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Sep. 7th, 2019 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlofpreyI haven't really done anything today. Read a few pages of Temeraire, I see now how a book gets written intending to be part of a trilogy/series because I'm most of the way through it and they're still just practising combat manoeuvres, played a few hours of a game here and there, paced up and down my room, laid downstairs stroking the dog, watched a few Let's Play videos I don't care about, thought about tidying my room. Blah.
I'm having a very specific health anxiety at the moment, in that I thought I might have felt something a few weeks ago, decided based on the location and situation that it was more likely to be a tendon instead, so pulled my hand away so as not to check it or obsess over it. And ever since I have been worrying that maybe it wasn't a tendon, maybe it was something bad, and I just have an illness that I haven't bothered to confirm or find out about. No amount of checking in the area has convinced me that there's nothing there, I just think I might have missed something or not been feeling in exactly the same place. I feel incredibly bad and stupid for people who actually have the issue I'm worrying about. I told myself that today or this weekend I would try doing exactly what I was doing when I thought I felt the something, and also one other type of check my mother has suggested, and then if I still don't find anything just assume that either there's nothing there or that I can't find it and leave it. But I've been putting off doing it, because I generally really hurt myself doing these checks, and I doubt everything I'm feeling and experiencing while doing them, and there's no guarantee that I won't just tell myself "but you might have missed something" again and come up with some other check I really need to do to be totally satisfied, and if I actually do find something bad I don't know what I'll do having failed to get it checked out for so long (I will accept that I have anxiety and hypochondria and have been trying to deal with that, clearly), and if there's nothing there I will just have to accept how crazy I am. I know it was probably a tendon. But anyway, it's made the whole day a bit of a strain with wondering when I'm going to do it, and if I'm going to do it or just decide not to, and then if I'll be worrying even more over the fact that I don't want to feel in the area, so obviously I do believe there's something wrong there.
When I called my local mental health team a few weeks ago asking for a referral, I discussed this whole issue a bit, and how my usual OCD coping strategies didn't seem to be working, and they said that it was really a different issue and handled a different way. Which made me feel a bit better, that I wasn't just failing to apply my strategies in this case, or just lazily and cowardly-ly not being firm with my anxiety on this one subject. The thing is that if you feel like something bad will happen if you don't switch a light on and off a certain number of times or don't wash your hands enough, anything bad that might come from that will probably happen within a few days, so you can just wait a few days and if nothing bad has happened, then you can see you were wrong. With health anxiety, you don't really get that kind of relief. The bad things you are worrying about are the kind of things that can go unseen for months. And just get worse in the meantime. I am hoping for some therapy and support to deal with this. It still seems like I might have to wait months for it. The therapy team called me this week to offer me some morning appointments, but on a weekday and in a different city than I live or work in, which I don't think is feasible. It is very difficult in the meantime.
And also Borderlands 3 is coming out this week, so there's really no point starting anything big until then, certainly not games-wise. I pre-ordered the fancy big collector's edition, and I went into the store I'm getting it from this week to check how much it is again, and they told me about the midnight launch they were having on Thursday. I can't really do that in Leeds, but then I got an email from the shop saying that my order would be ready at 9pm on Thursday - which is a lot more doable. And then if I have the time that evening I can just get the game installed and ready to play when I get in on Friday. So I will probably do that. But Thursday isn't today. And the witch expansion for Sims 4, Greedfall, and an interesting-looking expansion for Red Dead Redemption Online are coming out on Tuesday, but at some point I have to start considering the amount of funds at my disposal. And also what is the point, I will be playing Borderlands 3 by Thursday?
Also, I found out that some interesting looking films I had no idea about are coming out next week - rural Irish psychic woman vs Satan worshippers and Roman soldiers vs werewolves. Original screenplays! Both probably won't be in cinemas very long. I know, logically, that autumn is when the nights get dark and cold so the entertainment industry starts throwing all the indoor pursuits at us, but is it really necessary to get the interesting films on right when the games start amping up again? Is that really a necessary thing to do?
Other things that happened this week:
Steve Harrington is a real light in these dark times. Honestly, it's just nice to like a character that's nice again. As much as I love Joseph Seed, you do have to accept the fact he's a psychopath that will never accept that anything he does is wrong when you think of him, and that puts a dampner on things. But not Steve. No. But then you do have to think about the things that happen in Stranger Things, and get sad again. The more I think about it, the more I'm sad about what happened to Billy. Like, it hurt to lose Barb, but at least people loved her before she died. Billy was basically loved when he was seven, then abandoned, then abused, and then dead. It seems very flippant of the writing, even for a fictional show. And sad.
