riding the echo down

Challenge #4

Since this is the start of a new year, this challenge will be to set your own goals! Of course we can all make large or ambitious goals, remember that small and/or short goals are also good! Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

- i want to write and draw more often. signed up to getyourwordsout for a boost with my writing habits, and just now my partner was talking to me about how i used to draw a lot more back in 2014-2016 so that gave me the idea to start with baby steps and get back into doodling while watching something that doesn't require my full attention. even just once a month should be good. there's also my art piece for ygorarepairs but i started that last year, so....

- make progress with uploading backlogged reviews from dreamwidth to lawrencedane.com. might need to redo some of the screenshots since idr if i kept the uncropped originals when doing the earliest ones, but i'll enjoy getting those again if needed.

- and speaking of my man larry, maybe a nice shorter-term goal would be to get a post up somewhere about "heavenly bodies" in time for his birthday. i've already done some background research on the production and reception, i've watched it once, and now i have the blu-ray so image/video grabs should be a breeze. biggest obstacle really is deciding how to structure the review since he didn't act in it, lol.

- finish my makuderu fst and upload it to the appropriate comm(s) since i started it a couple years ago so it's time to stop sitting on it!!

- another shorter-term goal: do year 3 of my hellsing mini exchange with more promo and see how it goes so i can contribute that experience to a citruscon panel about organizing fan events.

five goals for 2025, nice. i think these are decent low-pressure goals that'll still help me feel accomplished no matter how stressful the rest of my year ends up being.

slowly getting lawrencedane.com together - i went with liberato.io for my host and it's been a steep learning curve going from neocities' handholding to having to do literally everything from scratch. (i guess i don't have to do it from scratch since it's possible to do a wordpress plug-in thing? but when i tried installing it, it seemed like more trouble than it was worth lol.) but their customer support has been very patient with me which i really appreciate.

i decided on liberato after reading tempural's post about site hosting resources - the post is from about a year ago now but their tos still distinguishes between fictional content and irl harmful content in a way that gives me optimism that they won't suddenly decide to be weird about it, even though there won't be anything on the fansite dealing with (for example) fictional sexual material with underage characters. i did email them before signing up to ask about nazi iconography, since they say no hate symbols are allowed, and they responded promptly to clarify that discussions of/screenshots from media like dane's jericho episode would pose no problems. i do also like that they make it very clear that live-action sexual material is allowed as long as it's consensual, since i'm well aware of how hostile most of the internet has become towards sex workers.

i know neocities can be loosey-goosey with what kind of content they allow to be hosted, for better or worse, but i also know they have no customer support and it was absolutely a given that i would need it.

now that i've started to understand how the directories/subdirectories work in liberato's interface, including linking to images, i think my next step is going to be using a static site generator to help me with the css lol. much easier to tweak a template than code a page from nothing. i don't know if i need to be concerned about disabling hotlinking to images? it's something i thought about since one of my inspirations, the phantom of the paradise fansite the swan archives, has right-click completely disabled so you can't look at the source code for the pages or anything. i'm sure it's a bandwidth-control tactic but possibly also a copyright thing, which may be a factor i need to be thinking about in the long run...? trying to understand how to implement that kind of thing has been pretty confusing to me though, so for now my priority is just to get the site functional and reasonably attractive. then i might go back to customer support and ask them to walk me through implementing that function like i'm a five-year-old.

