Friday - Well, it's just one of those days.

I saw Star Wars Episode 2 today. It was good. Not as good as Return of the Jedi or Empire Strikes Back, possibly better than A New Hope, much much better than Phantom Menace. Yay. I might comment in greater detail on what I really really liked when it's been out more than, you know, two days. Sole comment: Jar Jar still needs to die.

Other than that, today has sucked. It just hasn't worked at all.

So I woke up, played Zeus a bit, started doing well, took out the first couple of episodes of the first adventure. Found out we were leaving much earlier than I expected, had to rush, had to eat strange bread-plus-toppings-not-quite-sandwich because I'm out of cereal. This, it turns out, was an omen. In the car all the way too Warwick my parents were having one of those conversations that's annoying and somehow soul-tainting, then when we got there, Dad locked the keys in the car with the ignition still on, although not with the engine actually running, thankfully.

So I got money out of the bank, Mum too stopped at an ATM, though separately - we met up back at the car, and then went and waited for my friends who were joining us for the movie. Watched the movie. Chris gave us a lift home, we broke into our own house (with his help), got the spare key to the car. Then, right before Dad and Chris leave again, Mum realises: she left the $200 she withdrew at the atm in the slot, which is not something she ever does, but today she did. This, of course, would be the very last $200 we have until payday.

This is where the day stands. I'm hoping for a kind and honest stranger to have done us a good turn regarding the money; Mum has no faith in this prospect. I see it as being better to hope. She's very upset. I can see why, but... hell. It's only money.

I hold together in adverse circumstances. It's what I do. I still have to go to gaming today and run a session. At times like this, though, my general responsibility and suchlike things bite down hard; so does my resolution to drink only socially, and rarely. I crave a drink, I really do, but I know full well that that way lies alcoholism - I picked up years ago that that was my future if I didn't keep an eye on myself. How grown-up of me. Adulthood bites.

<chronicle resumes Saturday>

Probability at present suggests that the $200 isn't lost to us, but we won't see it again for several weeks. The next few days promise to be irritating... but not too awful, actually.

Let's see, where was I up to?

Last night at gaming, I had great DMing fun. Nothing spectacular was happening as far as the current story goes since they spent most of the session staking out a house, but great individual character events did occur. One of the characters is freaked out, another thinks she's losing her mind, and they're all hassling a third for an apparent phobia of rats. He may be getting a Fear of Rats dementia soon. Heh.

It's a one in a thousand chance, but it just might... bomb horribly...

The system of the game I'm running is a sort of bastardised World of Darkness, corrupted, altered, and generally reinvented so that it works for a campaign where all the characters are mortal humans. In this system, dice rolls work like this: you have a pool of n ten-sided dice, where n is determined by your character's abilities, and roll them with a set difficulty rating. Difficulty or above is a success; below is a failure, and a 1 subtracts a success. If you have more 1s than successes, you 'botch' the roll and something very bad happens.

Oliver was trying something his character may or may not have been able to pull off; tricky, but within the realms of possibility. He had 3 dice to roll. He got three 1s.

He botched as badly as it's possible to botch. It was sheer luck his character survived - his motorbike was totalled. Not good, not good at all.

Today, I did a Graphic Novel buy for UniSFA. Bought some cool stuff - several Gaiman things that looked good, Top Ten, Marvel Boy, New X-Men "e is for extinction", Swamp Thing second paperback... Top Ten is the one I've been reading, it's rocking cool. Highly recommended. It's about the police force of a city where every single inhabitant is a superhero.

"Heroines and sidekicks first!"

Well, this has been a sucky semester, academically speaking. I feel kinda like Zoe from Sluggy. Some advice from my History tutor, who is a god among men, may save me. I've definitely decided to drop Formal Logic in favour of another History unit next semester. Twin virtues: Escaping Formal Logic, which I've decided I don't feel like doing this year, and getting Rob Stuart again for history to continue this Modern Europe thing as well as the medieval unit I'm doing with Ernie the Mad Scotsman.

