girlofprey

The sky seems to have remembered it's July and gone sunny.

HMRC wrote to me yesterday. Apparently the letter I got saying I owed them £750 was only from one part of the tax year, probably from when I was no longer eligible to receive the benefit at all. For the time before that, I owe them £250 of mony they overpaid me. So they want about £1000 from me in total. Which is...frustrating, considering I didn't really do anything wrong. If they had a date in mind when I was no longer eligible to receive a payment, I think I gave them that information, they could have easily kept track of it themselves and done a review when it ran out. And of the time before that, they just miscalculated I guess, or something, but it wasn't me. But it was just money they gave me, which I didn't spend, so I can pretty easily get it back out and give it to them. My parents are saying I should complain or say I don't have the money, and tell them to take it back out of my tax code or something - but I'd just end up paying the same amount to them anyway, just slower. I'd rather take it out in a lump sum and give it back and have done with it. I'm thinking about complaining about the way it was all handled though.

I've been going through my old CDs some more again. It's a little more irritating given that a lot of songs I thought I had saved to my computer haven't been saved, or have updated till I can't play them anymore, but it's still odd to go through a CD, realise you really like a lot of songs on it, but still feel no need to keep the CD. One of those songs is this one, which I think is one of my favourite ghost stories ever. I did not keep the CD.

I live.

I might not be around very much in the near future though, because my internet is still playing silly bastards. Almost could not connect to the internet enough to delete my Livejournal (RIP) on Friday. So, who knows. However, this last week, even when I was connected to the internet it was slower than usual. I bought a game on Steam because it was on sale, and I swear to god, I've spent the whole week downloading it. But then last night, all of a sudden, my download speed for it went from 50kb/s to 4mb/s, and I downloaded the last 14% of it in a couple of minutes, and after that I could watch Youtube videos, in sharp resolution and without constant interruptions and everything. So, I'm hoping my internet has suddenly just fixed itself. Somehow. Maybe.

Anyway - this will be my first attempt to embed videos on Dreamwidth - after quite a few months of just being disappointed by films and slowly losing any emotion at all towards the Marvel films, it turns out there are quite a few original movies coming out this year that I'd quite like to see.











So that's nice. I hope they come out in England. And some new DC movies will be coming out this year. I can see how they do.

All of our politicians and their wives suddenly appearing in fashion magazines: the face of modern fascism?

Here is what I consider Krissychula's greatest hits. Including the one I think about whenever it is too hot. I'm gonna slit someone's throat.



She won't let people embed the second one, for reasons I both completely do and completely don't understand, but it is here.

I had a dream about the apocalypse last night. Well, first I had a dream about a storm that literally ripped apart most of my home town. Then I had a dream about a proper, everything destroyed, deer and lions in my garden apocalypse, and told my dad (in the dream) "I had a dream about this last night". I think it's from reading the comments in too many posts about the state of American politics at the moment. Although the actual posts are becoming no better - yesterday on ontd_political there was a post by someone saying there was no 100% conclusive proof that Russia was involved in swaying the election, so we shouldn't act like they might have until there was 100% conclusive proof, and the CIA were always lying, and I didn't understand it at all. Until I got to a paragraph about how "anyone who had opposed the smooth, self-entitled rise to power of Hillary Clinton is now accused of being in line with the Ruskies", and I understood what it was actually about.

By the way, can't really explain how furious them calling Hillary Clinton's bid 'self-entitled', when American politics is dominated by men and she has literally been hounded by the Republican press for years, actually makes me. People still say awful things about Hillary Clinton, and I worry sometimes that I'm eventually going to get Truth Delusioned into believing them. But for now I still take inspiration from her.

Anyway. I did end up getting a little stressed out by the overtime last week, although some of that was just about buying so many parts for my computer, and feeling like I had to rush into buying my mum's present so I could hide it within those packages. It totally worked though, because she ended up taking the delivery including her gift, and had no idea about it. As for the PC - I'm in a funny sort of waiting game right now. When I went to buy the PSU I'd been recommended it was out of stock, and Amazon were like "buy it now, we'll send it when it's back in stock". So I did. And now it's been back in stock for more than a few days, and I haven't received any sort of email saying they're sending it to me. Meanwhile, they're promising anyone who orders one now that they can have it the next day, if they choose express delivery! Hmm, Amazon. I'll probably send them an email if this continues. The PSU being the power supply for the computer, it is a pretty important part. And I can't really check if any of the other parts I've bought are faulty or super or whatever till I build the entire thing. But apart from that I've got everything else I need. Apart from an OEM version of Windows I've been recommended by my games shop guy, and - since most of those I've seen are on disc, and nowhere does it suggest the computer I'm currently building has a CD-ROM, a plug-in CD-ROM. I have no idea when I'm going to build it, though. Certainly not before the PSU comes.

Other than that though, yesterday was pretty productive. I took some stuff to the charity shop, finally, and picked up some wrapping paper and a card for my YN's birthday tomorrow, and even managed to pick up my MN and sister's presents. I also got an idea for what to buy my dad this week, and I can pick up my ON's present in Leeds when I'm there for work, which only leaves my YN's Christmas present, and I'm told he loves Paw Patrol. And I'm looking forward to going back to my regular hours next week, and I have the Last Guardian and Trico's amazing, and generally everything's going quite swimmingly at the moment. I am bleeding again though. Which is kind of annoying.

Anyway. Speaking of female artists I used to love and then forgot about, do you remember when we learned to Hit Em Up Style?



I don't really love this music video like I do the last one, but I do love the song.

