eighthphase

Last night I finally got all caught up again with my word count. Today's goal is 12k! I'm currently at 10.2k so there's still a ways to go, but what's probably going to happen is me going to campus early and holing up in the quiet study paradise I discovered yesterday with my notebook and my skullcrushers and just, well, writing for two or three hours.

Speaking of the quiet study paradise... So yesterday as Hanekoma and I were scaling the hill, I mentioned that the main reason I hadn't brought my laptop with me (besides the part where I'd have to carry it up all those goddamn stairs along with everything else I was already carrying) was that I didn't know where there were any power outlets in the library. I do dearly love my Atropos, but she is not portable because 1) she's a fatass like I am and 2) her batteries don't last very long. So while I can go a couple of hours on battery power (I think I can squeeze three hours at best, if I try) I need somewhere to plug my laptop in if I want to use it for longer than that.

Then he tells me there's a ton of space up on the fourth floor with outlets all along the walls under the windows. "Up the elevator?" I asked. "No," he replied, "up the stairs." The fourth floor of our library is in two halves; if you go up via elevator, there are classes, but if you take the stairs, then you're in what I thought was just bookland forever. Yesterday I went up those stairs, and I learned...

Well. I learned I'd been wrong. On either side of the staircase I saw quiet study cubicles. "This is great," I thought. But then, beyond the bookshelves, I saw an entire sea of quiet study cubicles. And hardly a soul in them! "This is perfect," I thought. And it was.

I didn't find any outlets, though. To be fair, I didn't have my laptop with me, so I didn't exactly look very hard. While I could bring my laptop with me today (especially since I think I can bum a ride off of somebody, and therefore don't have to walk to the bus stop) I'm also apparently the master of overworking wrists and ankles, and somehow managed to do so to my left wrist. It's mostly okay now but I'd like to make sure it stays that way, so less typing for me. (, she says as she types a relatively long blog post.)

A few days ago I discovered a new word processor. It's called Jarte and it only works on Windows but it's super simple and the word count is way more accurate than OpenOffice's and it's really quite lovely. It's also small and self-contained enough that you could run it off a flash drive if you wanted to. I'm not doing that, but you totally could. The only problem is it basically only reads and writes .rtf files; it's supposed to be able to handle .doc as well, but when I tried opening one it told me I was missing a plug-in. It was easy enough to just save my working file as an .rtf anyway, so I didn't really mind. Besides, basically every word processor ever can read them, so it's not like I'll have compatibility issues ever again. Because it's so small - both in size and also the window defaults to tiny; you wouldn't really want to full-screen it on something like 1600x900 anyway - it's probably better suited to netbooks, one of which I dearly want but do not have, but I don't have any complaints about it now. It's simple and it does what I need it to and it doesn't distract.

Also I guess it's election day or whatever. I voted three weeks ago, so I really don't give a flying fuck. Except if Romney wins. Then I will be a very unhappy seer of space. (I used to be a mage of doom, but then I got put on antidepressants. Now I'm a seer of space. I like this me a lot better.) But seriously, absentee/mail-in ballots are the best.

So I got my stuff for English finished. And I made up missing wordcount from yesterday.

That's about it.

I still have to do today's 2k and also that ten-paragraph government midterm paper I've been putting off for weeks that's due tomorrow... and also at least some of the relevant reading, because I do believe I'm expected to quote shit. My wordcount is currently 6277 and I picked which of the two prompts I'm going to write and I have done absolutely nothing else because I'm a fucking loser!

Real college students procrastinate, kids.

I have at least been vaguely social in the form of making posts in the NaNo forums, so I guess there's that. I wouldn't have thought of posting last year at all - hell I wouldn't have thought of posting last month - so at least I've worked up the nerve to shout into the abyss. (Also Amber asked for photos of my Aradia costume and I linked her to the post I made and she reblogged it and said I was really cute! 0//////////0 That kind of made my day a little bit.)

So far, in the last 6k words, I've learned that Jacob eats a metric fuckton (this is probably going to be something mages in general do) and that he's being a little shithead and decided he didn't want to act like John, and furthermore that he didn't want to be the generic male protagonist, either! On the one hand, at least he's more interesting, but on the other hand... dude, you're going off-outline! Stop fucking up my plans!