I'm in serious danger of turning into a History major rather than a Linguistics major, but for preference I'll just take the double.

Day Four of The Headache is not so bad as the past few; I've been functionally headachey rather than debilitatingly headachey, which is an improvement, but my bastard doctor isn't working tomorrow so I can't have my appointment until Monday.

Idle question: What do you do when you're writing your blog into an e-mail window because you're at UCC instead of home, and an annoying, sleazy guy next to you keeps talking to you? Do you a) ignore him, b) make nasty comments about him in your blog on the grounds that he *probably* won't ever read it, or c) dismember him casually?

Doing a and b, fantasising about c. Most of the guys in here are busy obsessing over Escape Velocity Nova, which is apparently a very good game, but which is only available for Mac. There's two macs set up over there pretty much exclusively for EV Nova.

I'm pretty much hanging around at this point, not studying because my headache is too annoying, and waiting for my parents to come pick me up on their way home from work.

Something cool: There's about eight computers along this bench, varying in degrees of spunkiness. The bench is firm and strong with legs and all, but it still gets this vibration that carries along the surface. Two guys are playing EV Nova (the rest periodically spectate). One of them is annoying me somewhat by *constantly* commenting on what's happening in his game.

<blogging resumes later>

Oliver is the UberCool: He's getting out money for me tomorrow. ($250 of UniSFA money for me to buy GNs with. I know very little about graphic novels, but I'm taking people with me who know much.) I forgot to get it today, and have been sick half the week until now, and have to do the shopping on Saturday.

Parents and I stopped off at the food hall for dinner. A few random observations from the trip:

You know how in carparks, you have that thing where there's double rows of parking spaces, and cars tend to end up with their headlights facing each other? Well, the car we parked opposite tonight had two people making out in the front seats. It was odd. I would never do that in a carpark where there'd be likely to be people. I just don't do that PDA thing. Urgh.

I've decided to keep running observations on the content of my soya-milkshake. Tonight I didn't get asked about the smoothie mix that has dairy in it, but she didn't put it in at all. Possibly because I went caramel instead of chocolate, I don't know.

And I was bad, and bought a computer game, even though I can't afford it: Zeus: Master of Olympus. It looks very cool. Like Caesar III but cooler, and with Greekness, and gods making appearances.

Tomorrow I'm going to see Star Wars, with my parents and an unspecified number of UniSFAns. I've heard mixed reviews. We Shall See. This is possibly the most boring blog post I've made to date.

I failed a personality test tonight.

This one.

When I went to get my results, I got the message: "Sorry, but you did NOT stand the test of sincerity. Results cannot be reliable and there is no sense to show them".

My friends, of course, were comforting.

* Tom bursts out laughing.
Tom: You are an outlier.
Me: I *FAILED*?
Me: I failed a personality test.
* Froggy laughs
* Liz falls over laughing
Froggy: well, obviously you have an extraordinary personality, Rae... we all knew that :) *sincere face, not laughing at all*
* Tom comforts Rae.
* sonnlich whimpers.
Tom: I don't mind the fact that you don't have a proper personality at all.
* sonnlich chokes trying not to spray her sip of lemonade across her screen.
Me: Gee, Tom, thanks.
Tom: I hope I'm helping. It's hard to empathise with the personality-free.

<sigh> I hate you, hate you all.

I bet it's just because I decided it was true I would always pay for luggage if I wouldn't fear control.

Also, this story about heroin sweets was brought to my attention by the Amphibious One mentioned above. I guess we're looking at the 21st-century equivalent of the "Fags" sweets we used to get when we were kids, which were little sugar cigarettes, but much, much more disturbing. (How come syringe lollies are allowed, when nowadays they call Fags "Fads" and they don't have the little red spot at the end, and are instead just boring, bland white sugar sticks?)

The strange cowardice of my kitty

My parents and I cohabit with two cats. One, Mouse, is 22 years old and in faltering health. The other, Spike, is six years old, and, other than being built like a brick, in fine fettle. Of course, he and I don't get on, so I consider his chunky build to be yet another of his many failings.

