i hear the voices when I'm dreaming

Last night was weird, partly because I got really sleepy fairly early and tried to go to sleep around 10 ... but then didn't get to actual sleep until about 3

but partly because of the dream I did have when I eventually got there

where I went to a horror movie that ended up involving audience participation... in the middle of a scene it went black, and when people started looking towards the projection booth in back, the guy had just been shot by two men who then came in to terrorize the audience

except instead of being at all afraid, I was having epic amounts of fun, because I immediately grokked that this was part of the movie experience and therefore completely staged, and so I was certain there was zero danger

(except maybe my mom -- I'd come with my parents but sat in different places in the theater-- saying something to indicate we were related, because I was pretty sure she thought it was real and going "no don't hurt my daughter" would give them ammunition to make her even more freaked out)

so I was sassing the hell out of them, utterly delighted, while in my head composing a livejournal post about how this particular movie had IRL aspects.

...just. What? lol.

So, ok, I have this ... weird inhibition about playing music out loud. I'm fine listening with headphones, but since I can't do those myself, that means I only listen when I have headphones on already. That's mostly at night, when I'm in bed. Singing along doesn't happen much -- it's embarrassing if headphoned, and I'm never not. It's been years, maybe decades, since I've just blasted a fun playlist and let myself sing along.

I keep poking at this mental wall, because I'd love to be able to do that. As far as I can tell, it's a combination of at least two desires/needs.

One is I don't want to bother anyone (more than I have to), combined with an overly sensitive meter for what counts as bothersome (i.e. anything at all). It's like I can only do loud things when alone. Between aides and roommate, I'm rarely alone, and I often just don't think of it as an option in the times I do have. Even if I'm watching a video, I'll often turn it off when someone shows up, because Noise.

It's not a logical thing: my roommate has a room with a door (and also can use her words if she needs quiet) and my aides are paid to be here and none of them would be bothered by what I listen to. It's just ... I somehow just can't, unless I'm alone.

(Oddly, video chat is exempt. I'm fine doing those on my computer with no headphones.)

The other is fear of judgment / mockery. This is a long thing: I remember as a young teen getting my first stereo system (CDs and tapes) and my dad brought along the CDs of Phantom of the Opera, with which I was obsessed, to use the Overture to test the sound of different players, and part of me was vaguely humiliated because it would out me as a Weirdo Who Liked Phantom. (Many of my interests at the time, including POTO and Star Trek, I was convinced were inherently shameful.) My genres are nonstandard, so there's possible weakness there, but also I listen to the same thing over and over again. Usually a playlist/CD rather than a single song, but sometimes even that.

(This is also why I never really got into things like Pandora; if I wanted to listen to X, I wanted to listen to X and not to things similar to X, and I'd rather listen to known comfort music over and over.)

I realized tonight that right now, when my roommate is out of town for a few days, I have times of actual guaranteed aloneness. That I could put on whatever and sing along.

...and I still got slammed with an almost visceral memory of someone saying, incredulously, "you're listening to that AGAIN???" Of someone begging me to put on something different. I don't remember if this was my sister (who would have been an older teen at the time) or in college, but I'm terrified, I guess, of getting that again.

On one hand I don't care if my aides don't approve of how I listen to music, and anyway they're all too nice to say something -- except maybe for "didn't you already play that". On the other, the internalization of "this thing I do is Not Normal*" is too old and too deep. So ... I don't know.

* ... I would not be surprised to learn listening to something on repeat is an autism and/or ADHD thing...

Last year I was super into Animal Crossing, though by December I was kind of burnt out ... not completely, but between Halloween and Toy Day there was a lot of eventing. But also I was bonding with my aide S, who also played, and I was planning island designs and stuff.

January was when S got hit by a car, and had to stop working abruptly because badly broken ankle; I heard from her once maybe a week oater, and nothing since. I don't know how she's doing, if she's still in the area, if she's even alive.

In some ways it feels like I had a trauma reaction, like my brain just shut down. I recruited a friend L to take over scheduling my aides, which is probably the only reason I survived January. (L has been helping since, because she likes doing it.)

I don't think I've touched my Switch since. Not just AC but anything. The Yoshi game had gotten to too hard levels, I never got far into Unraveled, and AC was just ... I couldn't. At some point I figured out the link with S and grief/trauma, so I figured I'd wait it out.

