girlofprey

My dad has gotten us a new modem, and maybe internet, and now for some reason it takes my computer minutes to connect when I switch it on. Even when I just get it out of standby mode. In fact, I think I've had to do something to connect it every time. Meanwhile my Playstations connect just fine. It's quite irritating.

I have been gone for some time. I didn't wander out into Antarctica to die, I was just playing the new Saints Row game. It's quite fun. And very pretty. I sort of wish it was a full game, with clothes and tattoos and everything. And the flying in it is AMAZING. My fave character, Dane Vogel, came back, and he wasn't exactly like he was in his first appearance, but it was a plausible change after losing to death and spending ten years in hell. And he was funny. I love him. AND A BUNCH OF THINGS FROM MY FIC BECAME CANON. Woo.

I was looking up Borderlands to see if any new game add-ons were out, and it turns out they're remastering the Pre-Sequel and 2 for the Playstation 4. I don't have high hopes after some of the remasters I have seen, but it's called 'The Handsome Collection' and it's coming out on my birthday. So. I will probably get that.

I'm training to volunteer at the hospice now, but apparently I can't start properly because one of my references hasn't come back. It's the one from that dude from my last volunteering place. STILL WAITING ON HIM APPARENTLY. I'll have to call and ask if he can either get on that, or if I should ask for one from someone else. I don't know who. Maybe my Jobcentre woman. Anyone else.

Title: Running Deep
Fandom: Saints Row series (video game)
Disclaimer: I don't own the Saints Row universe and I'm not making any money off this.

Part 1
Part 2

( Running Deep, part 3 )

Part 4

I FINISHED IT.

Title: Running Deep
Fandom: Saints Row series (video game)
Pairing: None, F!Boss + Dane Vogel gen
Wordcount: 34,396
Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, mentions of violence against sex workers, mentions of death, the two main characters are sociopaths and they don't live in a fun world.
Disclaimer: I don't own the Saints Row universe and I'm not making any money off this.

Summary: Hell is what you make of it.

( Running Deep, part 1 )

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

ALERT THERE IS A NEW SAINTS ROW GAME COMING OUT WHERE YOU BELIEVABLY TAKE OVER A NEW CITY AND DANE VOGEL IS INVOLVED ALERT THIS IS NOT A DRILL THE CITY IS HELL IT IS COMING OUT IN FOUR MONTHS YOU CAN'T PLAY AS THE BOSS BUT IDK WHATEVS DANE VOGEL THIS IS NOT A DRILL

( Saints Row IV and 2 blather )

Also, today my YN officially started calling me something along the lines of "Rachael". It sounds more like "Wey-dul", and he only calls me it when shouting up the stairs for me. But it's better than "daddy", or nothing. Woo-hoo!

On a less pleasant note, I also got a letter today from the Tribunal service, saying that a request had been made to see the reasons my appeal was allowed, and they were enclosing a copy for me as well. Which sounds like the Jobcentre are "double-checking" whether I really do deserve the ESA I was awarded at my appeal. Apparently the Jobcentre can overturn or refuse a Tribunal's decision, or appeal against it or something, but I'm assuming they don't do that very often or else there wouldn't be much point having an appeals system. If they were just going to say "no" anyway. So it's probably fine. Still makes me nervous though. Wankers.

( Coronation Street, tw for racism, child abuse, ableism )

Also, I've started playing Saints Row IV. I hated Saints Row the Third for really going over the top with the cartoonish-ness and taking away a lot of the stuff I loved in the second game, so I never finished it. But I'm enjoying the fourth one because they've really committed to the cartoonish-ness, making you President, having aliens attack, and putting you in a computer simulation where you have superpowers. The only problem now is, since they're taking the third game as more relevant canon than the second, I don't know who anyone is. And I don't want to stop playing IV to go back and finish The Third. Or play The Third at all. So I'm flying blind. Sigh.

A list of things I was going to post earlier because basic reactions were all I had, but you can have them now just because:

• Vera is amazing. The show and the lady.



• I am annoyed with Infamous, because it has so many problems and is kind of shit, but I also really enjoy playing it, and like the story-telling, if not the story, and now I have a pairing. A pairing with no fandom. Home at last.



• There is no kink meme for Infamous, but there is for the game it's apparently constantly having fights with.



• However, I've decided Infamous is probably the most difficult fandom there is to Google, especially when it comes to kink memes, because almost everyone non-fannish who talks about a fandom's kink meme seems to describe it as 'infamous'.



• I really think I would be less annoyed about Infamous if more people talked about the problems with it, in a way that didn't make me think it was just me, and in a way that there was a good chance of the creators seeing it, so there was just a chance they would try not to make the same mistakes next time. There isn't even an 'Unfortunate Implications' link on the TV Tropes page, and they tend to be pretty good about things like that.