( thinking out loud about image hosting and site organization )

when you visit fansites/fanpages what are the first things you look for, as a fan or just someone who's curious? what kind of organization have you found helpful for navigating the sites/pages?

i'm not a music reviewer by any means. in the past others have encouraged me to write about music i enjoy, since i do like reading reviews whether i agree with them or not - i remember spending hours on progarchives and places like this one guy's website where his rating system didn't use stars or numbers but something that iirc was derived from math or something? i can't find it again unfortunately* - and i'm also very interested in the history/production of a given album and following connections to find cool music by relatively obscure artists (bobb trimble, anyone?), but it's difficult for me to actually write my own reviews because, well... i know i'm not getting the same auditory information as most other people. but here's an unorganized attempt (pitchfork this certainly ain't) so let's see how it goes - aiming high by starting with steely dan even if it means retreading well-trodden ground lol.

apparently steely dan's discography has been experiencing a re-evaluation lately and i had no idea - only found out when i was browsing reviews of donald fagen's solo albums the other day and fell into a rabbit hole. (this brand-new book focusing on the characters in the band's songs sounds interesting and i'll have to see if i can get it from a library first or something - the illustrations are a cool idea, but the author's "don't do drugs, kids" comment at the end of the interview is annoying enough to make me not want to buy the book sight unseen lol.) i grew up mostly hearing about the band as a punchline the same way a lot of other '70s stuff was made into the butt of jokes during the 1990s/early 2000s and never actually listened to them until last year, entirely by chance. i asked my parents recently about their memories of the band and they both said that they remembered some songs being radio hits but didn't have strong opinions either way. they didn't have any of the albums in their record/cd collection when i was a kid even though they did have a fair amount of jazz music. at any rate i'm glad i finally introduced myself to steely dan - i've tended to prefer music with tightly-crafted lyrics that invite closer reading and/or are dense with references&meaning, and steely dan's work fits right in. distinctive voices also tend to feature a lot in my favorites and while i wouldn't put fagen on the same level as orbison/nilsson/mercury/darnielle/etc, he's still recognizable enough for me to hear 'I.G.Y.' on a recommended-for-you playlist and be like, huh, this sounds like steely dan and then look up the singer's name for an oh-shit moment lol.

my favorite of steely dan's albums at this point is the 1980 "gaucho" which, in addition to having a rather notoriously tortured production history, is apparently also their most divisive. some people feel it's too polished and/or too simple compared to earlier work... can't speak to the "polished" sound but if it is relatively simple then that's to its benefit imo - makes it easier to follow what individual instruments are doing so appreciation comes faster. wall-of-sound can be fun but it typically takes me several listens to figure out what i'm even hearing. (thinking about how long it took me to appreciate masato nagai's "wild drive"....)

thematically it feels like a spiritual companion to pulp's "this is hardcore" and that's probably why i'm drawn to it more than the other albums - i've been a big pulp fan for a long time and still go back and forth on whether i like "this is hardcore" or "we love life" best, but i've not found anything else that really reminds me of the latter. "gaucho" and "this is hardcore" have similar themes of dissolution and longing, with less defiance than in the earlier albums from either band. the songwriters for both tend to simultaneously make fun of and empathize with their seedy male subjects - but they're not necessarily asking the listener to sympathize. their lyrics are more aimed at reminding us that we're all capable of being terrible to each other in one way or another, and that beneath the fucked-up actions there's still a person there who's hurting. sometimes, anyway. other times it seems like they're just having fun writing about creeps, and i can dig that too! both titles are also almost concept albums, tightly wrapped around a unity of sound and theme that each band's earlier (or later!) albums don't quite have, which is another thing that makes the overall listening experience that much more rewarding imo.

steely dan continued to revisit these themes, of course - 'things i miss the most' from "everything must go" is a real fucking earworm with their signature sensitive-yet-sardonic lyrics - but "gaucho" as a whole is so laser-focused that it comes across like a collection of short stories by raymond carver with more of a sideways sense of humor. and i'm seeing now that there's some who class carver as "dirty realism" and that midnight cowboy is considered a great example of the subgenre, which tracks since i adore both the herlihy book and the schlesinger film.... i don't know if steely dan would fit the literary definition here but there's a definite throughline with regards to subject matter that i find interesting.

anyway, back to the music: this is a short album, easy to listen to all the way through in sequence as intended, though i can also understand why people might not enjoy that experience much. to continue the short story comparison, it's a bit like flannery o'connor - great in individual doses, but if you sit and read a full collection of her in one go then you might find it a bit repetitive after a while. (not my personal opinion! one i've seen other people express, though, including people whose opinions on writing i tend to respect even when we disagree.) so imo if you only listen to one from this album, make it 'hey nineteen'. i'll talk a bit about each track below, including why that one is my favorite.

