I have no idea what I’m doing

Like. When we talked about who this new lady is, and I asked my very hungover questions about her, there was some light joking about how my previous therapist was not going to say anything about the fact that I am being picked on by a chaos god, and is instead just going to throw this woman to the wolves with a simple "good luck." But we'd talked before, several times in various degrees of seriousness, about how I occasionally have these feelings of not being a real person. Not in a dissociative sort of way necessarily, but more in a "my life is dictated by the whims of a coked-up Channel 4 sitcom writer" sort of way.

Which is all a very long-winded way of saying MY CLOSET IS FULL OF WATER AGAIN. Yesterday morning, I unplugged the fan that was left here over the weekend to dry everything out, and last night, I stepped in there just to be sure, and sure enough, the floor was wet. Not the sopping great puddle of water it was when we first noticed it, but definitely a problem. I only thought to check at all, because the toilet had started running again, which was odd, because it had definitely been fixed when the guy left on Friday. He fixed it. I saw with my own eyes that it was fixed. It was not doing that. So we still have giant, plastic bins piled up in the way, and I've already put the ticket in for the maintenance on the water heater which frankly could have waited anyway, and I still don't know where the roof goblins have gone. The longer they wait to finish up, the more nervous I get about not having a roof, because the rain is supposed to come back next weekend. Meanwhile, we're looking at temps in the low-mid 80s again over the next few days, which should be fucking illegal for October.

Mostly, I'm grumpy and annoyed because I had to wake up at 7am today, not for all this, but to go to a doctor appointment that quite literally could have been a phone call. The only saving grace about the whole thing is that it was at the hospital, which is three blocks away, and I got there early enough that they were able to get me in early, so I got out before my appointment was even scheduled, so I got home about ten minutes after the appointment was supposed to be. The appointment was a follow-up for my procedure back in August, to let me know that they didn't find anything, which I already knew because they'd already told me that, and to tell me that my stomach problems are diet related, which I also already knew. The whole thing was basically to get what I suspected was IBS charted and documented, but one casual remark about losing weight turned into a full-GI cancer screening from hell that I'm sure I probably needed to do at my age anyway, but definitely not all at once, and not quite so frantically. But it's done. It's all clear, so that's behind me and a stress I don't have to deal with. And now I'm sat here, too tired and annoyed to get any work done, and waiting for the man from the building to come back and fix my apartment for the second time in less than a week.

About two weeks ago, I walked into the bedroom as my husband was in bed watching TV, and remarked that it stank in there. Husband didn't smell anything, and asked what I smelled. I said it smelled like a public toilet, and immediately tried to locate the source. There was no smell from our own bathroom, so I assumed it must have been coming from the alley outside and lit some incense.

Thursday, as he was getting dressed so we could sit down to watch Taskmaster together, he came out to ask if I'd spilled anything near the closet. I am a clumsy sod, so this was a perfectly reasonable question. However, I had not spilled anything, so I got up to see what he meant. The floor was soaked. In our closet, we keep a bunch of large, plastic bins, full of blankets and laundry and coat hangers, which all needed to be pulled out. The whole closet was flooded. The wall was bulging out and fucked. We now know what the source of the smell in the bedroom was the other week. Why it only stank that one day and not a day since, who knows.

While he ran the carpet cleaner over it to suck up as much water as possible, I rang building management to put in an emergency maintenance ticket, because something is clearly wrong. Then we had the question of how in the fuck the neighbours below us never noticed it raining in their closet. We at least had the excuse of plastic bins being plastic, and not wicking upward, so everything in them stayed dry and protected. The next question was why it took the building until the next morning to get maintenance round.



And this was my Friday morning. Bathroom in a million pieces, closet piled up at the foot of the bed, and no water for about three hours while the maintenance guy tried to figure out whether it was the toilet or the shower. He couldn't actually tell. The toilet always kind of runs, and he stopped it from doing that, and fixed the tap from leaking in the bath. And then about two hours after he left, both started up again, so fuck me I guess. And the real indignity of all of it was I was waiting for these roofers to get out of here before putting in a ticket to get the water heater serviced, because it's been acting up. Now, because of the weather, the roofers have fucked off anyway and then this happened. So I'm gonna put in the ticket for the water heater, since he needs to come back anyway to collect his fan next week, so he might as well come back and take a look at the water heater while he does that. I've already let him know what the problem is, so he's expecting it, and even told him I was putting it off because of the goblins on the roof.