• I did find the last pigeon in Infamous though. Hurray!



• I commissioned a piece of work from an artist on Etsy. But apparently she just got a deal with a children's publisher, and has been working to deadline, and - even though she's apparently done it - she keeps forgetting to talk to me about it. This wouldn't be so bad, except one of my emails got lost on it's way to her before, or 'buried in her inbox', so whenever there's a long gap in emails, I'm never sure if she's just busy, or actually hasn't seen it.



• I still haven't seen the film I was planning to see for ages, Lockdown, with Guy Pearce and Peter Stormare in it.



• The Avengers film is out (I think), and I still haven't seen Captain America. I did not realise it was coming out as soon as April. However, given how popular it already is, chances are it will be in cinemas for a while. However, given how long it sometimes takes me to watch one film, never mind two, that might not necessarily help.



• On the plus side, I've been largely ignoring the long, long pre-release buzz, so maybe I can mostly ignore the post-release buzz until I've seen it as well.



• There also doesn't appear to be a Prison Break kink meme. That seems impossible to me. I was going to say that, well, it started in 2005, so maybe it just didn't quite catch that boat. But then just the other day I found out there was a Kiss Kiss Bang Bang kink meme. So I don't know. Unless I'm just not googling properly.



• Guess which Playstation game I'm playing at the moment? If you guessed "Saints Row 2 again, because you love it", you are correct. If you also guessed "Shadows Of The Damned, because you saw it on Two Best Friends Play and it looked wicked", you are also correct. But that's a bit creepy. Shadows Of The Damned has a non-white main character. In terms of race, it's already streets ahead of Infamous. There is some slightly odd stuff about his white (white, white!) girlfriend who he almost constantly refers to as 'Angel' though. Hmm.



• I hate my dad slightly less now. He's still a cunt though.



• There are about five million dance shows on pretty much this month and next, mostly in London or other parts of the country where I don't live, which I'd really like to go see, but it's really just not feasible at all. Really. Which kind of sucks.



• I don't feel like throwing up anymore. This day is looking up.

Hello. I've been meaning to post for the past, um, few weeks. But I've been keeping myself on a pretty steady diet of Skyrim, Saints Row 2, rewatching about half of Season 2 of Oz for Peter Schibetta reasons (who I love MORE THAN EVER), and watching American Dad, for humour and intergenerational het incest reasons. THE BEST REASONS THERE ARE. Also, I managed to get onto the jewellery making course in Leeds for a second term, and I've been going to see my employment coach again. Christmas is truly over. Even if all the sales aren't. So I haven't really had a lot of time to do other things.

Some nice things that have happened to me lately:

• My new nephew came home from the hospital on Monday, yay!



• On Saturday in the post I got both a slightly gloomy, but lovely, card from jekesta containing beautiful stickers (thank you jekesta), AND a letter saying I'd won a premium bond, for the amount of £25, including a cheque for it. It was a good day for post.



• I got back on my jewellery making course. I was lucky to do so, really, in a slightly sad way, because I was only on the waiting list, and they didn't call me the morning of the first lesson like they did last term. But I called them and they said yeah, come in, so I went in and enrolled and went to the class. And then the tutor took the register and realised one person - who had also been on the course last term - wasn't on the register, and there were 13 people in the class when the maximum was usually 12. The woman who wasn't on the register said she hadn't signed any forms or spoken to the people running things upstairs, she'd just come back to the class. She and the tutor went upstairs to talk to the people in the office, and then the tutor came back down and said the woman had had to go home, because there wasn't a place for her. So assuming she wasn't on the waiting list like me, I probably ended up with her place. Which I did feel slightly bad about. But not entirely, because assuming I don't win my appeal - which I don't think I will - by the time the next term comes round, I might well have less money to spend on courses, and no concessions, so it would cost £50 instead of £5. So mostly I'm just relieved about it.



• My Oglaf book came in the post today, hurrah!

Some bad things that have happened to me lately:

• Yesterday at my jewellery course, I managed to cut my thumb with tin snips, which if you know anything about tin snips is pretty hard to do, but I managed it. I also burnt my fingers quite a lot while trying to polish things, scraped my elbow on part of my desk, and get hit by a tiny drop of boiling water while someone was quenching another piece. It really was not my day yesterday.



