i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

...okay, I admit it, this entry is mainly an excuse to test out the new update page on Dreamwidth. :D

(for those going "what? it doesn't look any different to me?", head over to the beta features page and opt in. it is awesome. There is a tag browser! and organization! and an update box that doesn't have an obnoxious fixed width! and fu is the awesomest!)

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Writing thingses for the rest of the year:

* secret_mutant fic exchange (due Dec 22)
* Yuletide \o/
* [redacted] from kinkmeme
* daily writing project

Knitting thingses for the rest of the year:

* haat!
* ...other haat. maybe.
* gauge swatchen for tubular castingson
* figure out garter square sock toes on loom

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(that all should keep me busy)

I figured that, having frogged the damn sock anyway, I might as well make proper stitch counters¹ while the loom was empty. What I had previously, red twist-ties, was functional but the tips kept snagging on the yarn. Plus, they were, well, beat-up old red twist-ties.

So I dig out my beading supplies, and also take a run to the local bead store to pick up magnetic findings (since I needed fastenings that could be easy to open and close one-handed but that wouldn't fall off accidentally).

... in case anyone's wondering, magnetic findings are a fucking /pain/ to work with, given that all of my tools are metal.

Long story short: I spent all day futzing around, hurting my arms a bit, to end up with something that a) doesn't really work, b) managed to break, c) doesn't work, and d) is generally an utter failure.

I am feeling all emo mopey self-pitying miserable.

Also, I can't figure out how the hell to do what I want to do.

1/ETA: See this post for clarification / more information / etc

Had a run of really depressing dreams -- I can't remember everything, but some of it was me blatantly acting out the "...I don't deserve to be around people, no one wants me around" sigmathink, and some of it was me being abandoned, and the two were partially related but not completely but they were doing that fun self-feeding spiral, and it left me waking up gloomy and out-of-sorts.

(and, I suspect, hormonal.)

This was not improved by random internet outage. Lack of internets to whine to = not fun.

And as I was doing a non-internet activity, namely my dwsockclub project, I finally figured out what was gnawing at the back of my mind about being off. The pattern has these ... kind of intertwining V shapes? And my sock was coming out not looking like the pattern. I didn't notice immediately, because the loom blocks the most recent 8-or-so rows, and then when I did notice I told myself it was just something about the loom that would resolve itself once I got the sock knitted and blocked, because I couldn't figure out what exactly was wrong.

...Until this morning, when -- at least 30 rows into the pattern, mind you -- I realized that I had flipped ssk and k2tog. Which means that the wrong stitch was being put in front, which means there wasn't the proper delineation of the V shapes.

(To be fair, it's not entirely my fault, because the instructions on loomknittinghelp -- you know, the ones where skp and ktog were matching when they shouldn't be -- were wrong, and I was just blindly following them. But I didn't really take the time to think, to grok why the pattern said to do what it did, and I should have.)

So now I have two-and-a-bit pattern repeats that are utterly messed up. And this is a top-down sock, so it's not like the first few pattern repeats will be hidden by shoes. Which means I pretty much have to frog it all and start over.

And I want to cry.

(I also want needle-knitting back, dammit. And cross-stitch.)

ETA: ways to /not/ make onesself feel better: sign on to WoW and queue for a random heroic, as a healer, and get freaking HoR. And then have lovely lag/latency issues (out of combat, it was fine, but in combat, I swear it was dipping to about 5fps or something). Yeah.