The best part of all of this is he came in fully expecting the water in the closet to be from them, because they left the job half finished, but had to pause it because of a storm that came in. I have no idea how we have no roof, but also no rain coming in, but that's where we're at right now. All in all, I'm very tired. And very annoyed that I need to wake up at 7am on Monday for an appointment that I don't want to go to, but couldn't reschedule.

In other news, I started listening to one of Jon Richardson's books this week, (It's Not Me, It's You), and after the first hour or so of listening to it while on my walk, I came home and immediately rewrote the opening bit of Malapropism. I think I am going to abandon the blog format I'd had planned, just because it wasn't making a lot of sense as I had it laid out. Under any amount of scrutiny, it fell apart pretty quickly. I'll still be posting it as a blog/newsletter, but the meta formatting of it is going away. It was a bit too much. Which means a lot of rewrites for what's already been written, but it'll be better for it. And this is why I set such a late release date when I decided to start doing this project, because I knew I would want to do a lot of fussing around with it to get it right.

You'll be able to read it for free here, if you haven't signed up already.

I've been going through the archives of my journal and deleting certain old posts. Mainly, fic and image posts that don't link to anywhere anymore, because they point to AO3 or Photobucket or whatever, so they're rather pointless to have up. I've debated going through and retagging everything, but I don't think I want to go through the faff of having to retag over 300 posts dating back to 2012. But I do want to at least get rid of these old posts, and also see if there are any old notes or post mortems up that I can move over to my site.

But I've learned that the HTML editor on this site has changed at some point between 2012 and now, and if you try to delete a post within the legacy HTML editor, you can't. It throws an error message. So every time I delete a post, I need to first switch over to rich text, and then delete it. Which is odd. So that'll be interesting to see when it stops doing that.

Also, I got the butter into the moulds, but not without spilling the water it was in all over myself. So now I reek of effectively bong water. I could go take a shower about it, but I'm so annoyed and tired about everything else, I just can't be fucked. So I'm just being lazy, waiting for my uncle to text me from Ridgefield so we can get on with our day. Which should be at any time now.

Holy fucking shit. Nope. Wow. So many regrets.

We played the game on Thursday. It is Saturday and I still feel like dogshit. Oh my god. I've never got so fucked up in my life. I spent most of Friday dying on the sofa, and then had to drag my ass into gear to go to a therapy appointment that frankly, never even occurred to me I might be allowed to cancel. Because that's what kind of person I am, and why I'm in therapy to begin with. But in the end, it wound up being a very good thing that I went, because my therapist is leaving the practise. So, had I cancelled and rescheduled, I would have been rescheduled onto someone new with no warning whatsoever. But we talked for a while about the new lady I'll be seeing, and one of the questions I asked was if this person will be adequately warned about the fact that they will be receiving a literal cartoon character in their office next month, because that's how I've been feeling lately. One of the things we actually talked about is how I don't even feel like I'm a real person sometimes, because the things that happen to me aren't things that happen to real people.

I'm not quite at the point of wanting to die like I was yesterday, but I've definitely felt better. Like, I went to bed last night feeling vaguely like I had some kind of flu, and now I'm sat here at my desk waiting for my uncle to text me back so I know whether I need to get up and rush to tidy the front room of any lingering evidence of our stupidity. He's got an old rolltop desk he's bringing up for us, allegedly either today or tomorrow, and today we're also going to go next door and pick up a dresser as well. The desk is going to become a better place for the laptop we use to watch pirated TV, since right now it's on a very rickety end table that's just kind of stuck out there in the middle of the room, and the dresser is going to replace the table the TV is on in the bedroom. We have a dresser, but it's very small, and not really adequate for the amount of clothes two middle-aged men have acquired by this point in our lives.

Also, I got the camera I've been looking at, and that arrived yesterday as well. I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it, since I've spent much of my time since it arrived actively trying not to die, and then rewatching Thursday's episode because we realised we had no idea what happened in the second half. Couldn't remember what the live task was, or who won, and had vague memories of a giant duck at one point. But I did get a couple of photos off with it to test, and the quality is quite a lot better than I'd expected it would be from the reviews. But honestly, the reviews for this camera cracked me up. People were annoyed that an instant camera that takes photos the size of a credit card doesn't take ultra high definition photos. But they're still good photos. I can't really tell the difference between the wide and macro settings, but maybe once I've had the chance to really dig in deep with it I'll spot the differences a bit better. It's got a few other settings, and I've got 60 photos to play with, so that's probably what I'll do with those ones over the next few weeks. Just play with them, get to know the camera, and any that I like, scan in and share online.

