The Thessaliad Redux

So I'm going to try this meme that mitchy came up with. 30 days of movies. I have a bad track record with these but ... well, you never know.

( 30 Days of Movie )

1. Favourite movie (or Top 5 Faves, Top 10 Faves, Top Oops I Got Carried Away)?

Yeeeeeeeeeah. This one's always a tricky one because so much is dependent on genre. I think Pump Up the Volume probably wins for sheer inspirational quality, though. It illustrates perfectly the teenage need to talk and break boundaries that has led to the blog generation. A lot of people take it for granted, really - the whole thing where they can say whatever they want to say on a public forum and not have anyone but a bunch of trolls come down on them. Back in the day, there was no forum like that and I imagine a lot of people didn't feel listened to at all.

Plus, some of the lines are just plain amazing.

In other news, back from Brighton and sometimes I just gotta wonder about my mother. I love her dearly, don't get me wrong, but ... well, I wonder, is all. I mean, she has some serious hypocrisy issues sometimes. But we had a good time notwithstanding. There was shopping and nice food and chatting and now I'm just kinda tired. Not in a bad way, mind.

Some of the shopping was books. I finally picked up a copy of Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Which was awesome, by the way - I recommend it. Though our trip to the Brighton Waterstone's lacked the awesome I found in a London branch of same, wherein I found a couple of copies of Mur Lafferty's Playing for Keeps. I also picked up a copy of Feed, by Mira Grant. One of you charming lot blogged about it and piqued my curiosity, and I am enjoying it immensely. I also see that it appears to be a series or at least a trilogy, with a second book coming out in May next year. We'll have to see whether I devour Feed (no pun intended) and wail that I have to wait too long for the next one.

As to my own writings ... I got hit by inspiration on Friday afternoon, when I was entirely unable to work on it. I've jotted down the basic premise (which kicks the arse of the last one, in my view, particularly in terms of overarcing plot - really the idea I had for the third book is better sub-plot somewhere else) and a few bits of dialogue that need cleaning up but I wanted to start it and longhand was all I had. Mum said something about a laptop for Christmas - one of the tiny ones, mayhap - so that's all good. She also said something about helping out with deposit and first month's rent on a flat, once I've got some money behind me to actually move. This is thrilling!

So yeah, there's been a lot going on and I'm sorry I've had radio silence. This shall be remedied. There are rants to be had!

Um ... all of them?

Seriously, much like lithiumdoll, I rewatch series rather than episodes. I have a small but adequate collection of TV series DVD box set (Ultraviolet, Buffy, Angel, Being Human, two seasons of Eureka, Torchwood S1 ... wow, can you tell where my genre flag flies?) and I will mainline them quite happily ... or at least, happily provided I can skip a few episodes that I find particularly annoying now and then. However, there are 'comfort episodes' of various shows that I will switch on when I only really have time for the one episode and want something I know I adore. In this case, I think I will have to go with the Buffy episode "Hush".

I pick this one because it's one I actually watch rather than having on in the background while I'm doing something else, because it's not a background-noise episode in the least. There's minimal dialogue by the very nature of the episode, and is - in my opinion, anyway - one of the most clever episodes Buffy has. To be able to convey so much in facial expressions and gestures is just plain awesome, and it's one of the few times the actors can really shine beyond the one-liners that make that show so popular. I have a certain admiration for anyone who can tell a story with nothing more than body language. Een the spots where the written word is used in the place of actual speech says something about the characters (for instance, when Willow takes the time to write "Hi, Giles" on her whiteboard when a simple wave would have done; it just suits Willow's shy-polite awkward friendliness so well). So when it comes to episodes I watch rather than listening to with half an ear and then tuning in when the dialogue or lack thereof indicates that something is going on that I need to look at, that's probably the one that best fits the bill of an episode I have really, actually watched more than five times.

In other news, apparently having a best friend is bad. It apparently promotes possessiveness, bullying and cliques. Well, they can frankly stuff it, in my opinion. Look, that would not have worked for me. I could not have had a group of a dozen or so friends in elementary school because just about everyone in my class thought I was weird. There were limited people that I could actually talk to, who shared my interests, who didn't think I was a freak. To be 'in with' everyone in my class at school, I'd have to have been very, very different as a person. I would have had to hide who I was, be ashamed of my tastes and interests. How is that healthier than having a best friend with whom you can share those interests and be yourself?

Welcome to the monoculture, where everyone is expected to behave like everyone else just so they can fit in and be 'normal'.