He hasn't warmed up to Gareth as much as I thought he would. This is probably because he's neither your typical magical girl candidate nor (apparently) your generic male protagonist, and so just because Gareth saved his life doesn't mean he's going to hop to Gareth's quest and start the fucking plot like a good little protagonist. (It's also partly Gareth's fault for doing his best Kyubey impression, because Kyubey is a creepy little fucker. And if Jacob were supposed to be Madoka it might even work, but Gareth is supposed to be Kero in this analogy and that makes Jacob Sakura, which means he's supposed to decide to start collecting the magic plot devices already damn it.)

I've introduced another character, one who we won't be properly meeting until the end of the book, although she will pop in from time to time before then. (Actually I think she has three more appearances until the characters learn who she is.) And then I realised as I started writing the Jacob section after that that, uh, her bit should probably break up Jacob's morning routine and him actually being at school. Which would be fine, because I can just move it later, except... I have to actually get Jacob to school, first. And he's decided he'd rather wake up early and then bum around the kitchen drinking coffee with his dad. Put some fucking clothes on and get an Egg McMuffin or something, asshole! (Or even better, get some Breakfast Jacks. It's not like the Jack-in-the-Box isn't right next to your fucking school. I know it is, because you go to my old school!)

...Actually, he totally should get some Breakfast Jacks and also some bacon cheddar fries, because those things are delicious and he eats a metric fuckton and would therefore appreciate the calories anyway and oh shit I made myself hungry. I guess I'll go heat up some leftovers or something. (And cover them in shredded cheese because some genius bought some and then didn't put it on his shelf, so it's fair game.)

I ended up with 700 and change yesterday /: Which is okay, because so far today I'm at ~2350. So now I just need to write the other 1700! Or through to the end of chapter two, whichever I feel more like doing (spoilers: probably not the second one, considering I haven't even quite finished chapter one yet).

The only problem is that I forgot that writing about high school is fucking boring. Probably because high school itself - especially when you're a senior - is fucking boring. Jacob is well aware of that! This is probably why he sleeps through his government class. (Relatedly, he has a government class that he hates - like me right now - he's pretty eh about his English class - which I made Kay the teacher of - he doesn't like pre-cal - I hated it - and he's in journalism - which I also was my senior year. I know they say "write what you know"... of course, I'm really fucking lazy right now, so that's probably got more to do with it.)

Jacob wasn't even supposed to be in Journalism, but I needed an excuse for him to be kind of walking around and I realised belatedly that giving him a car, which I did yesterday without even really realising, meant he wouldn't be walking home, which was what he was supposed to be doing. So I thought and I thought, and I stuck him in journalism because I needed an elective, and then I thought "well I guess he can be their photographer, that should give him an excuse". So I've learned that he eats a lot, that he actually does have a few friends, and that he is a photographer. I also learned he's in AP English Lit! (Mostly because I think Kay would absolutely hate teaching regular English classes.)

If you know anything about me and/or my friends and/or the city I live in, it's really easy to see how lazy I've been with worldbuilding. Jacob basically lives in my city, he basically goes to my high school (actually he does go to my high school; it's got a common high school name so I didn't bother changing it), and some of his teachers are named after my friends. (Besides Kay, Jordan is the journalism teacher. I was going to make Marc a maths teacher but realised that Jacob's apathy in pre-cal was better served by an expy of my own pre-cal teacher.)

Also, Jacob very nearly ended up being Jacob Taylor. I was this close to just saying "yeah whatever fuck it" and making him Jacob Taylor. And then I was bored at the bus stop and actually looked up surnames and so now he is Jacob Linwood. I was much lazier with his friends and so besides two friends with normal-ish names (Tony and Leesha) he's got Anders and Desmond. Desmond is called Des all the time so it's not as obvious, but Anders is called Anders all the time, because his real name is Anderson (ooo stealth double reference) and he hates it!

I'm trying like hell to procrastinate because teenagers and high school are boring as shit but the NaNo site is being strangled by heavy traffic so there's not much else I can do.

Did not learn the art of fake eyelashes. Compensated with lots and lots of eyeshadow instead. It worked out just fine. (Except that I forgot that horns are uncomfortable and wigs are itchy. Boo.) I have some issues to work out for Wednesday, but they shouldn't be much trouble.

In D&D last night, I was on a roll! :D I missed once pretty miserably, but after that, although my attack rolls were kind of shit (I rolled like 14, 13, and 13) I managed to hit the shit out of the goblins we were fighting. And by that I mean damage rolls of 7, 7, and 6, respectively.