Lo these last several years since my sister moved out and I took over her bedroom, Spike has been forbidden to enter it. If he gets caught in here, he's in trouble, and if he enters whilst I'm in the room, I send him packing, as well he deserves. However, today, I let him be when I spotted him sitting inside the door. He wandered a little, sniffed a few things, rubbed up against others (my knees not least of all), and eventually settled under the desk.

Then bolted like a scared rabbit when I bumped the desk with my knee.

Foolish boy.

So while I spent today with another headache, it wasn't nearly as bad a headache, and I only spent a little while curled up in a ball of pain feeling sorry for myself, and idly cursing all those around me for not loving me enough to put me out of my misery.

I was at uni for this one, which meant I could listen to people talking while I was suffering instead of just being bored. Yesterday I discovered how much being sick and living alone could suck - previously I've always had someone to look after me (usually my mother) while debilitatingly ill. Yesterday, my parents were at work and I was home alone. Nasty. With just the cats to yowl at me and make my headache worse because I wasn't paying enough attention to them.

The literature front: Reading the non-fiction content of Larry Niven's Playgrounds of the Mind, I discovered a couple of things.

1) The kzinti are a genuine and legitimate part of the Star Trek universe, via the Animated Series.

2) I want to read Ursula K. le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which I got out today.

I also wonder if I'm as much of a writer as I thought I was - I haven't really written anything much in about five or six months. It's starting to bother me a lot.

So I've been thinking about voices - a writer's voice. I found mine, a while back. I've lost it again. I can't write the way I used to. I read things like, say, Cauchemar or Vox, and I like them. I think they're good. I write the kind of fiction I like to read. Who doesn't? A writer always has to be her own first critic, and I'm mine. I read what I write, and determine if it's good or not, and if not, if I can make it better, and how - and there's the point of ego where I decide, once something's finished, that this is good enough to show to other people, and I put it online, and sometimes post it to relevant mailing lists or newsgroups.

At the moment, I can't write anything I think is good enough. I can write a couple of sentences of good prose, and I could write more that's bad, but I don't want to. There's enough bad fiction on the web without me adding to it. (Especially since a drop in that ocean of bad fiction is mine, from years back - this is part of why I don't like people archiving my fic any more. When I get older and think what's up there now is bad, I want to be able to take it down. For that matter, a couple of stories on Dimensions are due to come down as soon as I get around to removing them.)

It's a shame, because I love writing. I love telling stories. There are a dozen or more partial stories hanging around my hard drive that I want to finish, because I read what's there and I want to read the rest, but for that I have to write it. (There's also one that I started earlier this year, and I read it and think where the hell was I headed with that? Which, really, is a sign of my current problem.)

I think part of it is that I'm in a frustrated kind of holding pattern right now. It's utterly tiresome. And so, on to different topics:

As rockin' cool as the story of The Kindly Ones is, I have to say I have issues with the artwork. It's just not up to Sandman's usual standard - all comic book poster art-y and dumb. Too many solid colours instead of shading, and in a lot of places, entirely inadequate basic sketch quality. Feh, say I. It's not as bad as what they did to The Authority, mind you, but close. (I could hardly stand to read the second half of the second Authority collection, and not just because I missed Jenny. The artwork went from gorgeous to ew.) Fortunately The Wake resurrects the standard we've come to expect, more or less, but The Kindly Ones deserved good artwork.

Random complaint: I can't get the different window bits of WinAmp to stick together any more. It's annoying.

<ponders music> Of course, one's life is in a bad way when one begins identifying with 80s pop. Or, for that matter, listening to it without the liberal application of irony.

Friday will be the second session of my roleplaying campaign, which has a general theme of "mortals in a world containing vampires, only they don't know it yet". A couple of new players are starting this week, which should be fun; they're all pretty experienced gamers, so my big challenge is balancing the puzzles so that they're doable but interestingly tricky. So far they've been romping through their first mystery, so I figure within a session or two they're going to start coming up against continuing plot points. Basic theme of that: "things I think are cool". At least one of them reads this blog, so I'm not going to be giving away things I don't want them to know yet.