It's not like I haven't heard this shit before. I recall being mercilessly bullied by a particularly violent and mean-spirited girl when I was in junior high school. She stuck chewed gum on my combination lock, she shoved me in the corridors ... once she tried to steal my handbag but because I wear mine with the strap across my chest instead of just over one shoulder, all she did was claw my back while reaching for the strap hard enough to draw a bit of blood and nearly choke me before she gave up. The only time I ever physically retaliated was when she picked on my then-best friend. He had a broken leg and was on crutches, and she kicked them out from under him ... at which point I hit her. There was a scuffle, I bloodied her nose, I got detention while she got suspended. (It was my first offense and there were mitigating circumstances; she'd been in detention so often she more or less had her own desk in there.) Anyway, point is that before we got to this point (I think around the time she tried to steal my handbag, actually), Mum went into school to talk to my principal about the ceaseless bullying I was getting from this girl. The principal's answer was to handwave the bully's behaviour - she came from a troubled family environment, allowances were made, yadda. Then started in on me, saying how "Maybe if she were more like the other girls, she wouldn't get picked on so much". As I recall, my mother's response was, "So you'd like my daughter to be a vicious little bully?" The principal's response was, after a brief stammer, "...Well, maybe if she just dressed more like the other girls..." That earned him a verbal reaming as only the women in my family can truly manage (you think I could rant for my nation in the Olympics? Where do you think I learned it from?) and things returned to the status quo - in-between lessons was a giant open-ended game of "Kick the Thesski".

Point is that encouraging people to not have best friends, to socialise equally with everyone, is the end result of the kind of thinking my junior high principal employed: if you do what everyone else does, say what everyone else says and never, ever show a spark of individuality that will get you shunned, then you're not any trouble for the school administration so they don't actually have to punish anyone or do their jobs a healthy, happy child. Bullshit. I was not a stupid kid. Maybe I could have fit in if I'd figured out what these little shits wanted. But I didn't want to be a sheep. I wanted to be me. I wanted friends I could have on my own terms, without hiding who I was for the sake of an easy life. It's nice when there are more of them, but sometimes it doesn't work that way. That's a large part of why some people have just a couple of close friends ... and a best friend; someone with whom they can share everything and not be judged.

These days I have a long list of friends with whom I can share just about everything, and I am grateful for them. Back in the day, though, I was very much alone beyond a few people. So here's to the list of people I called 'best friend' between the ages of three and sixteen:

Stacy Dion
Gillian Murray
Jason McLean (despite what he did to me when we were ten)
Richard Strother
Leanne Toffell

Fuck this article and every bit of research that went into it - for some people, best friends is how it works and I'd rather be seen as 'unhealthy' by people who don't even remember how crappy school can be than have been without them. I'd have been lonely and miserable without them, so I call it a win.

I think the final interview thing went well. I don't think they have all my references through yet, but they expect to let me know soon. There's only two of us to decide between now, and the consultant I met (nice guy, and yes, I am very familiar with the type) implied that it would be very hard to choose between us. Fingers crossed, hopeful thoughts and ye gads, news soon please...

In other news, this little old lady approached me at the bus stop on my way out and paid me the most random compliment:

Random Old Lady: Excuse me ... are you wearing stockings?
Me: o_O ...No...
Random Old Lady: Nylons?
Me: ...No...
Random Old Lady: Oh, my; you have lovely colour, your legs...
Me: ..............Thankyou?

She wandered away after that, and it was a heartfelt compliment spoken in a way that isn't quite as creepy as it may sound in text, but ... well, of all the things to get complimented on, the tan or lack thereof in my legs was about the last thing I would have expected. I've had compliments on my shoes, my hair, my handbag and my headphones, but that's a new one.

Yeah, so ... that happened.

1) Job thing ... went. Apparently the NHS is getting really picky about hiring people without three years' worth of references with no significant breaks therein. Which ... well, I don't have. They're trying to see if a personal reference will be acceptable in this instance and I will know by Monday. I just ... *flail; sigh*

2) Playing DA:O, the only origin stories that I have played through right to the end are Human Noble and Elven Mage. Feeling somewhat adventurous, I decided to plough through with my Dwarf Commoner, mostly because I liked the origin story way better than I thought I was going to and was curious to see what would happen around about Orzamarr. Dwarven Noble was going to be next, but now I'm thinking I might move on to one of my non-mage elves instead, for one simple reason: the bloody Fade.

( Spoilers for Circle Tower shenanigans hello... )

So there's grumbling, a bit. But never mind. Tomorrow is lunch with Mum and I'm sure there will be sushi. Mmmmmm, sushi. Nom.