On a weapon with a d6 for damage. Huzzah for adding your strength modifier to your damage rolls!

And then I bought a new mace so I can hit people for up to 1d8+1 of damage. So huzzah for that, too.

Tumblr's back up! The reaction was not as glorious as I thought. Fortunately I popped onto Facebook to complain, saw Amber had already complained, commented on her post, and then spent the next half-hour gushing over it with her. So that was nice.

I've strung my horns back onto their elastic, and I've ended up cutting off enough of it while doing so that I don't need to tie off more in order to get them to sit on my head properly. I probably will need to if I want the elastic to sit under my wig instead of under my chin, though. Of course, I can't test it out yet since my wig isn't here yet. I have been so super jumpy waiting for the fucking Fed-Ex truck to show up, I am not even kidding. Like, I got really excited earlier, but it turned out it was only just the gardeners (who honestly don't really do much at all, like I don't even know why we're still paying them. They blow stuff around our yard. That's it. Which is useful when, for example, we've had lots of wind and rain and so our redwood tree has decided to shed everywhere, but is far less useful at any other time). And then the house was making its creaky house noises and my aunt was scuttling about in her room, so I kept getting up and checking.

But no. My package is not here yet.

I did the stencil for my shirt, and started painting the Aries symbol on. The fabric paint I have is actually a lot brighter than I'd like... I've only put one coat on, and it looks kind of distressed, really; I like it, and I'm tempted to leave it more or less as it is. It also looks kind of sloppy, though... Well, maybe I only think it looks sloppy because I know it is; it might look fine to other people. I guess I'll find out later.

Yesterday I asked for candy requests in a comment, relating to how I was going to be dressing up; I didn't get any replies. Today I was smart and made an actual post about it, and so I'm actually getting requests now. I'll have to go out and buy candy later, but I'd already anticipated that.

I also need to clean up my nails; they're all lovely and dark red, but, uh... also really messy. So I need to go around with a Q-tip or a brush or something.

...and I need to finish Pinky's bag! Ugh ugh ugh ugh I should have it done by now ): I'm a bit further with it! But not... not enough. D:

So I have a chapter-by-chapter outline for my story! Unless I can come up with another name for the thing I guess it's just going to be the Soulcatcher and I'm just going to call the story Soulcatcher. /: Anyway, I've got 24 chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, though I'll probably play around with it a bit since it's a little, uh, backloaded. (And by that I mean the epilogue contains stuff that should probably be a part of act three proper, but I'm not sure what I can cut and stuff.) I'm still looking forward to starting this!

Amazon finally fucking shipped my package omg it's supposed to show up on Friday which is good. I also went out and got the fake eyelashes I wanted... as well as some new nail polish (dark red and also black crackle even though there's literally no reason for me to be wearing black crackle polish over the red), a cosmetics sharpener, some eyeshadow applicators, and some eyelash adhesive. The eyelashes I bought have their own adhesive, but I wanted to have some in case they fell off or I wanted to wear them again or whatever.

I also bought some books! I got Cloud Atlas and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I was kind of interested in seeing Cloud Atlas the film, so if I like the book then I might actually go do that.

It's so nice knowing that I don't...

Well. I was going to say that it was so nice knowing I don't have any homework for tomorrow! But that's not true, because my anthropology midterm is tomorrow night so I need to study. /: Ugh. And here I thought I got off lucky.

DAMARA. DAMARA WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING. DAMARA GIRL YOU ARE 100% BAG OF CATS BATSHIT WHYYYY

ugh ugh ugh i really wanted to like damara because she's a megido i mean she's aradia's ancestor you know!? and at first i was all okay it's weird she talks in japanese but that's okay but uhhhhh girl your sprites are kinda creeping me out and then i translated the text dump and WHAT THE FUCK GIRL WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN ON OH MY GOD

with a side of really, hussie, did we really need an omeagle troll?? ugh. although i guess it's not so much omeagle as /h/ or maybe /d/ i guess??? but it's still just like... jesus fuck i wanted to like her so bad but i can't, i just can't.

i don't even hate her like i do vriska, i really fucking hate vriska, i just... ughhhhhh

it makes me not look at meenah in such a good light either, i mean i was inclined to kind of like meenah (probably because she's mostly the pov character in these flash games really) but if what rufioh and aranea were going on about is true (and i mean isn't that kind of what aranea's whole purpose in these is, is to exposit at us?) then holy fuck meenah did you really have to do that

and i mean i guess it's also partly rufioh for fucking cheating but i mean holy shit damara did you really have to paralyse him from the neck down?!? i mean meenah probably deserved getting iced since she (apparently) played off damara's insecurity/jealousy while also pushing rufioh and horuss (was that his name? ugh i should double-check but i'm really fucking lazy) together (and probably did other shit too but jesus) so i'm definitely not complaining about that but...

tl;dr: HOLY FUCK, DAMARA. HOLY FUCKING FUCK.

i wonder if aradia's met damara, and what her reaction is/was and what she thinks of her. i really wonder.