( you gotta shake it )

earlier this month my partner and i managed a cross-country move - driving three days with three cats.... really do not recommend doing this unless you have to lol. but we all made it to our new apartment in one piece. my first week at my new job was really hectic but i'm enjoying it so far. from the sound of it this next week will be more normal now that a big site event is over with - they wanted me to start at the beginning of the month but that timing just wouldn't work for me.

i haven't been able to engage in my hobbies much with all the packing/driving/unpacking/new job orientation stuff but yesterday i finally got my pc unpacked and set up with a fancy new monitor to replace the one i had to leave behind. everything seems to be in good shape so far! and while i was in the middle of a move i got an email response from the PR person for the organization that runs what used to be known as the genie awards - they're willing to give me reproduction permission for award ceremony footage where the LAC description makes it sound like dane gave a presentation. this is exciting for me since i've yet to see video footage of him just being himself. i do also have permission from the CBC to get a copy of a brief sit-down interview he did with a local tv station in the 1980s but i haven't put in a request for that yet with the moving and everything. now i have my new mailing address and things seem to be arriving here with no problems so i'll act on that soon.

i'm stll catching up on a lot, including dreamwidth, but the more things we manage to unpack the more time i have to just chill and do my thing. i'm enjoying new hampshire so far, partly because i really missed being around mountains and also because it is not going to be nearly as hot here as it was in the midwest. even with climate change it's not as bad. the cats like it here too. we're using a projector instead of a TV now and one of them keeps wanting to climb on the platform, so we'll have to figure out a way to stop him....

the other night we watched "magic" - the 1978 film with anthony hopkins - and it was an interesting experience. i had more fun watching "the italian connection" from 1972 with my father when he was here to help us move in, even though the structure of that one was a little confusing to me at first. the hopkins movie had some great performances but a weak script imo - mostly hamstrung by the fact that the female character didn't really have any kind of interiority. an example of the male gaze in the original sense of the theory, where she's just there for the men to act their desires upon. a bit disappointing with the pedigree of the screenwriter but it was still fun to see hopkins so young when i only know him from his more recent work, and again the performances from hopkins and the supporting cast were quite strong. (i was very excited to recognize david ogden stiers in a brief appearance lol, and burgess meredith was a pleasure to watch.) i also dug the aesthetic, of course. "the italian connection" was an engaging character study and it had a couple truly nuts chase sequences - i can totally understand how it's a cult favorite. it was kinda funny tho since the female characters in that are also pretty limited development-wise (one's dialogue was mostly about how she's a "whore") but they're still given more to do than ann-margret in "magic". all in all a movie i could see myself rewatching.

baked some beer bread earlier with a local ale even though it's hot today and it turned out nicely so i'm gonna kick back with something cold and play some eso until the place cools down haha. hoping that soon i'll have the mental energy to write prose again!

i got my physical contributor's copy of ofic mag #4 at the end of january so, as promised, here's my write-up of the overall process i went through from submission to publication. the story was submitted on october 21, 2022, and the acceptance was received on november 18.

first off, i'd like to note that beth and amber (head editor and managing editor respectively) were both very accommodating while still feeling professional. i also had correspondence with hannah, the fiction editor, but that seems to have been mostly limited to the initial acceptance and any further email correspondence. (it's possible hannah was involved with the edits too but since they were all made under the name of "ofic magazine" i don't know who suggested what for most of the notes.) when they sent me the notice that my story had been accepted, they included some basic feedback and proposed edits. this was par for the course with my previous lit mag experience, but they also asked if beth could speak with me about the story before going in depth with the edits - beth said, in the acceptance email, that she had questions about the world-building and wrote that "I know this is unconventional, but I don't want to give you a bunch of off-base edits if my interpretation of certain details is totally wrong. I also don't want to presume I know what's best for the story without having a more holistic understanding of your intentions for it."