To elaborate from the Twitter aggregate comment on what I got up to last night: birthday get-together, much belated, and I finally went to Belgo after years of hearing about how awesome their mussels are.

(Side note: their mussels are awesome.)

mitchy and I started at the Lamb and Flag, another place that I've been hearing about for years (my Daria fandom friend Padre, aka Father Martin, and I met up in London for drinks many years ago and we pondered the Lamb and Flag because of its fantastic ale and good sausages but it was too crowded so we ended up somewhere else). I did not have the ale, because I don't actually like beer, with a few very random exceptions (Labatts, Newky Brown, that Mexican stuff where you jam a wedge of lime into the bottle neck... but only very rarely in the case of all three). Instead, I had a half-pint of cider and two packets of crisps because I honestly anticipated a longer night and did not want to dump more alcohol on an empty stomach than necessary.

We honestly didn't expect to see anyone at the L&F, on the grounds of very last minute decision of which pub to go to. However, thalinovel turned up along with random and unexpected but very nice to see him again tyrell. Albeit briefly for tyrell, which was a shame, but at least there was a few minutes of conversation and "Yes, we do know each other from more than online, even if I've only been at Brighton Below three times before my character died" with added "no, let's not talk about the job hunt because frothing at the mouth often offends".

And then it was off to Belgo, with me serving as navigator because someone who is actually very familiar with the area and wandered said area frequently not so long ago trumps the bother of looking at a map. :) And I did get us there, though admittedly I took us the long way around. Mostly I did this on the grounds of my firm belief that there is no point in going to Covent Garden if you're not going to blow past the Covent Garden Market and up from there past the station because missing the buskers is criminal. Actually, there was more entertainment in the two girls in the brightly coloured coats doing a little hoppy-dance and singing "Reach for the stars" out of absolutely nowhere, but the point stands. In any case, we met adelpha and kelemvor in the reception foyer and minmorton turned up a bit later and we were, on the whole, quite the group.

And so there was food and fruit beer. I was dubious about the fruit beer thing (see above about not liking beer) but I was assured that it didn't taste like beer. So mango beer was, in fact, a revelation, though of course it turned out that I liked everyone else's drink better than I did my own. But seriously. Mango beer. Anyone who knows my fondness for the humble mango knows I had to try it, and it was really nice. It was just, ironically, the most beery-tasting of the three I tried. In any case, there were also the mussels and these really nice salmon cakes and there might have been dessert if not for the fact that 95% of the dessert menu involved chocolate in some way and I was already developing what promised to be a monumental migraine. Belgo is a lovely place with great food and good service but it is also sardine-tin crowded, rather close and excessively loud. This is never good for me anyway, but I wasn't about to dump chocolate on top of it - I still had hopes of actually beign able to enjoy the rest of the evening.

...Of course, that entirely relies on 'the rest of the evening' not involving London pubs on a Saturday night. Crowded and loud is my bane, and ... well, y'know, West End. In the end, I had to bail early, with the rest of the merry crew happily ensconced in a hard-won table at the Captain's Cabin, after a protracted game of musical chairs that managed to span both floors of the establishment. I was really sorry to have to leave but it was for the best - there were painkillers and a relatively early night (for a Saturday) and unfortunately rather broken sleep and now it's afternoon and while the head still hurts, I don't feel specifically like I'm going to pass out any time soon. Bonus. Added bonus: haven't had one that bad in quite awhile.

Further bonus: it's a pretty nice day. I will finish my coffee and possibly find food and go for a stroll, and then sit down and figure out what to do with the rest of the afternoon. It may or may not involve DAO (about which I kept conversation to a minimum last night, go me!) but will definitely involve roasting turkey bits later on.

So to those at the birthday dinner celebration thingie, thanks for the company and lovely conversation, and I hope to see you all again at some point.

Yesterday was all manner of fun, if vaguely painful. And even if there was a little bit of argument with my mother. At least it was good-natured. I keep forgetting how insistent my mother can be about things she wants to see me wearing.

There was lunch - I'm a little devastated because that place in Chinatown with the Best Beef with Black Bean EVAR closed down, but we found someplace nice with a good express lunch menu. Meet-ups with my mother are a lot better than they used to be because I can actually talk about stuff that bothers me; the vents and frustrations and stresses I've got at the moment are okay to talk about to friends sometimes, but sometimes you just can't beat mother-sympathy, especially when the said mother knows how to help and when to just offer some advice and back off. That and just under half a bottle of wine, and I felt a fair bit better. Yay perspective.