I didn't just get the camera by itself. I got it as part of a full kit, so it came with a bag and a bunch of other peripherals, and the bag had a lot of odd reviews as well. A lot of people were complaining that it's too big for the camera. About twice the size, actually. Which, yes. It's a film camera, with extra equipment. You want space for your extra film and all the things that attach to your camera. Your extra batteries and your straps and your lens cleaners and all that. I need to check, but I think it even has a port for a shutter switch, and I've got one of them as well. If It's compatible with it, that's definitely going in the bag. Not sure how often I'd use it, but it's the sort of thing where that one time you want it, it's nice to have it on hand, and not in a box in the cupboard. Another thing I also go to go with it is a photo album, because if I'm going to be taking pictures, I might as well have somewhere nice to keep them all. I think this one holds about 400 or so, and I think what I'll do is probably get one in a different colour each time I need a new one, just for variety.

I gave up by noon yesterday. Them stomping around above my head had me glued to the ceiling, so I gave up and went out to go watch TV all day instead, which is a really lame use of my time, but I genuinely couldn't think. But aside from series 4 of TMNZ because I can't be arsed to download the episodes individually, I've now seen all the Anglophone versions of Taskmaster, and overall, they're enjoyable.

Except TMUS. That's still a flaming disaster, and I stand by everything I said about it, and even have a few things to add.

( This got long again, so behind a cut it goes )

After I finished TMAU, I wasn't quite ready for bed, so I decided to watch Everyone Else Burns, which I've been meaning to watch for a while. I missed it when it first aired earlier this year, and I really like Simon Bird, so I decided to finally put that on. It's not quite what I thought it would be, but at the same time it's exactly what I thought it would be. I really enjoyed it, I think in large part because it focused on the church aspect a lot less than I expected it to. It seemed like that was going to be a bigger part of it, given the whole concept of the show. It was very much there, but it was more of an undertone to the whole thing, and less of the central focus to everything. Somehow I guess I thought the culty religion itself would be the focus of the comedy, but it's more used as scaffolding to build around. What surprised me most is that even though this is very much a parody of culty religions like Mormonism and Jehovah's Witness, the comedy isn't coming from poking fun at the religion itself. The rest of their church is very much played straight, if overly strict and fairly outdated even by their own community's standards—there's one episode where they have a fête sort of thing with other sects, and they have to play nice with one church that flies pride flags, even though everyone from David's church clearly thinks the folks from that one are going to burn in hell. Instead, the humour very much comes from how out of touch they are. David has a mobile phone he gives to his daughter that hasn't been plugged in since 9/11, and he destroyed the television as part of "God's will" because it had sex on it.

( And a cut for spoilers )

All in all, a tremendously unproductive day, but whatever. It was the weekend, so who cares? I got a lot of work done on a new blanket, and it seems quiet today so I'll make up for it today. I want to work more on Malapropism, because I think I've finally found the right groove for it. That's always the trick with new projects, is figuring out what they want to be. Starting out with something real was definitely the right move, because it let me find the right voice and tempo for it, but also it's let me find the right amount of embellishment to pepper in. People who have been with the newsletter will be able to tell how much is real in the first few chapters, I think, but the goal is to reach a point where that line becomes so blurred that eventually it is all fiction, with bits that are simply inspired by stupid shit that happens around me. But this year has been so astronomically stupid that it was the best place to start, so it was the right call in the end, I think.

Last year, when I first got into Taskmaster, I tried to watch the US version and got about halfway through the second episode before I quit. With TMNZ, I wasn't able to get into it the first go round because it's a vibe thing. It's not a bad show, and even the first time I tried it, I never thought it was a bad adaptation. It just lacks the particular flavour of batshit unhinged that the UK version brings to the table that happens to really do it for me, and a big part of that is the studio banter (and for some reason this really makes fans of NZ really butthurt if you say it out loud, which is unfortunate, because it means there's nowhere to have proper conversations about how the two are different as their own unique shows, separate to one another). But, and this is universally agreed upon, the US version is an absolute clusterfuck of failure. It's easy to say, "oh, it's American, so it's automatically bad," but no. They literally cut the runtime by more than 50% and then tried to cram the exact same show into the same space and expected it to work. And it doesn't.