UGHHHHHH THIS IS REALLY STARTING TO BUG THE SHIT OUT OF ME

Okay, okay. So this is what's happened. I managed to get a shirt for my Aradia outfit; I just have to make a stencil for the Aries symbol (which I am somehow consistently misspelling, ugh) and paint it on. Easy. I've just finished spraying clear coat onto my horns; I borrowed some from my brother and it's got this really nice satin finish and they look good. They're drying now. And the eyeliner I ordered came in the mail today.

Which is where my current problems begin.

So, first, in the time it took for the seller I bought it from to ship it and for it to get to my house, Amazon hasn't yet even shipped the rest of the order. And since we used free shipping... I don't expect to see it until Friday or later. (And later would be bad.) But, I mean, sometimes that's just life. Packages take a while to show up. I know how that works.

Secondly, and more importantly, I spent a whole lot of time looking up alternatives to red eyeliner, because red eyeliner is apparently hard to find. "Maybe I can just use lip liner, instead!" I thought. So I looked it up.

The internet is fairly adamant that no, you can't substitute lip liner for eyeliner. Or rather, you can if you really want to, but you probably shouldn't. (Well, the FDA says "no don't do it ever not ever" but most other places say it's more of a consistency issue than a "you'll poison your eyes" issue like the FDA says. Relatedly, their guide for eye makeup safety says that you shouldn't use lip liner on your eyes because it could contain ingredients that aren't eye-safe. And then proceeds to not make any kind of mention of what sorts of cosmetics ingredients aren't eye-safe. Because it's not like that would ever be useful information ever.)

There is a reason I'm making a big deal about lip liner. The reason is this: the product listing I ordered on Amazon listed it as eyeliner. The product I've received says "lip liner" right there on it.

This is annoying (false advertising, anyone?) but not as annoying as it could be. It is as annoying as it could be, but for a completely different reason: I cannot find, anywhere on the internet, a listing of what the fuck this lip liner has in it. I just want to know if it's eye-safe! But there's no ingredients listing on the lip liner and neither the brand nor the distributor seem to have a website, so the ingredient lists seem to be entirely unavailable. (So even though a bit of judicious googling has led me to some information about ingredients, it isn't any help since I don't know what's in the fucking lip-liner.)

Of course, YOLO and all, so I've put some on the inside of my elbow just to make sure I'm not allergic to it, and if nothing happens (disclaimer: I pretty much never do allergy tests ever and I don't think anything is going to happen) then I'll just fucking use it as eyeliner, I guess. (Ugh god it smears what the fuck.)

Third, although this is entirely unrelated to Amazon or shipping or make-up, how fucking hard is it to find a long grey skirt. Seriously, I thought red eye make-up was hard to find (spoilers: I guess it is) but goddamn I just need this skirt and then I am done and I cannot fucking find one. Actually that's a lie, I found one that would be absolutely perfect at a thrift store if not for the fact that 1) it was slightly too long for me and 2) it had this gigantic fucking slit up the front. So there was that.

I've literally checked everywhere I've gone in the past week that's sold clothes and nobody sells long fucking skirts. There are still a few places I can try (there's a couple of bargain stores at the Hub, and I need to go that way anyway for 1) the bus stop and 2) CVS, so I can pick up those fake eyelashes) but by this point I think I might have to just make the thing myself. Which I can totally do, you know, I've found plenty of easy patterns and I may hand-sew slow as shit and my stitches aren't the neatest ever but the end result is totally durable; the problem is that 1) it takes time to do and 2) fabric is not cheap. I want to use jersey fabric (might as well make a comfy skirt if I have to make a skirt, right?) but that's anywhere between $10 and $15 a yard, I'd need about 2 yards, and I am fucking broke right now.