Then came the shopping - if there's one thing my mother and I do well together these days, it's shop. Really, it started with a trip to Boots - Mum needed a few things, and we picked up some bits for me as well. Nothing major at that point, but I got some new lip gloss (I have this thing for flavoured lip gloss, some of you may recall) and toothpaste and some cream for that itchy, swelling eyelid that kind of works, plus this stuff that's designed to hide the dark circles that seem to be perpetually under my eyes no matter how much sleep I get. Comes of being pale, I suppose. All in all, it was good.

Then, though, there was the more fun shopping - to a point, anyway. See, one of the things that tight finances has meant is that we hadn't been able to get a copy of the new Jim Butcher novel, and my Hoodoo deserved a treat as well, we thought. So we spent some time trekking all over the West End, looking for that book. Harder to manage than you think when Borders didn't even seem to have received a shipment and was waiting on one for next week. The man I spoke to at the info desk was disappointed, and it seemed he was a fan too, so there was a nice chat. I like being the Good Customer Asking For Info; beats the couple of Rude Stupid Interrupting Twits we got mid-search... Anyway, I finally found the book at the WH Smith in the Plaza shopping centre on Oxford Street and disturbed a fair bit of clientele with the squee. I've let my Hoodoo be the first one to read it; usually, I get first dibs because I read the quickest, but this is part of the gift. Yes, it pains me. I know I'll have to wait days. But hey, sometimes you make sacrifices.

Following that, there was a window-shop for shoes. Sometime in the not-too-distant, my mother and I are going to go on the day-long quest for The Perfect Pair of Funky Shoes. Personally, I have my eye on a pair of funked-up Victorian ankle boots, but The Perfect Pair of Funky Shoes cannot truly be found without a day-long quest or a lot of time spent browsing the internet. And I can't see myself buying shoes on the internet, as I have wide feet and what size I take depends on the design of the shoe. It's a pain. Anyway, then I just popped my head into H&M to have a look at a pretty top and next thing I know, Mum's decided that I need new summer clothes and I came out with four tops, a skirt and a cardigan, and narrowly escaped going away with a pair of hemp-heeled platform open-toe shoes that I unconditionally despised but that Mum desperately wanted me to have because she insisted they looked good on me. Maybe, but if you don't think you look good, it doesn't much matter. Cue five minutes of Mum saying, "I still think those shoes looked good on you..." and us finally having a fairly good-natured argument on the lines of, "I hated them, Mum; please stop!" Sometimes we shop well together, but there's always a sticking point.

Then I came home and made steak. I was too tired to work the HIPPIEcast last night, though I desperately need to re-record Chapter 15 after royally ballsing it up the other day. So I'll do it today, following a cheap n' cheerful treat-lunch out and doing the washing-up. I think I'm destressed enough not to rush the reading this time around. Also, at some point to day I need to email Mum and say, "Yes, my Hoodoo would like to be included in the trip to see "Waiting for Godot", thank you very much". Woo!

As an aside, I'm a little bemused about the people who end up following me on Twitter. I get a fair bit of spam same as the rest of the Twitterverse, but then I end up with fantasy authors I've never even heard of (how the HELL did these people find me?), Alasdair Stuart of PseudoPod and its related podcasts (that would be down to my Hoodoo; at least I know where that 'random' friending came from...) and just ... yagh. I've recently come to the knowledge that there are people I don't know - people who do this kind of thing, and do it a lot better than I do - listening to the HIPPIEcast at the moment and it's actually kind of nerve-wracking. I know that this is to be expected, but ... Steve Ely? Alasdair Stuart? Getting into arguments debates with people who can write me into the ground over gender roles in fiction? What happened to my little amateur groove? AAAAAA!

Okay, I'm done with my panic attack. Now I go eat lunch.

I figured out what happened!

I had a drinks meet with mitchy this afternoon. I conscientiously set my alarm for 11:30 so that I would definitely be up in time. Now, leaving aside the arsehole who was leaning on my doorbell and then not actually making sense when I got him on the intercom at 8 or so, I still should have been up in plenty of time, thanks to handy-dandy alarm.

However, the alarm was set on my snazzy shiny cellphone. Now, one of the things I adored about this phone when I first started using it was that you could programme repeat days on the alarm clock - set it up so that it only went off on the weekdays and you wouldn't have to switch it off on the weekends. No more forgetting to switch the alarm on for a Monday morning wake-up!

...Except, then I started using the iPod-dock clock radio thing as an alarm clock and forgot all about it. Which meant that when I started using my phone again this week, I forgot that my alarm clock settings were still set for "Only Goes Off On Weekdays". Which meant that I woke up not because of my alarm going off but because mitchy was ringing me, five minutes after I was supposed to be there, wondering where the hell I'd gone.