( This got much bigger than I expected it to )

I've spent way too much time thinking about this today. I think I'm going to go take a bath, and try not to get annoyed by the roofers, and the people outside shouting at the roofers for being too loud, because with about three exceptions everyone in this building is either retired, work from home, or on permanent disability. We're only on day two of these guys being here, and everyone's already fed up with the noise. My husband and I have already made plans to just fucking leave as soon as he wakes up later, because seriously screw all this.

Ugh. Awful. Spent the whole day feeling dumb as a bag of rocks. Mostly I just sat around working on my blanket while I caught up on TMNZ on C4, and now I am fully up to date there. I've not watched series 4 yet, because C4 hasn't got the new series, but I can't be fucked to download it right now. But unfortunately I think TMNZ fell victim to the general fandom effect. Even getting past the New Show Weirdness, it was good, and I did enjoy it, but I still don't think it's better than TMUK. That's not its fault. But the way it was hyped up by its own little section of the fandom, I really was led to believe it would be better than TMUK. Because so many people do actually say that, to the point that I'm starting to get sick of seeing it even discussed on the subreddit if only because any time it's mentioned it actively devolves into an argument between the two factions of fans. I don't give a fuck either way, but the people who care really care, and this is becoming the big source of wank (right after the topic of RPF within the fandom).

It's a bit better on Tumblr, but Tumblr is slower to pick up on news and updates, so I'm hesitate to stop following the subreddit. I use them both for different reasons. Tumblr is where I go for traditional fandom interaction. Over there, it's more typical fansquee bullshit. There's a lot of old man thirst and fanart over there, and I love that. People on Tumblr are proper unhinged in all the best ways, and totally unashamed about it, and the different factions coexist rather seamlessly. I haven't seen TMAU, but I imagine it'll take off and become a third big faction soon enough, being another Anglophone version. Though funny enough, I don't think I've seen a single gif from it. Or if I have done, I haven't recognise it as being from TMAU. But there's only been one series so far, so we'll see. But my point is I don't see people on Tumblr fighting over it the same way I do on Reddit, which is both odd and refreshing. With the new UK series starting next week, I am both excited and nervous though, because new episodes do always bring the weirdos out into the open.

This franchise does have a unique sort of group psychosis almost that other fandoms I've been haven't really experienced before. And I've talked about this on Tumblr a bit. I have never been in a fandom before that has been so consistently spoilt for new content. Every fandom I've ever been in has always had big waits betwen new seasons/series. Always. Or if not televisual, then the release schedule was something else entirely. The Venture Bros would go years between seasons, just to drop twelve episodes or whatever. Sherlock made us wait years for three episodes that seemed hell-bent on telling the fans to go fuck themselves. Marvel have so many comic titles that they wind up pulling their titles for months at a time without warning, and then you go six months without seeing the one you're reading, with no explanation for why. Or sometimes it just gets cancelled for no reason at all. And the MCU is an over-saturated garbage fire that releases too much stuff that all stopped being good about eight years ago anyway.

TMUK releases two series a year, plus the New Year special. That's 21 episodes. 22 episodes if it's a Champion of Champions year (rumour has it that's filming in November, so next year, probably). TMNZ does one series a year, so if you watch that, you get 32 episodes a year. Now there's TMAU, which seems to be doing one a year, so that's 42 episodes a year. And those are just the Anglophone versions. Assuming they don't overlap, you've nearly got a new episode every week. If NZ and AU kick it up to two a year, this would be the most well-fed fandom I'd ever been in. I think it already is, honestly. TMNZ just aired its final episode for series 4, and there's a whole week's break between that and UK's series 16 starting next Thursday. This'll end toward the end of the year, take a little break, have it's New Year Treat, and if TMAU's second series airs the same time its first one did, there'll only be a few weeks in between the NYT and that. And while that's airing, it's entirely likely TMUK's series 17 will overlap. They don't seem to really care about spacing the series out with one another, because technically they're not in competition with another country's channels or ratings, but it sure makes for an interesting schedule for people who are following all of it. And it'll be interesting to see if (when) C4 does pick up TMAU as well. They aired TMNZ during a really bizarre time slot, on one of their weird tertiary channels, but it was all on catch up immediately so it didn't really matter. So is I think the Swedish version as well? Which is an odd one to have picked up before TMAU, but I bet there's some sort of exclusivity agreement, and that one probably won't show up on C4 until next year. I'm betting the same for TMNZ's series 4.

