Laughter Through Tears

The Sims 4 are releasing (or have already released) their English-language custom pronoun update. Having tried 2-3 times to play trans sims and felt the discomfort of incongruous language, I've been looking forward to it. I haven't updated my game yet (busy with other things), but when I do, I'll try to write about it.

Worth noting that they are working on updating other languages, as well. I imagine it's much more difficult than a relatively ungendered language like English.

I use 750words.com to foster good daily writing habits, and have been having mixed success with it since 2015. Recently I've been on a 90+ day streak, fostered in part by my frantic work on Turncoat Chronicle. Today I quickly went back and checked when I broke my last streak. It was in late April. I checked the days before and after and found that I'd been having a productive time of it, plugging away at Blue Rose (my other main WIP, which has been in the works since December). So I tried checking here on DW, even though my update schedule here is sparse and totally unpredictable, to see what happened to break my streak. I discovered that the last week of April was when I picked up the new desktop... and suddenly recalled that the day I skipped (which also broke a super long streak) was a Saturday, and that was the day I spent all day playing The Sims 4, after having spent an entire Thursday setting up the computer to my liking.

So, in a way, my habits are incredibly consistent over the years.

Somewhat relatedly, the writing is mostly going well and I am trying to make the best possible use of the free time that I have left before I start the new job.

And later today is Jerusalem Pride, which I promised myself I'd attend despite sketchy weather conditions.

I promised an update after NaNoWriMo, didn't I? And now it's been nearly a month since I wrote my fifty thousand words, and I still haven't written anything. A lot of things got put on the back-burner for November, and so December has been pretty busy. I didn't find a lot of time to set aside for contemplating the nature of my chaotic little manuscript, and how to move forward with it. Although I'd been meaning to break my habit of adopting overly ambitious story ideas, and then getting stalled trying to solve them...

Well, that was the situation I found myself in, completely unintentionally. ( Read more... )

You know, I haven't used this icon in a long while. I used to blog pretty frequently about LGBTQ issues, but these days most of what I post is reblogs on Tumblr. But I made this icon after, I think, the 2007 parade, when the Jerusalem municipality for the first time hanged pride flags along major streets, in preparation for the annual pride parade. I remember my friends inviting me to join the end-tail of the parade in 2003, on a Friday afternoon when I had only just returned from the base. I remember attending, the next year, both the Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv parades, concurrently with my process of coming out of the closet as bisexual. I remember the first time since coming out that I missed the parade, and how guilty I felt. I even remember the parade two years ago, which happened to be the day I receiving the final failing grade in my incomplete BSc.

And I remember the stabbing in 2005. ( Read more... )

4537 / 10000 words. 45% done!

I'm going to have so much less time to write, soon, and the draft is due 20/3. I might not be able to fit in a more actiony plot like I'd intended. Oh well, at least I'm writing a story about bisexual dominatrix vampires. Not actually a spoiler I suppose, I mean what else was I gonna write about?

I'm finally reading "the gay elf book". Yes, I know I said I would finish PDS next, but the gay elves were right there on my tablet, and...

In other book news, I really want to buy books but I'm having a temporary cash flow situation. Because my finances and those of my parents are inextricably tangled up together, I need to somehow help my mother with a financial issue, while also covering yearlyproperty tax on my apartment, tuition payments to the open university, and an unusually large electric bill. Winter, you know.

So I am reading gay elves to cheer myself up. And trying to cross-reference my two bingo cards. Which reminds me, I should post my second card for easy reference. The other card is the first thing that comes up when I type my DW URL into Firefox.

I can write a lot of things into the seminar paper I'm (ostensibly) working on, but I don't think I can get away with making the argument that psychiatry speciously groups together homosexuality, male bisexuality, female gender dysphoria, and straight male crossdressing -- merely because all of these are equally threatening to the modern conception of heterosexual masculinity.

Snippet behind the cut.

( I have no idea what I'm doing, this is what flailing in the dark looks like. )

Why, oh why do I keep writing shitty poetry instead of studying neurobiology?

My life is sooo haaard. ;_;

Pride today. Fun times. Retracking to the old route, which is shorter and much less steep. Hopefully this may mean I won't be exhausted by the time the march is over.

Since it's all over Tumblr, let me just drop a rec for the visual novel Cinders, a multiple choice ending fairy tale retelling that allows Cinderella to be a raging bitch on wheels in the best way possible. Also there are love interests or something?

This week has been weird.

I just... don't know what I'm feeling anymore. Am I panicking? Am I anxious? Am I complacent? Am I having a breakdown? Am I physically ill? Have I got my shit together? Am I turning my life around? Am I giving up too easily? Am I clinging to something obsolete and worthless? Is my life moving forward, straying or stagnating?

I wish I could take a magical certainty pill. I guess that's the attraction of games. They give you limited options so you basically always know what you should be doing.

The guy I had to talk to today just couldn't figure out why I spent forty five minutes talking about classes and exams when he asked me about my life. He also couldn't seem to grasp why I was so concerned with my financial future. I guess he was expecting something along the lines of 'This is my plan for having a penis inside of me and later also babies' or something along those lines.

School. Work. Making something of my life. Achieving something tangible. Securing my future. These are not odd goals for a woman of almost twenty eight.

So here I am again, attempting to connect my study materials to real life, fandom and/or porn, while nursing a stalking cold and a headache that feels as though Betty Crocker is trying to mind-control me through a handsome red tiara. Meanwhile I still haven't read the most recent monthly package of comics because I planned to do it on Friday but was just too goddamn exhausted, and the book I have been making gradual headway on since Dragon*Con has reached its point of WTF no return. I wish I was in bed reading or mainlining a new TV series. My bed is cozy and using it to study makes me sad.

Both my favorite fandoms are making me sad, both of them because of shipping. The only novelty is, in one case it's the f/f shippers who have gone rabid, illogical, fling flaming poo mad. As for the other Lost Girl-related stuff, that's to be expected. Ah, the mild social discomforts of being the "bad bisexual" in any given group of vagina-lovers. I could go on, but I don't feel like it. As for Homestuck, at this point I truly think I'd be happy if Jake English just up and died. Maybe I should do a whole essay about how hard it is for me to relate to male characters.

Just my luck, I get a canonically queer intellectual character that I actually sort of like, and his entire existence causes my primary fandom to go up in a BFBVFS.

I miss my Eeyore icon. Where'd it get off to?