*headdesk* So, so sorry, mitchy.

Hey, redstapler? nightskywarlock? Found this, thought of you.

( Cut for size )

I miss you guys.

There must and shall be drabble today. However, there must and shall also be grocery shopping so that there's something in the house so I can feed dodgyhoodoo when he comes home, but first and foremost there shall be telling tales of Brighton Below. Because damn, that was fun.

Being early is seriously worth it. After a trawl for decent foot-saving socks (which weren't quite as foot-saving as I'd hoped, but maybe with another pair...), I eventually turned up at game at about half-three, got changed and had plenty of time to read the Undersider and my little gossip slips. I like the gossip slips - you can't necessarily believe a word of it, but you never really know. Interesting bits and bobs about Clayton Square (oh dear oh dear, Drinn) and so forth. The really unfortunate bit was that I seem to have left the camera switched on when I unplugged it from Eshu after loading my photos from last game, so of course the battery was dead. Which is a damn shame, because Patch Ann was there and everything and her character is so. Damn. Cool. Next time, though, definitely.

The carriage coat went over really well, and Saint loaned me a hat that really just completed the outfit, on the whole. Everyone oooohed and aaaaahed over my Gladstone bag, too, so yay! However, there's a minor issue with LARPing indoors in this heat - the costumes are not generally designed for comfort in hot weather. yshala was bundled up in a coat, hat and shawl. Daz was in three jackets and he wasn't the only one. Drinn and one of his friends were in shirt, waistcoat and jacket. Alex (Patch Ann) was wearing this cropped fun-fur coat. Three of the girls were in heavy velvet dresses. I had the carriage coat and the bulky socks. Some poor guy was wearing chain mail. Various nobles were in various period pieces involving jackets and capes and in one case, a ratty powdered wig. And then there was Law, all done up in what I think is Regency-era riding gear, all ruff and collar and ... ye flippin' gads he looked uncomfortable. It'll be better come November, when it's cooler and being in all that gear isn't going to make people step outside the Market truce just for a bit of fresh air...

We broke the plot. The organisers told us at the end of the session that we had comprehensively broken the plot. But then, as has been repeatedly pointed out, plot doesn't survive contact with the players anyway. It was also apparently the single most combat-heavy Market they'd ever had. And this, I suppose, is about the point at which I'd have to explain the "got near-killed over cake" thing.

( Cut for length, stupidity and cake. )

All to say that we had a remarkably good time. The trip back wasn't any fun, though - train and buses were all full of drunken yahoos. I have issues with drunken yahoos - they are loud and obnoxious. And most of my food intake yesterday involved standing at a counter ordering something unhealthy smashed into a bun. Oh, and the curry, which gave us the best bit of bullshit in-game, in my opinion. See, Travesty's not really ... au fait with anything Upworlder, so a lot of stuff confuses her. So when a predominantly vegetable curry turned up with ridge-cut carrots and soya meat of some description, there was a comment about how time-consuming it must have been to cut all those roots into these wavy shapes. Saint, recipient of said comment, replied with, "No, see, it's an Indian dish, and these were cut with what's called a kris, an Indian knife that's rather wavy, so the waves are all built-in. No extra effort involved." After which we had to go out of character to laugh our fool heads off.

But all told, I got home safe, I don't hurt so much anymore, and I'm already looking forward to the next one. I just need to figure out the new downtime system. Now I should go and do something productive, I suppose. I don't know what I'm going to do about dinner but I'll figure something out.

About to head off for Brighton - doing a bit of maths and so on, I figure that quarter to twelve is about the latest I can head off and still make my train. The checklist has grown, though - it's almost distressing:

- Costume
- Boots because I am not wearing those fuckers today, no way, not until I have to
- Gladstone bag
- Spare herbs for physreps
- Daz's chocolate memory cards (which I don't think came out quite right but they've been in the fridge all evening so ... we live in hope and if not, hey, green chocolate)
- Little sack o' tradeable crap for Floating Market
- Camera

I was going to bring my laptop but in the end ... too much junk. Thanks, but no. I'm already going to clank when I move. Yech. So instead it'll have to be the notebook that perennially lives in my handbag for the drabble that's been flitting around my head for the last week and I've been too tired to set to 'paper', as it were. So ... yeah, anyway, things to do and places to go. Less nervous this time, though partly that's because I've just woken up after going to bed at near daylight and I'm not last of the great morning people.

Okay, this leave me ten minutes to pack my shit and get out the door. Hasta luego, people - see you when I get back (not before 2am my time, from the look - I'm such a nutbar...)