And then also you have to deal with the weird writing of the whole show, while trying to figure out canon and characterisation at all. It wasn't so grating in the first season, because the first season was basically a Stephen King novel, and whole parts of those contradict each other. The clothes people are wearing don't make sense from the start of a scene to the end of it sometimes. It doesn't matter, it's the atmosphere that matters, as long as the main plot and the emotional beats are consistent the details don't matter. But then when we got into the second season and it was trying to be more longform, things start to fall apart. Like, I genuinely had no idea what was happening with Billy and Max throughout season 2, until basically the last episode. I genuinely assumed they were part of Eight's/Kali's gang from the pre-season sting, and they were a gang of thieves and something had gone wrong, so they'd all had to split up and lie low somewhere, and Billy had ended up having to take along one of the orphans of the group to his disgust. Hence the whole "she's not my sister" thing. I genuinely didn't really accept them as just students until basically the last episode, where we saw their house and at least one parent. To this day, it feels like they mainly put Billy in so there would be someone to beat up Steve in the last episode, giving the Party an opening to get out and do something in the grand finale instead of being kept safe. I should probably watch it again, I might have very different feelings about Billy Hargrove. I didn't know what was going on from the beginning of the season to the end.
And there's little stuff, like Nancy being able to buy a TAPE RECORDER IN THE EIGHTIES that could perfectly record a human voice from five feet away through a handbag. And the super-secret government lab, that already suspected them of trying to spill their secrets, not checking Nancy's bag or taking it when they got brought in. But whatever, plot. But the worse stuff is really the character stuff, because it really ends up feeling like the writers just don't know what to do with the characters. Especially by season three. And worse than that, don't really care what they're doing with the characters, just about getting their set-pieces/Stranger Things 'formula' set up. Joyce kind of just became "shouty, defiant woman" for a lot of it. Hopper was an entirely different character, and he did have Eleven in his life so that would have changed things, but still. It was a big change. Max suddenly seemed semi-close to Billy, after being terrified of him all season 2, without even a scene to show that things had changed between them. And Dustin had a whole scene of telling Steve he should get with a girl without worrying about things like her popularity, when the whole plot with Steve in season 1 was that he was dating Nancy, even though he was popular and she was not, so clearly he didn't care about those things. So much of it just makes no sense. Meanwhile they're falling all over themselves to make Terminator and The Thing and Red Dawn and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers references. Fun fact, when the Mind Flayer made Billy hallucinate that girl saying 'take me to him', I also thought that was the Mind Flayer wanting to get back to Will, his original host. And then that turned out to not be a thing. Because I don't get a lot of the plot of Stranger Things, I guess.
And I love Stranger Things, it is very good, but it is so difficult when you actually try to straighten things out and figure out anything. What are these characters? How do they make sense. I genuinely think they should just make it a 'monster of the week' show if that's what they want to do, and stretch things out a bit more - spread out the 80s homages a bit more - and work on actually stringing their plot together more. But I'm guessing they won't do that. They're still more or less letting the actors write the plot for them, I believe - didn't Billy's actor come up with the whole thing about him being abused? And they changed Steve's story entirely because they fell in love with Joe Keery, which I don't blame them for and am glad about obviously, but damn. Write your story, dudes. I love Stranger Things, but what is Stranger Things?
But Steve Harrington is a pleasant thing to think about.
I'm having a very specific health anxiety at the moment, in that I thought I might have felt something a few weeks ago, decided based on the location and situation that it was more likely to be a tendon instead, so pulled my hand away so as not to check it or obsess over it. And ever since I have been worrying that maybe it wasn't a tendon, maybe it was something bad, and I just have an illness that I haven't bothered to confirm or find out about. No amount of checking in the area has convinced me that there's nothing there, I just think I might have missed something or not been feeling in exactly the same place. I feel incredibly bad and stupid for people who actually have the issue I'm worrying about. I told myself that today or this weekend I would try doing exactly what I was doing when I thought I felt the something, and also one other type of check my mother has suggested, and then if I still don't find anything just assume that either there's nothing there or that I can't find it and leave it. But I've been putting off doing it, because I generally really hurt myself doing these checks, and I doubt everything I'm feeling and experiencing while doing them, and there's no guarantee that I won't just tell myself "but you might have missed something" again and come up with some other check I really need to do to be totally satisfied, and if I actually do find something bad I don't know what I'll do having failed to get it checked out for so long (I will accept that I have anxiety and hypochondria and have been trying to deal with that, clearly), and if there's nothing there I will just have to accept how crazy I am. I know it was probably a tendon. But anyway, it's made the whole day a bit of a strain with wondering when I'm going to do it, and if I'm going to do it or just decide not to, and then if I'll be worrying even more over the fact that I don't want to feel in the area, so obviously I do believe there's something wrong there.