My father put me onto this article about slavery in the modern world. It's worth reading, in a kind of disturbing way. The definition of slavery is subtle - including debt bondage, for example - but I agree with it. Brothel slavery I've spent enough time around feminists to have heard of. Sweatshops, brothels, and domestic service - not a pretty picture. I don't understand the human slavery mechanism, but it's been going on as long as we have. I don't get it. Just like I don't really get people like the man who re-enrolled in bondage to his landlord - but at the same time I do, because while his liege didn't give him freedom, he did give him security - for his children as well as for himself.

Then again, I don't understand the mindset which gives us prostitution, either. Why would someone pay for sex with a stranger? There's a huge minefield of sexuality I don't get - but I don't want to, either. I don't think prostitution is wrong, just incomprehensible. To my mind it should be legalised - governments have been trying and failing to stamp it out for millennia. At least if it's legal you can enforce occupational health and safety laws.

Now Playing: The Tourists - I Only Wanna Be With You

Well, Non-Swearing Week is officially over. Which is just as well, since I encountered an obnoxious git today and was pleased to be able to swear at him.

Today's UberNOTCool is my migraine headache that persisted all day and meant I missed uni. Although I'm glad I didn't, as I considered doing, force myself on the agonising journey to uni to fulfil my responsibilities as a committee member and attend the UniSFA committee meeting - apparently it lasted seven minutes, and I would have felt quite aggrieved.

Random: He was only following orders.

I finished reading The Kindly Ones today. I started reading Sandman a couple of years ago, and am only getting to the last ones now; that's bad, I know, but oh my lord does the story itself get amazing at this point. Words fail me.

Enough of this folly. My head still hurts, and I need sleep.

Two and a half hours until the close of Non-Swearing Week, and so, I think, it's time for a recap.

The Origins

I decided to go for a week in which I wouldn't swear because... Well, because I don't approve of excessively casual swearing, and I was doing it.

So what was it like?

Stressful. After a crisis point on Thursday I adjusted better to the general thing and have been both Non-Swearing and human, but until then, the inability to vent frustration in the manner to which I had become accustomed had my blood pressure through the roof. My speech patterns are a little more creative now, my habit of swearing broken, and the D-Word expunged from my vocabulary.

How successful were you?

Slipped up occasionally, but overall, really quite successful indeed.

Will you do it again?

Definitely not.

Hey, this interview format is fun. Let's have some other questions, shall we?

Where have all the flowers gone?

Gone to young girls, every one.

Are you feeling guilty about anything right now?

Yes. I'm a bad bad girlfriend.

Who put the bop in the bop de bop de bop?

I did.

What have you been reading lately?

Sandman. I finally borrowed copies of the last three books from Stephen; Worlds' End is possibly my favourite so far, though I still have to read The Kindly Ones and The Wake.

What do you want to read?

American Gods. (Neil Gaiman.)

What's your secret shame?

My Take That albums.

A curious thing

If I were vegan, I'd be perturbed right now.

I stopped off a few minutes ago for a favourite delicacy, a chocolate soya-milkshake. All very nice. But the very nice, very polite, and very detail-oriented young woman behind the counter did something no-one else at that place ever has (and I've had a fair number of soya-milkshakes there). She asked me if I could have the smoothie mix that goes into it, as it has dairy in it. Every other person there has put it in by default. I hadn't known it had dairy until tonight.

Which, I'm thinking, is a bad thing. What if I were vegan? I'd have been consuming dairy without even realising. Or gruesomely lactose-intolerant? If I buy a soya-milkshake, I assume by default that my beverage is dairy and lactose-free, because that's the base POINT of soya milk.

Naughty people. Of course, the soya variant of the milkshakes is 60c extra, and this is also the first time I've been charged that, so the detail-orientation isn't always the sweet thing.