Also my shirt might be a bit too low-cut, but AHAHAHAHAHA costume accuracy what's that, and anyway I was planning on wearing a long-sleeved shirt and leggings, both grey, under my clothes anyway, because it's at least supposed to be getting cold outside and this way I can pretend to be paying the vaguest amount of attention to the fact that trolls have grey skin. So there's that.

Which is a thing that I say a lot, I've noticed.

Also, I am nothing if not impatient so time to go put on some red eyeliner! YOLO and all that. (I actually don't like the phrase "yolo" but you'd never know it reading this post, would you?)

I'm still working on DAHF/LT though. (Jesus, I need to come up with a better shortened name for this stupid thing.) Slowly. Very slowly. But I am still working on it. I may well rewrite most of what I have for the first half, since it's... very game-centric. Like, very game-centric. Like, I was following the script, more or less. Which is boring, as we all know, because if we wanted to read the script, we'd just play the game. Nobody's going to read Saika's story as a faithful novelization; that's not what's interesting about her story.

No, there are two interesting things about her story: that she already knows Pharos, and that she knows exactly when she's going to die. She doesn't know how or why, but she knows when. (It's going to make Shinji's s.link really interesting, haha.)

Somehow it seems that the story I'd prefer to write is Life in Technicolour, even though I got the idea for that one much later; on the one hand, it's more interesting because Saika doesn't know what's going on. On the other hand... well, I still want to write Death and All Her Friends.

Maybe I'm just antsy because I'm stuck at the beginning? I mean, the Welcoming Ceremony hasn't even happened yet. And the beginning is so boring...

I don't have a name for my NaNo story yet (although, to be fair, I don't have a name for most of the things in my NaNo story yet either; I ended up going with sources for the magical collection key things, but what they unlock is still called 'magic thing' in my notes. Or Eileen, but, uh... never mind.)

I wish I could just kick back and relax tomorrow, but I actually have kind of a lot of things to do. /:  This morning I wrote a fail!tastic essay that I get to revise/rewrite large sections of (and just plain write some of them), I have to do a fact sheet and bibliography for my government class paper (the bibliography is preliminary, but the fact sheet isn't supposed to be), and I have to do some of my anthropology homework, since there are two due this week thanks to the midterm next week (I'll do the other homework on Thursday as usual). I have to go out to my dad's tomorrow after class, so I won't have time to work on most, if any, of that in the evening, so I have to do it all in the morning before I leave. Add to that the fact that it's supposed to start getting warmer again this week... Yeah, I'm not looking forward to it.

If I get a chance to, I want to pick through the make-up at CVS tomorrow (spoilers: I don't think I'll get a chance to). My Aerith cosplay plans fell through, but I think I can do Aradia instead. I may or may not get a wig (I found a nice one for cheap, but I'm also broke and I don't think my mum wants to buy me a wig really) and I absolutely don't plan on doing grey troll make-up, but I should be able to get horns and the rest of it easily enough. As far as make-up goes, I would like to get lipstick, red and black eyeshadow, and red eyeliner... though I'll settle for just the first two, honestly. I can wear my normal eyeliner if I need to.

...Anyway, enough about all that. It's not terribly late but I am tired anyway, so it's bedtime for me now. z_z

I'm starting to feel a lot better now! :D I'm still tired, but I don't really care, so there's that. I am highly annoyed that I don't have any batteries, though, as I was going to finish act one today, except that my mouse is dead. T: I considered running to the store earlier but as I was doing stuff I realised the list of things I need just kept getting longer and longer, and I'm kind of short on cash right now, so... Instead, I'll stop by the drug store on my way to class, so I can pick up just batteries and maybe some M&Ms. (They sell both of those things at the bookstore on campus, too, but they'll be much cheaper at CVS.)

I think the meds are starting to work, since I've been in consistently higher spirits for the last two days. We'll see if it continues, I suppose. (Although, really it could have been a couple of different things... but I think the reason those things put me in such good moods was because I was already in a pretty good mood.) To be fair, a nice hot chocolate would put anyone in a pretty good mood, I think; I decided to treat myself with one before English class and it was quite lovely.

...So lovely, in fact, that I'm going to get myself another one before anthropology tonight and see if it improves that class any! (Speaking of anthropology, I have homework to do. ...well, I can put it off at least a little longer.)

I'm really not used to feeling like this, almost like I did back in high school. Has the last year really just been a huge downward spiral I'm only now coming out of? ...Well, if that's the case, then it's a good thing, I suppose.