When I called my local mental health team a few weeks ago asking for a referral, I discussed this whole issue a bit, and how my usual OCD coping strategies didn't seem to be working, and they said that it was really a different issue and handled a different way. Which made me feel a bit better, that I wasn't just failing to apply my strategies in this case, or just lazily and cowardly-ly not being firm with my anxiety on this one subject. The thing is that if you feel like something bad will happen if you don't switch a light on and off a certain number of times or don't wash your hands enough, anything bad that might come from that will probably happen within a few days, so you can just wait a few days and if nothing bad has happened, then you can see you were wrong. With health anxiety, you don't really get that kind of relief. The bad things you are worrying about are the kind of things that can go unseen for months. And just get worse in the meantime. I am hoping for some therapy and support to deal with this. It still seems like I might have to wait months for it. The therapy team called me this week to offer me some morning appointments, but on a weekday and in a different city than I live or work in, which I don't think is feasible. It is very difficult in the meantime.
And also Borderlands 3 is coming out this week, so there's really no point starting anything big until then, certainly not games-wise. I pre-ordered the fancy big collector's edition, and I went into the store I'm getting it from this week to check how much it is again, and they told me about the midnight launch they were having on Thursday. I can't really do that in Leeds, but then I got an email from the shop saying that my order would be ready at 9pm on Thursday - which is a lot more doable. And then if I have the time that evening I can just get the game installed and ready to play when I get in on Friday. So I will probably do that. But Thursday isn't today. And the witch expansion for Sims 4, Greedfall, and an interesting-looking expansion for Red Dead Redemption Online are coming out on Tuesday, but at some point I have to start considering the amount of funds at my disposal. And also what is the point, I will be playing Borderlands 3 by Thursday?
Also, I found out that some interesting looking films I had no idea about are coming out next week - rural Irish psychic woman vs Satan worshippers and Roman soldiers vs werewolves. Original screenplays! Both probably won't be in cinemas very long. I know, logically, that autumn is when the nights get dark and cold so the entertainment industry starts throwing all the indoor pursuits at us, but is it really necessary to get the interesting films on right when the games start amping up again? Is that really a necessary thing to do?
Other things that happened this week:
- I had to have a conversation with my dad, who until recently said he wanted another referendum so he could change his vote to 'Remain', starting with him asking "what is Boris Johnson doing wrong?"
- I got the chilled-out week I asked for regarding the car parking, but during that week the new Head of Facilities started asking a bunch of questions about the system, and my manager was copied in but didn't respond to them very quickly, so I answered them. He would have had to ask me about the system anyway, because he doesn't know anything about it, so it wasn't that much of a difference. And then this week apparently the business had some sort of mass-employee call that they do every month, and they told everyone off about the car parking, and said people who didn't follow the rules in a specific way were now going to have their parking spaces taken off them. And they didn't speak to us about that at all. I tried to speak to my manager about it, and he just cut me off and told me not to worry about it. So we'll just see how it will play out I guess. Who will have to actually take spaces off people? Will it be me?
- We think my cat killed a squirrel. She's 13, and doesn't seem that much bigger than a squirrel, so it's dubious. But a squirrel is dead. That's all we know.
- Had a conversation with another member of the Facilities team yesterday, the guy who will mostly be onsite and will be sort of in charge when my manager starts spending less time there. He tried to start a conversation about how awful 'people' look when they get plastic surgery, and then wouldn't accept and got quite angry that I kept saying that people generally look about 80 when they're 80, and looking 'young for 80' isn't the norm and that's why people even point it out. Quite angry. So that was fun.
- I ordered one of my favourite takeaway pizzas tonight, with the chicken and barbequeue sauce. There's always some variation whenever you get it, but tonight it came with no barbequeue sauce and twice as many jalapenos as usual. So, after the basic work to make it edible, it was basically just bread, greasy cheese, and dry chicken, with a bit of pineapple every now and then. This week has not been good for ordered food.
