Laughter Through Tears

Writing is half reason, half ritual. There's an element of magical thinking to it, and also an element of self-reinforced habits. You make your own recipe for a muse, more or less. Some of the advice for beating writer's block is so bland, or so arbitrary, you feel like you might as well...

Well, you might as well take advice from a video game.

In The Sims 4, individual sims are ruled by their mood. The canonical mood for creative work (which includes playing instruments, writing, painting and cooking) is "Inspired". Inspiration don't come easy -- except in TS4, where it literally does. True, true, it comes a lot easier if you have lots of money, or if you've already had success in one of the creative careers. But even at the lower levels, there is always something your sim can do to get in a creative mood.

How to beat writer's/artist's block, TS4 style:

• Take a "thoughtful shower" -- the easiest way, available to all but the poorest sims. Grants four hours of blissfully enmused creativity.


• Drink green tea (my flesh and blood self prefers ginger, because it's caffeine free).


• Interact with a reward you got from progressing in your creative career (lovingly strokes the paperback copy of the anthology I was published in).


• Cloud or star gazing (it was cloudy yesterday, dammit, why didn't I take advantage).


• Playing with molding clay (this is actually a good idea, I gotta get me something like that).


• Drinking coffee, but only if done at a cafe (can confirm, I just had a moccha latte).


• Completing a piece of art/writing, but only if you're at a low skill level (presented without comment).


• Mentoring from a sim with a higher skill level (...).


• A special creaitvity-boosting mixed juice drink called the "Prose and Pop". I'm gonna have a lot of fun trying to invent a recipe for that one.


• Just fucken' be born naturally creative or something. Don't even.

Ah, fuck it. I'm gonna go drink my ginger tea and eat my black licorice and hope for the best.

I really wish the yeshivah whose phone number is very similar to mine would finally put out new pamphlets.

(believe me, I've tried)

1. I check a dude's profile out on OK Cupid.
2. Scan the profile, nothing interesting.
3. Check out "personality traits" even though they're always weirdly vague and random.
4. Check "questions with unacceptable answers" to find out if he's a creep.
5. He answered a probability question differently than me.
6. I assume I'm wrong and start rethinking the question.
7. Before changing my answer, I realize that I'm right and he's wrong.
8. Despite his background in mathematics.
9. Technically, it was a reading comprehension error, but...
10. ...he forgot to account for the fact that there are two sides to every coin.
11. If I read this kind of symbolism in a book, I would consider it ludicrously uncredible.
12. Post about it to my journal and lol.

Last night I finally installed Dragon Age: Origins. I was going to set up my character and play for like an hour or two, just to get a good feel for the game. During the character's introduction mission, I got stuck in a fire trap and had to repeat an escape sequence 4-5 times before I managed to avoid getting myself and my companion killed by guards. By then it was getting kind of late, so naturally I just went and played for three more hours. Mysteriously, while I was trying to save and close the game, my mouse flipped out and I had to change the batteries.

( Read more... )

Maybe I'll play all night tonight. That's what the holiday of freedom is for, right?

Sometimes I get sad, but then I remember that Texts from Cephalopods exists.

True story.

I suspect that going to an Israeli comics convention might be a little anticlimactic after Dragon*Con. Or, then again, it might be comfortingly familiar. At any rate, the food will be better. Too bad I fell asleep at 3 AM last night and then woke up at 8 AM this morning.

My brother still wants TPBs to catch up on the latest Green Lantern events. IDK, I think he'll probably end up being disappointed.

One of the weird, random gender behavior assignments of my youth was stationary. For some reason, collecting random crap was considered a noble pursuit, and the number one thing that little girls collected was colorful stationary. Toy stores sold ultra-cheap sets of paper and envelopes in pastel colors, with little drawings printed on the margins. You could use them to write letters and greeting cards for birthdays, but most girls collected and exchanged them.

Possibly this was supposed to be an exercise in prosocial behavior or something. It wasn't focussed on the buying of more and more stationary, although it did make a convenient cheap gift that parents could use as rewards for good behavior (or treats for when the kids were sick). Basically, your social status determined who you could trade with, and the more friends you had, the more diverse your collection. If you got a set of stationary from your parents, and you still had 8 out of the 10 sheets, you were a friendless loser.

Another quirk of the stationary system was that each pack had half as many envelopes as sheets of paper. However, the makers had grossly overestimated the verbosity of third grade girls. Even with an effort, most of us could barely fill a whole page. This created a constant shortage of envelopes and, as everyone knows, packaging a nice stationary page (LOL shitty kids' stationary that costs 5*10^-11$$ or thereabouts, but it was sparkly) in a lousy white envelope is just the height of gauche. It is a grave insult to the girl receiving the letter.

Anyway, I just realized that the way I arranged the images on my seminar presentation strongly resembles the arrangement of ugly cartoon images on the shitty stationary I collected as a kid.

IDEK.

RNA polymerase is an enzyme that's responsible for transcribing DNA into RNA. It facilitates producing proteins according to the DNA template. Like many complex enzymes it's made of several subunits. The sigma (σ) subunit is responsible for initiating transcription. The rho (ρ) factor is responsible for terminating transcription.

I believe I've mentioned my chronic inability to tell the difference between the two? Just when I reliably learned to tell mu from eta, too.

This post is an optical illusion. I am actually studying thermodynamics for my biochem quiz tomorrow, not posting.

So this week's fannish5: Five of your favorite characters are going to a Halloween party. What costumes are they wearing?

My first thought was CrossGen characters, which is bizarre, because they went out of business about six years ago, so why would they pop up before more recent fandoms? Anyway, the thought of Giselle in a classic black witch's costume is too hilarious not to share. But for reals:

1. Kenzi from Lost Girl dresses as a harlequin clown, because there is nothing scarier than clowns.

2. Astrid from Fringe dresses in a gown and wimple which she did not buy in a Renn Faire, obviously, because she doesn't go to those, and whatever her loser ex told you to the contrary is nothing but a vindictive lie. She does look good in velvet, though.

3. Veronica Mars dresses as Carmen Sandiego FTW. You know she played the hell out of those games when she was twelve.

4. Jamie Madrox from X-Factor would dress as Cyclops if he wasn't afraid Cyke would toast him for his troubles. So he dresses like Indiana Jones. Not because Terry has a crush on Harrison Ford, though, because that would be weird.

5. Faith from BtVS has probably never been to a proper Halloween party in her life. She doesn't really get how the concept works and so Dawn makes her wear a classic purple Batgirl costume, which is truly a WTF choice. Halfway through the party she changes into one of Buffy's minidresses and they end up duking it out and spilling all the punch.

Why I love geologists, crystallized (hee!) into one sentence. Digger: Pretty much the best webcomic in the world.

ETA: Is it TMI to lament the loss of my midstream? I was supposed to take a urine test this morning and as I was getting ready to leave, I inventoried everything I'd need in my mind, and realized my dad still has my HMO card.