while, yes, that's pretty unusual, i was flattered that they accepted the story in the first place instead of being like "okay this is too niche/esoteric, into the slush pile it goes" haha. it was originally written for a friend whose character is featured in the story alongside mine, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of our creative relationship, so it assumed knowledge of several details that had been discussed privately or developed via roleplaying and the like. i did try to expand on some of these details before submitting but clearly not enough - when you spend that much time with a concept/story it can be easy to forget what all would be important for outsiders to know. so beth's request seemed entirely reasonable and it meant a lot to me that they'd accepted the story anyway. the $25 honorarium was sent immediately after i completed the requisite paperwork.

we ended up chatting via discord, where i explained the backdrop of the story and answered any questions she had. she'd originally asked for a zoom/video call but when i said i preferred text chat due to being deaf and all she had no problem working with that. i made it clear i was willing to consider any editorial suggestions but even then when the edits were made (via google docs) there were notes along the lines of "i think [x edit] would be good to help with the pacing, but feel free to ignore my suggestions if you think they don't work." for the most part i felt like the suggested edits were good ones; the few edits that i ignored or handled differently than the suggestion mostly had to do with punctuation or phrasing that would have changed the intended meaning/ambiguity of a given line. i did ask about the title being in latin or english, since i'd submitted it with both as options, but never received a response so i guess the latin-without-translation was fine since that's what got printed.

the editing process was very much a "kill your darlings" experience, haha; i was told that the pacing and structure i originally had would work wonderfully as part of a larger novel, but short stories need to have snappier pacing so it'd be better for me to take out passages where i lingered on the details of my character's travels (walking through chicago, etc). i agreed, along with rearranging the first couple scenes to make the in media res beginning even more so per their suggestions.

it was a pretty tight turnaround, especially with the extent of the edits they were asking for - as mentioned the acceptance was on 11/18, i made contact with beth on 11/19, and we didn't get to the q&a until 11/21. the first round of line edits was sent to me on 11/30 and they were hoping for edits to be completed by 12/9, giving me basically a week to finish going through everything. i crammed most of the revisions into the weekend and did end up asking for an extension to 12/11 because one of the second- or third-round edits was especially challenging for me to address. (i have to thank pendulumscale here for their patience and willingness to let me bounce some ideas off of them without them having read the whole story, lol.) for the record they did say they could give me longer than a week if necessary, but i was able to fit in some editing time while i was at work, haha, so it ended up not being an issue for me. i did keep backup copies of different stages of editing so if/when i revisit the story for a bigger project i have points of comparison that i can use to decide how to handle things. the typeset proof was sent to me on 12/22, final edits were concluded by 12/27, and the issue went live on january 1. all contributors were sent a digital copy of the magazine in three different formats, with the physical copy to follow.

( the only real conflict - pseud vs legal name )

yoinked a custom mood theme off ye olde livejournal (source post here). i used to have a really cute one of kawamura takashi from prince of tennis on my lj but it seems to have been nuked. thanks photobucket. at least this one is fun too.

watched a japanese horror film last night with the english title of "bloody muscle body builder in hell" on shudder. entertaining little thing - only an hour long - and very clearly a love letter to the evil dead film(s). seemed as though there were also some oblique references to reanimator but i could be wrong.... then again, decapitating someone with a shovel is pretty specific, isn't it? ditto a foot attached to another limb vis-a-vis bride of reanimator? or am i just Uncultured? at any rate i had fun, even if the movie did a couple things on my "thanks i hate this" list wrt things that keep me awake at night.

