on ff.de. Weird things do happen. Half of the stories that I have to look at as an OP are Mary Sue stories or stories with canon characters as Sues, though. No idea why people over there think the fandoms are overrun by slash. Do het fans have a persecution complex? Is everything about 15% slash more than acceptable?

How long should I wait for an answer after asking someone if they would be willing to beta a fic of mine?

I'm asking because my Yuletide support group buddy already heard back from the person she asked and she asked later than I did. I've been waiting for two/three days now, and I know that I am online far more often than other people, so I really don't know if it's reasonable to get a little nervous or if it's still normal response time. I've also written to people before who just didn't notice my message and wrote back to say sorry after a couple of months, so ...

☞ 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.)

☞ 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?

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*