Steve Harrington is a real light in these dark times. Honestly, it's just nice to like a character that's nice again. As much as I love Joseph Seed, you do have to accept the fact he's a psychopath that will never accept that anything he does is wrong when you think of him, and that puts a dampner on things. But not Steve. No. But then you do have to think about the things that happen in Stranger Things, and get sad again. The more I think about it, the more I'm sad about what happened to Billy. Like, it hurt to lose Barb, but at least people loved her before she died. Billy was basically loved when he was seven, then abandoned, then abused, and then dead. It seems very flippant of the writing, even for a fictional show. And sad.
And then also you have to deal with the weird writing of the whole show, while trying to figure out canon and characterisation at all. It wasn't so grating in the first season, because the first season was basically a Stephen King novel, and whole parts of those contradict each other. The clothes people are wearing don't make sense from the start of a scene to the end of it sometimes. It doesn't matter, it's the atmosphere that matters, as long as the main plot and the emotional beats are consistent the details don't matter. But then when we got into the second season and it was trying to be more longform, things start to fall apart. Like, I genuinely had no idea what was happening with Billy and Max throughout season 2, until basically the last episode. I genuinely assumed they were part of Eight's/Kali's gang from the pre-season sting, and they were a gang of thieves and something had gone wrong, so they'd all had to split up and lie low somewhere, and Billy had ended up having to take along one of the orphans of the group to his disgust. Hence the whole "she's not my sister" thing. I genuinely didn't really accept them as just students until basically the last episode, where we saw their house and at least one parent. To this day, it feels like they mainly put Billy in so there would be someone to beat up Steve in the last episode, giving the Party an opening to get out and do something in the grand finale instead of being kept safe. I should probably watch it again, I might have very different feelings about Billy Hargrove. I didn't know what was going on from the beginning of the season to the end.
And there's little stuff, like Nancy being able to buy a TAPE RECORDER IN THE EIGHTIES that could perfectly record a human voice from five feet away through a handbag. And the super-secret government lab, that already suspected them of trying to spill their secrets, not checking Nancy's bag or taking it when they got brought in. But whatever, plot. But the worse stuff is really the character stuff, because it really ends up feeling like the writers just don't know what to do with the characters. Especially by season three. And worse than that, don't really care what they're doing with the characters, just about getting their set-pieces/Stranger Things 'formula' set up. Joyce kind of just became "shouty, defiant woman" for a lot of it. Hopper was an entirely different character, and he did have Eleven in his life so that would have changed things, but still. It was a big change. Max suddenly seemed semi-close to Billy, after being terrified of him all season 2, without even a scene to show that things had changed between them. And Dustin had a whole scene of telling Steve he should get with a girl without worrying about things like her popularity, when the whole plot with Steve in season 1 was that he was dating Nancy, even though he was popular and she was not, so clearly he didn't care about those things. So much of it just makes no sense. Meanwhile they're falling all over themselves to make Terminator and The Thing and Red Dawn and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers references. Fun fact, when the Mind Flayer made Billy hallucinate that girl saying 'take me to him', I also thought that was the Mind Flayer wanting to get back to Will, his original host. And then that turned out to not be a thing. Because I don't get a lot of the plot of Stranger Things, I guess.
And I love Stranger Things, it is very good, but it is so difficult when you actually try to straighten things out and figure out anything. What are these characters? How do they make sense. I genuinely think they should just make it a 'monster of the week' show if that's what they want to do, and stretch things out a bit more - spread out the 80s homages a bit more - and work on actually stringing their plot together more. But I'm guessing they won't do that. They're still more or less letting the actors write the plot for them, I believe - didn't Billy's actor come up with the whole thing about him being abused? And they changed Steve's story entirely because they fell in love with Joe Keery, which I don't blame them for and am glad about obviously, but damn. Write your story, dudes. I love Stranger Things, but what is Stranger Things?
But Steve Harrington is a pleasant thing to think about.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-08 12:18 pm (UTC)So many games...! I will probably be trying out Greedfall first myself, but dang if there aren't a lot of titles to choose from this month! XD
Those movies look quite interesting indeed! :)
Lol, my kitty is scared of baby mice so I doubt we will ever see him going after a squirrel. XD There's a mystery there!
Sorry about the work drama! I hope the guy getting as angry as he did wasn't too upsetting or stressful in the long run. 0_0;
Ordered food can definitely be hit or miss sometimes.
I can so see what you mean about Stranger Things in terms of the writing and characterization at times. Though yay for Steve Harrington all the same, I agree! ♥