i really don't like jerky head movements, especially if they're at an unnatural speed, and i also don't like sudden loud noises/music cues at a specific pitch. the latter is related to my inability to tolerate a very specific kind of throat sound, lol, because for whatever reason my hearing aids just. cannot process it in a way that sounds organic to me. nope. cannot do it. (yes, i've watched the original grudge movie, yes every single fucking time that sound happened i just turned off my h/as until i was told it was over. No Thanks.) i'm also pretty susceptible to visual jump scares, even if i can guess they're coming, and when the movie ends with one.... wonderful. super nice. won't keep me awake at all.

other than that the movie was really enjoyable! the practical effects were so fun, as were the stop-motion/painted animation bits, and i loved how i could feel the passion in it all. would i watch it again? PROBABLY NOT LOL. but i'll definitely recommend it to others!

i also rewatched tommy recently, i don't remember why now - something about a conversation with pendulumscale and wanting to show it to them just so they'd have that context - and i did NOT realize that fucking father grandier is in it! i didn't recognize him when i watched the devils even though i'd seen tommy first (same director!) but it was kinda surreal this time around knowing the actor. he doesn't do a bad job in tommy at all, though i do think he gives a better performance in the devils. but when i was watching tommy with whim i realized that i didn't remember the latter half of the film at all. it just isn't as compelling once it gets into the cult narrative, which is a bit ironic imo considering that ken russell apparently agreed to direct because he liked the cult element. it just falls apart narratively imo, and that might be partly due to how it handles disability. it was really weird the first time around, and let me tell you it's even weirder the second time around because i was more sober and could tell they weren't even trying to use british sign language. yas qween use crips as props more! groundbreaking!!1 everything before tommy gets his sight/hearing back is great visually so idk wtf happened after that. (yeah there's the revival church scene in the first half but that felt a little less yikes to me personally because of the context, with his mother trying to ~cure~ him and it being framed as misguided, vs the context of the scene where tommy's preaching to the disabled people because...??? idk why that was necessary to include lmao)

i do remember whim making a couple comments to the effect of "if i were high right now this scene would probably be amazing" and y'know what? they weren't wrong. but even high i was like :| at some of it lol. maybe i just don't find exploitation narratives interesting when they move into religious territory, or when they use disabled people as visual props? like, i love iscariot in hellsing, they're my favorite part of the whole thing, but my interest is in the characters rather than the exploitation aspect. hm. Food For Thought, i suppose.

was gonna start taking screencaps for my next dane review (a good idea at the time/find the lady, per that poll i ran a while back) but got sidetracked uploading the custom mood theme. that took longer than i thought it would! while in adhd hell yesterday when trying to work from home i found some mixed/positive reviews for those movies so that was interesting, since until now i'd only seen bad ones. thank you [redacted local library] for providing premium access to newspapers.com. do be sure to check out your local library's database offerings in case they have free access for a database you'd find interesting/useful! the website kept 404ing when i tried to follow results for two specific papers, which was very frustrating because one of the results sounded like it included him discussing why he switched from zahab to dane, but oh well. i sent in support requests so we'll see what comes of that.

i did see that shudder has castle freak, but whim wasn't interested in a more serious movie and jeffrey combs/barbara crampton being in it wasn't enough of a sell, alas. hoping to watch it tomorrow with a good friend who's a combs stan - their enthusiasm is infectious. speaking of reanimator&c - check out this super cool post by tempural about an artwork i commissioned from them. i love hill/west and jumped at the chance to get a valentine's day commission from them because i love their art and knew they'd have fun with the premise of my request. i wanna write more hill/west this year! fuck the people on tungle who get mad if your gay reanimator ship isn't danbert. it isn't my fault david gale is mega sexy!

anyway, time to log into eso and dick around in advance of the elsweyr event starting next week. my absolute favorite expansion... next post of mine on here should be a review of find the lady. pray for my adhd. thanks.