Although, they sure got TMUK's series 15 up on YouTube immediately, so Avalon seems to have got some hidden power from somewhere.

While I was completely zoned out on the couch all day watching this, I managed to blaze through three more stripes on my blanket, and now I'm on the very last one. I'd found a few more colours I hadn't realised I had left, and I didn't want to just leave them there, so I decided to use them anyway. The blanket is a really stupid size, but I don't care. My plan for today is to put the newsletter together and go finish the fucking blanket, I think. The weather's really cool, so I'll probably go for a walk as well. The summer weather has really got in the way of that, and I hate it so much, but I just get so miserable going out in the heat. The topamax makes it easy to overheat, and the pills for my stomach do the same so I'm at a double risk of just falling over dead on the pavement if I'm not careful. When I do go out, I've been listening to the Sun Also Rises, since I've finished my podcast and can't find anything else worth listening to. I really liked the podcast for going on walks, and it's what got me going out in the first place. I can't fucking believe I've lost about 100lbs on the back of some stupid podcast, and I'm really tempted to start going into the other one with Jack Bernhardt and Lou Sanders, but man, Lou Sanders can really grate after a while. Maybe I'll finish my book and then try giving the People's Podcast a go.

But I can't wait to finish this blanket. It needs to be done so I can never think about it again. My husband asked if the next one I start will be just as unhinged, and the answer was yes, of course it will, because I'm still trying to use up as much yarn as possible. I'm close to the goal of using up pretty much all of it, which was a lot of damn yarn, and then I can buy more without guilt, and start all over again.

Also, in the process of typing this up, I got a notice on my door that starting next week, they're going to start redoing the roof of our building, so that's going to be terrible for me. Not looking forward to that. My husband works nights, so idk how he's meant to sleep, with us on the top floor. They're scheduling it to take a week or two, and knowing how roofing works, the noise won't be right above us the entire time. The building is quite big, and presumably they'll be working from one end to the other over that time. We'll probably have two or three days of really bad noise above us, and since we're right on the end of the building, either be at the very beginning, or very end of it. Here's hoping, anyway.

Apparently I'm still up to date with the most recent one the pharmacy has, which may or may not be the most up to date one available elsewhere. In the end, I only got flu, so I'm actually feeling all right today.

Other than that, yesterday was pretty much a non-event. As I was getting ready to head out, one of the giant, heavy owl decorations I have up for Halloween fell, but I didn't know it was that which had fallen. All I knew was that something loud had fallen and scared the hell out of me, so I had to go on a fucking scavenger hunt to find it. I finally found it wedged between my husband's bike and the wall, and put back up, and then I got to my appointment about 20 minutes early to make up for the clusterfuck that was the day before. And I explained to my therapist why I do that sometimes, because she has noticed a few times that I get there comically early (though the time I was there 45 minutes early was not because of this neurotic white rabbit tendency to always feel like I'm running late. That was because I straight up misread the times tamp in my diary). But I did explain that being late to things, even if it is arriving in a manner that is technically on time, not only stresses me out in the usual way, but makes me feel a bit of an inconsiderate dickhead, which just adds to the stress. So I'd rather just be the weirdo who shows up comically early to appointments and things instead.

I came home and worked on some fic a bit, and then went out front to work on my blanket and watch more Taskmaster NZ. I'd tried watching it once before, when I had to go hunting it down, but being on Channel 4 now makes it a bit easier and less frustrating. It still wasn't quite doing it for me though, but I do ultimately think it is that New Show Weirdness because I can't find any particular reason why it wasn't working for me. Because it is the exact same show, without the glaring mistakes Taskmaster US made by making a bunch of weird changes to the format. The only change is that aside from Alex Horne's name being everywhere in the credits again, it's a totally different team on and off camera. And I think that's the only reason I couldn't get into it. It's weird for the same reason the first series of the original was weird, except it didn't have the benefit of someone almost dying from choking on a watermelon in the very first task to shock you into getting on board. The decision to put that in the very first task was probably the smartest thing they ever did, because it is the perfect task. It has this bizarre escalation of tactics up to pure carnage, it has physical pain and jeopardy, it has cheating, it has failure. It's the perfect task.