Playstation are the best and I love them:

• The election is tomorrow. Sky News keeps reporting about polls that have Donald Trump in the lead over Hillary, and even though I know on average she is ahead and always has been, and even though I know it's in Sky News' interests to make out like the election is really close and uncertain to keep people watching, it still makes me feel sick and anxious. The two biggest superpowers in the world aren't both allowed to become facist dictatorships, while the country I live in is just being the worst. No.



• My period just keeps on keeping on. I guess it's not that surprising, given that I've been taking pills to change it (and for only half a month at that), and given that I haven't had cramps as strong as usual this month. Still. Huh.



• No train gits tonight. Thinking about it, and the arguments they had about overtime, they might be shift workers and therefore not be on most of my trains. But you never know when they will be. Fuckers.



• Only 2 pages of Evie/Jacob fic, AO3? Are we not allowed to have incest anymore? For God's sake.

Well. So. This happened with one of my Let's Player pairings over the weekend.

A less terrifying video, unless you are terrified of game glitches:



ETA: On reflection I see that the title image makes a mockery of that sentence. It's funny though.

I accidentally fell into Borderlands 2. Having finally finished all of Borderlands 1, including the DLC. When I say accidentally I mean 'deliberately and methodically', but I wasn't really expecting to love it as much as I do. I thought maybe I would be too good to love Handsome Jack? But it turns out I am not. And the count of how many video games I play where I ship the main character with the bad guy remains several thousand to 0.

I've even started making playlists, which I know is always a bad idea before your canon is finished, especially with a pairing involving a bad guy. But!!! I love him so much. And Kyla La Grange's Vampire Smile isn't helping in that regard.

Anyway, the end result is that I've been playing Borderlands 2 and Fallout: New Vegas instead of posting, or watching TV or films in general. Except soaps. Eastenders, having decided to kill off a sexy young female character in a VERY SIMILAR fashion to Coronation Street, managed to embarrass me horribly last night by a) ridiculously dragging out even the 'reactions to her death' episodes, b) having the whole thing be fairly unrealistic as far as I could tell (people do actually need to go identify bodies, don't they?), and c) terrible acting. Also if you haven't seen their 'Who killed Lucy Beale' advert by now, you should, because you're missing a treat. My parents and I have seen at least one puppet since then who could also have done it, and who knows how many more there are!

My Easter was nice. My nephew got hit by a car. We didn't find out about it until Easter Monday. He didn't get badly hurt, apparently the car was going slowly and just clipped his bike causing him to fall off it. He has been waking up in the night since then though, so he's obviously a little shaken up. The jury's still out on whether the fault is more with his mum and dad, who let him just 'go out and play' and don't keep an eye on him in any way when he's only 6, or with a neighbour of theirs who apparently parks his van very close to the junction at the bottom of the road in a way that might be illegal. Frankly, as long as it teaches my nephew to be a little more careful when he's out on his bike on the roads, I will be happy with that.

Also I did go see Muppets Most Wanted with my ON yesterday. The best song was obviously Tina Fey's one about the Gulag. Unfortunately, Hyperion has a Gulag in Borderlands 2, so it just sent me back into thoughts about Handsome Jack again. HE SHOULD DEFINITELY SING THAT SONG. I hope someone in the fandom, should there be one, has done some sort of filk for it.

David hugged Maria in Coronation Street on Monday. That was a nice change from him taunting her about her horrible life, when they always seemed like quite good friends a lot of the time. I can't believe Dennis is back, but I assume it's something to do with Tina. Everything else about Coronation Street is pretty bad at the moment, aside from Carla's blossoming relationship with Simon. Also Steve confronting Tina. Sometimes I forget he can actually do serious scenes nowadays. Well, there's lots of things nice about Coronation Street at the moment. But also a lot of things that are bad.

This is probably the funniest thing I've seen all week (for some background, this is the original trailer for the game, and gives a better idea of what it's about):



I was at jekesta's last week playing with her puppy Rita, and yesterday I ended up chasing around a dog that had got out from it's owner's garden, and I think that was one too many dog adventures because last night I dreamed about finding another dog that had gotten away from it's owner, and I really wanted to keep it but I knew mum and dad wouldn't let me have it in the house, and also - as sometimes happens - I knew I was dreaming and the dog wasn't real. She was golden brown and sort of short and stocky - I don't know about dog breeds and also she was imaginary - and called Aeren. Also the owner either didn't care or was a cult leader, so she was better off with me. But it turned out she wasn't real. So there we go.

The dog thing yesterday was basically that I was walking into town, hoping to go to the cinema, and this dog just came pelting down our road towards me, obviously not with anyone. Our road is a big main road, that leads down to the A1, so it's no place for a dog to be on its own, and it was only a little terrier. And I could see it had a dog collar on with a tag, so it was obviously someone's pet. So I ended up trying to call it over to see if I could get its address or a phone number, and then calling the dog warden. And then the owner turned up, asking if I'd seen a dog, and he managed to get it back on a leash. It turned out he only lived a few doors down the road, and the dog had escaped a couple of times before, because there was a bitch in heat somewhere in the neighbourhood and he hadn't had his (male) dog fixed because "he didn't believe in it". This dog apparently just kept finding escape routes out of their garden because it was so desperate to get to this bitch, and when it escaped he just gave it half an hour before even looking for it, so it would be tired and less likely to run off again when he found it. Frankly I think he deserved his dog running off a little bit, but he did seem to take pause when I said I'd seen it running across the main road and, at one point, directly down the middle of another one. Still, at least I know where he lives now in case I see it running free again.

I was going to take at some point about how Assassin's Creed: Black Flag simultaneously amuses and irritates me, but at the moment irritation is winning out, and I don't have the energy. Coronation Street on Friday, on the other hand, had a scene of someone fancying David, David kicking in a door, and David then rescuing a child. It did very well.

It's the exact wrong time of year for this video. And yet.