i completely unintentionally backdated my most recent post, lol, because i never changed the date from when i first started composing it. so yeah if you're curious about some of the behind-the-scenes stories/viewpoints of people involved in the production of rituals (1977) i shared some interviews! don't worry, i haven't forgotten about making a post for the seal-clubbing comedy. it's happening, though i did conveniently become sidetracked by a short film mai zetterling directed that stars lawrence dane - i'll save the details for an individual post, but i captioned the whole thing mostly by myself and that sure was a little journey.

i've joined a discord server of david gale fans, and it's been...interesting, since i'm the oldest person there by far lmao. i'm not getting too involved though - just hanging out there for the archival work being spearheaded by this one fan who runs the davidgalearchive account on tumblr. they also have a dedicated youtube account that i've been meaning to trawl though, and it's made me wonder if i should do the same for my dane video clips. i don't have as much that needs public archiving, i think....

idk what it is about me that swings between craving internet interactions versus retreating from almost everything sometimes, but i'm looking forward to my upcoming time off as a mental reset button.

i'm also looking forward to seeing a story of mine in print! again, technically, but the last time i went through a formal submission process was in 2015 so.... after about two weeks of revising and editing at a breakneck speed i think the editors and i have arrived at a version that's ready to release into the world. it'll be in the january issue of OFIC magazine and i'm excited to introduce more people to my fucked-up horrible little priest man. who is over six feet tall but y'know. he's doing his best, ok? (and someday i'll finish the high school teacher au story i've been picking away at with the intention of getting it published....) i'm planning on writing more about the whole experience with OFIC after i have the physical thing in my hands, so if you have any specific questions you want me to address in that post just drop them in the comments here.

man, time goes fast when you're looking for a new job. still plugging away at that with the hopes of securing something new and being able to move by summer of next year. hoping that's a generous enough timeline to ensure some kind of success. in the meantime, i've been splitting my time between various pursuits. the kink bingo was a bust because i became too busy with other projects, though i'm still quite proud of the rituals fanfic that resulted from it. another story that was originally going to be a fill for both a kink bingo square and a "untranslatable words" bingo square became something i'm submitting to a lit mag so we'll see how that goes. editing that to make it stand on its own more took up a lot of time but i'm pleased with the results so far. whether it gets accepted or not i look forward to sharing it with more people!


i've also watched some more of dane's work, mostly stuff from the 1990s, and i'm still trying to decide what to write about next. i keep putting off reviewing nothing personal so i should probably prioritize that.... it's just painful to think about, lol. not because of him! he's objectively the best thing about it. just everything else is excruciating.


in the meantime i've been thinking a lot about david gale, of re-animator fame - i saw that movie for the first time recently and it made such an impression i had to watch it again with friends and then find the integral cut and watch that as well. david gale is a real show-stealer and the dynamic his dr. hill has with the iconic herbert west (played by jeffrey combs) reminded me so much of my oc's primary relationship that gale has almost become another stand-in for my oc, a bit like lawrence dane. nobody could replace dane for me, but it's a lot of fun digging into gale's history as well. it helps that there's other people who have already done so - there's an archive on tumblr dedicated to him so i don't have to do all the legwork that i've been doing for dane.


there's also just a lot more about gale out there, probably because 1. re-animator and several of the other horror movies he was in are generally considered popular cult classics, unlike most of dane's filmography, and 2. he seems to have been a more consistent actor. like, i love dane, but i'll also admit that he can be a bit unreliable when it comes to quality and that's likely part of why he didn't become more famous. it does make his good turns even more of a prize, but i digress. gale had more of a history of stage acting so that must have helped - he was even doing a theater performance the night he died, and i can't imagine being in the audience when he had a heart attack. it's tragic, but i've taken some comfort in the knowledge that his role in bride of re-animator was created specifically because he so dearly wanted to be part of the production and that he died doing what he loved. (i know, i know, but sometimes one can only resort to cliches.)