The episode I came back to last night just happened to be the one where Greg Davies' video letter to Jeremy Wells was shown, which was a nice little treat, at least. I'd seen the clip out of context, but I didn't know what the task actually was until last night. And then, as Jeremy decided to wilfully misinterpret the content of the message and give one point for it, I decided to approach this show from a different angle as well. I ate a brownie from the freezer, got out my little white box from beneath the Victrola, and somehow managed to smoke two entire bowls without my husband noticing. It was game night, and despite him being at his desk not six feet away from me, I was not even on his radar. It wasn't until I got up later and nearly tripped over my blanket and swore at everything that he even noticed me, and even then he didn't consider I might be off my tits. I still had to tell him.

I got about three episodes into series 2, and I've heard that one is much better. It definitely seems like it, but idk if that's just because I was on Mars by that point and would have laughed at anything. This panel is a lot more lively in the studio though, which is always a delight. I love it when they get up out their seats and bounce around and scream and shout over things that don't matter. It's my favourite part of the show.

But I went to bed a bit later than usual, instantly fell asleep, and woke up a lot later than usual. I haven't been sleeping well lately to begin with though, so I'm not overly fussed about that. I'm still a bit toasty though, but brownies always do that to me. I do want to see if I can get some writing done today, and then maybe try to go on a walk later and get back into that habit. I think if I leave a bit closer to noon or 1pm, I can go downtown and it won't be as busy, but it is Saturday so we'll see about that. Also, we'll see about how I feel, because if I'm still a bit fucked up, I'm not going anywhere.

The problem is I need to find a better place to go. The lake is a nice place to go, visually, but it's very difficult to get home quickly if I need to. The park is just, no. Too many people doing drugs on the path. The only other alternative is going back downtown, and battling traffic. But at least I can get home quickly if I need to, and there are interesting things to look at and enjoy. But I can't keep doing the pedal bike thing, because I've almost completely broken it, and it will break my ankle if I keep using it.

I watched series 2 of Outsiders yesterday, and it perfectly lived up to expectations. I absolutely adore Joe Wilkinson and Jessica Hynes though, so it was going to be a delight on those two alone. I haven't seen much from Phil Wang, but it was hardly surprising to see him in yet another ill-fitting full-body costume that did horrible things to his junk. This man is now defined by his cock and balls in my mind.

After I finished that, I became absolutely baffled to find that none of my usual sources had made this week's Buzzcocks available, which got me properly confused about what day it even was at one point. It's still not even up now, so I don't know what's going on. I'm even more confused because the schedule seems to have flipped around. I checked last week, and it was supposed to be Katherine Ryan in this episode, but it wasn't, and now I can't find any information on when that episode is supposed to air.

I have a dentist appointment later today, and then on my way home I'm gonna stop and pick up a pizza from the place I like down the road. Then, my husband and I are going to finish off a 19-year-saga and watch Radiant is the Blood of the Baboon Heart. I'm still so bittersweet about this being a movie, because I will die on the hill that Adult Swim needlessly cancelled the Venture Bros. The show was very clearly wrapping up anyway, and very easily could have tied everything up with one more season and been out of their hair forever regardless. But AS had to go and can a bunch of their popular shows to make room for what I presume to be shows nobody cared about at all in the end, taking after the Netflix model. I've read that the movie doesn't actually conclude anything though, so it does make me wonder what HBO has planned for the series going forward.

Over on Tumblr, there's a piece of fanart that keeps coming up on my dash, and I am absolutely obsessed with it. It's the sort of thing that when it pops up on my dash, I can't stop looking at it. My last few fandoms, I've been very much on the outside, not agreeing with any of the popular ideas or headcanons. So it's been an insanely weird experience this last year to find myself in a fandom where not only am I on the same page with pretty much everyone else, the whole lore of the show is effectively a tailor-made experience for the weirdos. So now a piece of art is going round that has practically illustrated one of my favourite headcanons, and it's so wonderfully drawn, and I'm realising lately that I haven't properly enjoyed a fandom experience like this since about 2009. Christ, that's sad. Literally, I think the only thing that could possibly make it better is if it wasn't on Tumblr.

And over here, yesterday I tidied up my journal a bit and deleted all the old fic announcement posts, since they don't link to anywhere anymore. I didn't think it was worth it to have them up in the archives if they were just going to point to error pages, or pages you needed passwords to get to. I'm keeping the fic notes up for now, but eventually I am going to move all of that stuff over to my website I think.