Recently Nintendo announced the Nov update for ACNH, and it's fucking AWESOME. I'm not as rabid about Brewster as some people are, but. Fences! Accent walls! Lights! Permanent ladders! Crops! COOKING!! New islands to visit! And it's the day after my birthday so basically a free birthday present? Hell yeah!

(The paid dlc looks awesome too but I'm waiting; I can probably afford it but I want to make sure I actually get back into AC first.)

The update literally had my jaw dropping, and I was getting excited about the game again. Yes there will be many weeds and things to clean up and stuff, but I have online friends that promised to help if I wanted.

Only...

I still haven't touched the Switch.

Partly it's that I'm out of the habit of having my aides get out the Switch as part of the morning routine -- all but one of my aides are new to this year. Partly I kept forgetting about it until after I'd in bed, and I'd think "tomorrow I will remember" and then the next day would spend the whole day on Twitter again.

Today I actually thought of it, during the day, when an aide was even here. And I couldn't do it. Couldn't even ask.

I feel so fucking broken.

So, okay, animal crossing. In theory I am still in love with it. In theory there are so many things I want to do. There's the whole snow thing going on. There's stuff in preparation for Toy Day. There's putting away the Halloween decorations and putting up yuletide-ier things. There's balloon hunting, possibly with time travel, so that I get all the mushroom recipes and all the acorn recipes and all the maple leaf recipes and all the winter stuff. There's terraforming that I want to do (paw print island) and decorating I want to do (flower area). There's the other island, the new one, that needs to get to three stars so I can get KK so I can get terraforming so I can make fun things.

In theory.

And I want to do all this. Or at least I want to want to. But I get little flickers of excitement. And ... and then I go to play and my gut response is ".........there's too much *shuts down*" and I barely do anything.

The summer update that came out, the Halloween update, both these things I remember watching the promo videos and watching other videos talking about it, and I vaguely distantly remember being excited. Turkey day I ... did the stuff on one island but it was kind of slog-like. I know there are videos with what's new in December, and I haven't even looked. I'm almost scared to. The ac discord I'm on, is muted and I haven't looked in ages. The ac thread in one of my rav groups, ditto. I can't play, I can't do anything related to playing, I can't ... I just can't. It's like a weird mental paralysis.

To a very slight extent there is competing interest from my yoshi semi-obsession. I'm not good at yoshi by any means but I keep wanting to play more. But since both yoshi and ac are in cartridge form, and since I can't switch cartridges myself, that means I haven't touched my second island in ... fuck, I don't know. I know I've popped in once since getting yoshi, but only once.

But that doesn't explain the complete anti enthusiasm with the switch lite. It's frustrating because I want to want to play it, and I sometimes get the desire (sometimes at completely wrong times like midnight when I don't have my switch and should be sleeping, but sometimes at good playable times) and then ... it's like I have no fuel. The fire lights but it burns out quickly.

I wish I could enjoy it. Or, second choice by far, if I can't enjoy it I wish I could not care. But I'm trapped and frustrated. And feel oddly guilty every time I play yoshi instead.

Fucking brains.

...I have had ~the hiiiills are aliiiiiiive with the souuuund of muuuusic~ going through my head on endless loop

especially "To sing through the night like a lark who is learning to pray / I go to the hills when my heart is lonely / I know I will hear what I've heard before"

except the lyrics keep morphing

like, now it's "to swim through the night like a shark with a golden toupee"

...somehow... I don't think that's quite...right...

Dream last night: I was at some sort of casual conference thing and synecdochic kept calling on me to answer questions and it turned into a discussion of lj support (including a) looking at the current high scores list (in the dream I was #21, irl 26) and reading off usernames, and b) dates of my various support milestones like when I first for SH (irl answer may 2002) and when I got made admin (irl April 2004) and when I quit (fuck if I know) and such)

and now my brain is obsessing over all the ways in which I failed in lj support and everything

fuck

Why does it bother me so much to get lost in MineCraft?

I'm not talking about odd situations like "fell down hole with no tools, waiting to die of hunger" (last night's situation) or "stuck in an endless desert with no trees whatsoever" (one of my iPad worlds; I started at place-with-trees, because I have tools and torches, but right now I can *not* get out of the desert, and I am running low on said tools and torches, and trees are kind of necessary for those things; you can eke out a basic existence with just wood and cobblestone (since logs can be burned into charcoal), but you can't do diddlysquat without trees). I'm also not really talking about "I built a perfect scale replica of the Enterprise and don't remember where it is" or whatever.