i don't have plans to actively seek out everything he was in (and it sounds like it'd be harder for me to even do so, since a lot of his earlier work was in soap operas that haven't been preserved. a damn shame since i would have killed to see him as a priest) but i'll get around to his other movies at some point for sure. savage weekend is top of the list since it sounds similar to the clown murders with the odd tension regarding what kind of movie it wants to be, and i'm intrigued by that. this review of savage weekend also piqued my interest since it was written by someone with similar priorities as me. lumberjack david gale is indeed very important! i'd also love to see the porn flick (!) that was apparently his film debut but as of this date it's still considered a lost film. at least we have the theatrical trailer, and i will confess to slowing it down in order to verify that it is indeed him with the naked rear mid-coitus at approximately 2:49. the 1970s were a wild time for filmmaking, for better or worse, and i'm honestly grateful for the opportunities to watch the fruits of those labors even when they're rotten.


this weekend i'm taking some time off to finish an ao3 exchange fic that i procrastinated on really bad (it's due the 29th and i've written less than half of it...) and also just to recharge a bit because if i could simply quit my job right now i would. unfortunately i need money to live and support my spouse and cat children, so i can't do that. but what i can do is comfort myself in the metaphorical arms of lawrence dane's presence so one way or another i'll get some screencaps and/or scans together for a new dane post. i'll also catch up on my reading page here. until next time!

man. a lot of things have happened since the last time i was able to log in here. my spouse got top surgery (yay!) so i had to take off work and be their caretaker, which has been both good and bad. bad because i'm terrible at being a caretaker/house spouse lmao (i managed, tho, they're still alive) and good because i REALLY needed a break from work. i've been so stressed with covid and everything and then right before my spouse's surgery some people got it in their mind to harass me because i dared advertise an anthology i co-edited for a ship they didn't like. it's not my fault that student/teacher can be very sexy, and there wasn't anything in the anthology that would be illegal most places anyway. really feels like ye olde ship war just dressed up in weird holier-than-thou rhetoric. so i've been laying pretty low and staying off most social media, which has been very good for me mentally.

i've been participating in an oc exchange event (not artfight, it was formed as a response to harassment the artist skumsuck received at the hands of artfight mods) and doing a lot of little ficlets and some art. it's been extra nice this year since it's also how one of my most inspiring creative relationships got its start, so this year there's been some pieces acknowledging the anniversary of our ocs getting together, lol. i'm still intending on doing the kink bingo, but honestly i needed a break from fandom stuff after that harassment. and i'm still trying to be careful, so it'll probably be a little while before i return to writing for a specific pairing. i refuse to let bullies stop me, though! i've got a backlog of ideas just waiting to be written and posted >:)

what with taking care of my spouse and trying to wrangle three cats on my own when one hasn't been fully introduced to the others and just. everything. i haven't had much time for daneposting but i did get my spouse to watch "happy birthday to me" the other night and i'm def gonna write a post re-evaluating my opinion of the movie. much more enjoyable watching it with another person, haha.

not looking forward to returning to work next week but we need the money :/ grateful to have been able to use FMLA but it's still bullshit that doing so means a pay cut. you'd think that needing medical leave to care for someone means your full paycheck would be even more important than ever...... i would be so much happier if i could work part time with the same level of access to health benefits (or better, but let's start small) but i guess for the time being i'll just continue doing the bare minimum at work. they don't pay me enough to care more, especially not when i have an MA and the job description only needs a BA. at least it's a foot in the door because it'll be easier for me to be considered for another job within this agency when i have the chance.

anyway, hope everyone's been doing well. i might make a more specific post about the harassment later once i refresh my memory on how locked entries work, or i might just forget about it because it really shouldn't be worth that much of my energy.

ETA: i also started playing disco elysium! i gotta pick it back up but the writing i've read so far has been incredible. i would've gladly read this as a regular novel but the interactive element does really enhance the experience (and of course there are some truly phenomenal harrykim fanworks out there).