It's like someone flipped a switch and turned off all the warm weather. Which I'm fine with. I was sick of summer anyway, but today I woke up and needed to change from the pyjamas I went to bed in to warmer ones I intended to spend all day lounging around in, plus a hoodie, socks, and slippers. I need to go to the pharmacy later today, and I was planning on getting my flu and whatever covid jabs are available right now, but then I remembered I have a bunch of other appointments this week as well and getting both jabs at once always fucks me up for about four days straight. So I'll probably just go back next week instead. After my Thursday appointment, since my husband's off work that day, he's told me to stop by somewhere on my way home and pick up something to eat for myself, and he'll go somewhere else, and then when we're both home we're gonna watch the Venture Bros movie. The reason we're doing it this way, and not ordering from the same place is because all this dietary stress and testing nonsense the last few months has basically confirmed what I already knew: I am allergic to everything, and really need to start taking that more seriously. So rather than making him suffer because there are only about three entire restaurants in town that have a menu I can eat from, and one of them does fish, which he doesn't even like, we're just being reasonable adults about it and getting our own separate goodies.

Annoyingly, on the appointment front, my online account with my dentist appears to have evaporated again, so I wasn't able to confirm my appointment without calling into the clinic directly like it's the fucking bronze age. This is the third time my account with them has just vanished. No one seems to know where it goes, and the people in the office are just used to me calling in with cosmic bullshit at this point that it stopped being funny a year ago.

I was barely even at my desk all day yesterday, except to download something real quick. Mostly, I was out front working on my giant blanket, trying to get it done while I watched a bunch of stuff I've been meaning to watch for a while. I'm so close to done with it. After the colour I've currently got, there are only five colours left. And then it's done, and I can move on to pulling another sort of yarn from the giant bag of doom beneath the bed. While I worked on that yesterday, I got through a few things I've been meaning to watch for a while, but haven't got round to since aside from that, my hobbies lately don't really lend to spending a lot of time in front of the TV. First, I finally watched James Acaster's Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999. I've seen bits of it in those out of context clips that get posted on YouTube, mainly his dig at Ricky Gervais and bits about his Bake Off breakdown, but the whole thing was fantastic. Having just watched Nish Kumar's Your Power, Your Control when it came out last week, I'm really loving this trend of comics talking about their mental health struggles so candidly and frank. I thoroughly enjoyed both specials, both for what they were, and for their ability to make something so horrifically bleak still incredibly funny. Goals, honestly.

I also finally got through Bridget Christie's The Change, which was not quite what I expected, but also still very good. The trailers for it leaned a bit more heavily into the Wicker Man vibe than was really present in the overall narrative, I thought. I mean, it was still very much a vibe, but I have no idea if that was intentional or just a byproduct of the setting. By that point, my husband had woken up, so we watched it together more or less. In that, it was on, and he got more invested in it than I think he meant to. Really enjoyed this one as well though, despite it not being at all what I expected it to be. I'm not really sure what I expected it to be, honestly, so I can't say if it was better than expectations. If anything, not really knowing what it was meant to be may have been a factor in why I put it off for so long. But I definitely did expect it to be a lot more culty psychological and weird than it was, somehow. I guess I kind of missed the fact it was a sitcom, is what it comes down to. It does, however, end on a note that had me literally shouting at the TV that you can't end it there, and then my husband laughed and said, "Well, they did."

The last one I finally watched was Big Boys, which my husband also got way more invested in than he meant to. Usually he tunes out by way of headphones and YouTube when I watch stuff out front, but he got very invested in the lives of idiot university students trying to get laid. This one was very cute, and did fall more in line with what the trailers led me to expect. But I suppose it is harder to subvert expectations when the concept is basically two idiot boys meet at university and work out how to get laid. This one was very cute though, and there's a second series in the works which I'm looking forward to already. I think what I really liked about it is that it avoids what is becoming a fairly common sitcom trope, especially for this sort of sitcom, where everyone's kind of unlikeable and horrible by design. The Inbetweeners would be an easy parallel to draw here, except those kids were all dickheads. The only thing that really saved them as characters was that they were teenagers (at least in the show), and teenagers are kind of dickheads anyway. By the time they made it to university, their antics started getting into territory that actively started causing harm and it stopped being funny. That element wasn't present in this one, which ultimately made for a rather refreshing romp. They were still terminally stupid at times and made poor choices, but never malicious or overly selfish.

I think today is largely going to be a writing day. Might make some coffee or something and try to get some words in order. I've got the first issue of the new and improved newsletter going out tomorrow and I want to get on top of that as well, so it's definitely a day where I'll be tied to my desk I think.