Just ... getting lost. Having to start over.

Basic early-stage gameplay (on survival) is: punch trees for wood, get basic tools, get torches, get basic shelter. Survive first night. Figure out food source, go looking for resources, upgrade tools, kill things, survive more nights, go out for more resources. Upgrade home base to have chests, furnaces, maybe some decorative stuff.

Sometimes, in foraging for resources, I lose track of where home is. And it frustrates the hell out of me.

Like, my non-desert iPad world? I spawned on a savannah, so had several stairstep-trunk trees, so I just adapted one into a treehouse: partially done, with an 11x9 floor of acacia wood blocks and a frame but no walls or ceiling. I decided I wanted the walls to be mostly glass, so I went off in search of sand to smelt down. Found sand; found a NPC village; have no fucking idea where home is.

Now, the rational reaction is one of two things:

1) Shrug and make a new home base, maybe (in this example) centered on the NPC village. It's not like old home base had a whole lot, and all of what's there -- furnace and crafting table, wood, cobblestone, coal, a modicum of iron -- is not just replaceable but *easily* replaceable.

2) Temporarily make a place to store stuff, dig down far enough to get redstone, make a compass, follow compass back to spawn (while leaving trail if I want to do a more permanent pathway)

But somehow my brain flips out and chooses door number 3:

3) Panic, flail, and stop playing that world, with sometimes the added bonus of wanting to quit Minecraft altogether, though I usually end up just creating a new world to play in.

The odd thing is, there is *no actual advantage* to starting a new world instead of continuing with the old one. I mean, either way I've "lost" the time and effort put into making the first (usually basic and crappy) shelter, and the shrug-and-rehome option at least allows me to start with some resources on hand. And yet I can't seem to do it. I'm too disappointed to take it further.

Last night, I found out where all my spoons were vanishing to. ( female tmi )

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I want to take a language class, but there are very few places around that offer what I want. One of the local community college satellite sites offers Spanish, which is of mild interest but the semester's already started, and then Korean and Farsi, neither of which are high on my list. The other transportation-viable community colleges generally don't offer languages at all.

The local university offers a shitton, and even if I rule out the ones that only exist as 8am and 9am classes, I'd still have to make a decision on which to take (German and Russian are out of the picture because of time, and my weird-ass preferences have me deciding between French and Latin and Japanese), except that they don't allow non-students to register for classes. (I asked, and the registrar office basically said "nope, but there's always the continuing education program", which, of course, doesn't offer languages.)

I've tried learning languages on my own, I've /tried/ -- with German (which I still have subconscious groundwork for), with Bulgarian (which I still can't construct a sentence in except for song lyrics of things I used to sing), a long time ago with Japanese (I got hirigana and katakana down to the point of sounding out words with what's probably a horrible accent, but not much farther).

It doesn't work, and maybe it would if I tried harder, but I also keep remembering one year in junior high when I was self-studying German because the class conflicted with another class I needed, and I was horribly behind and couldn't conjugate to save my life.

I don't know. I want to learn, I really do, but I can't do it myself.

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Writing right now is mainly focused on the mer_ficathon story (which is turning into a random Little Mermaid fusion with bonus shark!Erik), which has a couple hundred words and then about 1k of story note scribbling and a lot of mental imagery that amuses the hell out of me) and the Fic of Doom.

Now, see, I'm sort of used to having kinkmeme fills be longer than I expect. But this one is 7k words with no end in sight.

To put this in perspective, my longest finished XMFC fic (Mosaic) is a bit over 6k words. Second longest is about 6k but was co-written so I can only claim half of the words. Third is a bit over 2k.

To put this in broader perspective, of the fic I have up on AO3, the longest (which felt like a mountain even though I wasn't having any writer's block issues whatsoever) is 15k, second longest is 10k, third is 7k, and Mosaic is fourth.

The Fic of Doom is already in third place and I have no clue how much more there is to write.

(and yes, that doesn't include fic not up on AO3, but I think that hardly matters. Did a brief spot check of my SPN fic, which is the bulk of what's not on AO3, and it's all under 5k apiece. They Who Knew The Storm is just under 3k. Dark Sacred Nights is 4.6k. Wednesday's Child is under 1k. Purgatory is 2.5k. Most of the rest are 1k at best.)

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I've noticed, lately, that my ability to type correctly has gotten rather ... bad. Some of that is due to the fact that I'm only touch-typing with one hand (my right hand is using a backscratcher to hit keys with; I /could/ get the keyboard in position to type but it's rather awkward and also leaves no room for the mouse where I can reach it), and it's fairly easy to hit the wrong keys, or hit extra keys, with no tactile feedback for half of what you're doing.

But some of it is just /baffling/. It's not mistyping, it's miswording; it's spelling things wrong, and (far worse) it's not even noticing. And not just in context of chats or comments or whatever, where there's more leniency.

The most recent fic I put up on AO3 went up August 21st. It took me until today to notice that there was a very blatant misspelling in the fucking title.

(And fixing it was kind of an illustration of how it's gotten for me [as is the fact that I just typed "gotton"]. The word as I had misspelled it was "Tommorws". The intended outcome was "Tomorrows". The evolution -- and I don't mean the keystrokes, but the times when I paused and thought I was done and went 'wait no that doesn't look right' -- was Tommorws → Tommows → Tommorows → Tomorows → Tomorrows.

I used to be good at knowing how words were spelt.

I don't know what happened.

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ETA: Got my XMFC dvd. This is a happy thing. What is not so much of a happy thing is that it's very bare-bones. The movie is there. There are two making-of-type extras, which have some cute moments (including James and Michael mock-sparring) but are probably going to end up on youtube anyway. And there's two non-XMFC things, a vague surreal anti-smoking PSA, and How To Download The Digital Copy, In Excruciatingly Dull Detail Including Multiple Close-Ups Of This Bizarre Thing Called A "USB" "plug".

That's it.

No commentary (from anyone), no deleted scenes, no gag reel, nothing.

Just the movie.

Now, don't get me wrong, I like having the movie. But I wanted more, dammit. And if they come out in six months with a "Collectors Edition" that has things like commentary and deleted scenes and other fun goodies, I think I will scream.

Sensible o'clock: I go to bed.

1:30 am: story idea - one, mind you, that has been simmering for years - goes OH HI WRITE THIS SCENE. Now. Waiting til morning is for SISSIES and also people who want to get to sleep ever because I am not going to shut up isn't this FUN.

... 90 minutes and nearly 1000 words later, I am left blearily going "buh wha?" and also wondering wtf was so thrice-damned urgent about the scene when it wasn't even new stuff, just a crystallization of something I already knew in my had.

I just hope that what I wrote is halfway sense making and doesn't collapse overnight into a puddle of gibberish...

...also, my brain is weird, but that is not at all new.

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So I seem to have acquired an iPad. (Combined birthday plus early Christmas present from my dad and sister.) This is very much yay \o/ there was sonic dolphin squeaking noises going on when I got it.

However, since this was one of the "omg waaaaant but can't afford, gah" sorts of things, I haven't been paying attention to what all is available, especially in the way of apps.

So. Any suggestions? Especially for:

a) increasing the sorts of ebooks I can read (I currently have a stash of ebooks / downloaded fanfic / etc, in forms ranging from .pdf (which it seems okay with) and .epub (ditto) to .html and .rtf and .txt (which it doesn't, but I suppose I could "print" them to pdfs?)

b) writing (since it might make a nice portable ... thing what is for writing)

c) knitting-related whatevers

?

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Also, er, remind me how to get info off of an iPod? I've been afraid to sync up my iPod because it has all the right musics and playlists and stuff, and while I have the music files more or less restored from backup data, the playlist info did not seem to come with, and I really do not want to have to do all that again.

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nano wordcount for today: er. 138. I know the day isn't over, but sheesh. My daily wordcount is kind of plummeting (845 for day 8, 611 for day 9, 358 for day 10), and it's become less "novel" and more "random unconnected scenes" because I have NFI where I'm going... or rather, I have one idea left and I'm afraid to write that because then I won't have anything so I'm trying to delay getting there? I don't even know.

And I try bribing myself ("X words and you can do/have Y", where X ranges from 2k to 1k to 500 to 250 and even that last feels impossible, and Y ranges from WoW to ebz to playing with new toys to knitting to reading to having chocolate to whatever) and it NEVER WORKS. I don't know what's wrong with me, because it ought to work, it just ... doesn't.