• I got a call from the Tribunals service today (and yesterday). It turned out it wasn't about anything much, though, but still. A reminder that it is coming :(

Hmm. In other news, Skyrim's wicked. The only problem I'm having with it is that there are so many quests, SO MANY quests, and you don't have to take them all, but I always worry that turning them down WILL mean you don't get to still do them, or that I'll forget that people are offering them and miss out on them. But now I have probably about fifty 'to do', and it's sort of stretching my own suspension of belief that people would not be upset that I took a few months to basically take something to another town for them. So I'm trying to work my way through them at the moment. And basically running into and getting more along the way. But still. It's pretty good.

Further adventures in gender included a quest where I had the choice between taking the side of a woman in hiding or the side of the men hunting her for supposed crimes, and taking her side led to the men accusing me of being fooled by a 'pretty face'. However, ( Minor spoilers for Skyrim, maybe ). So maybe Skyrim/Tamriel really IS meant to be a world where it's perfectly okay and accepted to be gay. In which case, well done, I guess, Bethesda.

Adventures with gender in Saints Row 2 have been slightly more confusing. By and large it's fairly straightforward or not mentioned. But there's an activity you can do in the game called "ho-ing". Which, as far as I can tell, is where you gain respect by going to strip clubs and "pleasing" - strippers, I guess - after which your sexual prowess is known throughout the land, or whatever. I went and did it as part of another job though, and you don't actually get to see any of the act, but you hear voices, and my character was definitely in there with a man. So. I don't really know whether I earned or spent money after that activity. Was it a male ho? Was it just some random guy and we were using a strip club as basically a motel, without paying any of the actual people who worked there? Which is kind of insulting if you think about it. Apparently you can earn money as a pimp by ho-ing, but I don't know how or if I did. But it sounded like a good time was had by all, at any rate. So fine.

Saints Row 2 is getting a bit tricky at the moment in that it's got to that sort of middling part of games, where you're quite good at it, but not super-good at it, so I'm feeling a bit cocky perhaps but the challenges are getting slightly harder and I can't just breeze through them like I could the earlier stuff. Which is a little bit aggravating. But I'm still really enjoying it. Especially now that I've figured out I can steal helicopters if I want to. Even if I can't quite fly them yet. Still.

I haven't really been watching any TV or anything lately. Although I did have dream the other night about hanging out with my awesome nana, before realising, in the dream, that she was actually Rita from Coronation Street. Which led to a weird dream about an alternative Coronation Street, where David Platt had a cat he walked on a leash, and Karen was still hanging around. Good times. Anyway, other than that, nothing really. Other than Oz and American Dad. YOU ARE FREE TO TALK TO ME ABOUT PETER SCHIBETTA OR HAYLEY SMITH IF YOU WISH. I love you guys. x

Hello. I have mostly been playing computer games. Since last I posted. I picked up Saints Row 2 for the PS3 just before Christmas, and I wasn't totally sure I'd enjoy it, but I really am, so at the moment the (possibly excessive) 4 hours a day I am allowing myself for computer games is being split between that and Skyrim. I'M BEING SO GOOD.

The thing I like about Skyrim is that even at the times when playing it isn't quite brilliant, it's always interesting. Yesterday's adventures involved spending about 2 hours getting through the bottom half of a dungeon, and then having to restore a save from before I went down into it, because you couldn't go back the way you came, and I assumed there was a way back up at the bottom, but there was either something I couldn't do or it was behind a lock I couldn't pick. I didn't mind exactly, because I still enjoyed it, but it was a bit annoying to have done all that and not gotten anywhere because of it. And then I killed a dragon on my own for the first time, but I only managed it because of a weapon I took that belonged to an evil undead guy, so I'm really hoping I don't get cursed or somehow punished for that. If anyone is playing Skyrim and knows what I'm talking about and knows the answer to that, please don't tell me. I really don't want to be spoiled for the game unless I'm really stuck.

Today in Skyrim ( Spoilers for Skyrim, including some minor quests )

The main thing that is annoying me about Skyrim is that in order to make it seem realistic, characters will have conversations in front of you about stuff, often leading into a quest, without you having to interact with them in any way. They only have them once, too. But people who are walking by your character, if they pass close enough to them, will stop and start talking to them, especially guards, who tend to patrol the streets. And the amount of times I have been standing around listening to a conversation that suddenly started, and which is probably important, only to a have someone come up behind me and start loudly talking to the back of my head, OH MY GOD I WANT TO KILL THEM. But I don't. But it's annoying.

The other nice thing that's happened in Skyrim is that, as of today basically, I finally have enough money to buy a house. So I can put down all the stuff I want to keep but aren't always using, rather than having to lug it around with me or leave it on a floor somewhere. Except that now I can't decide if I'd rather live in Whiterun, or in beautiful but evil Markarth. DECISIONS, DECISIONS.

Saints Row 2 is good as well. There is a lot of video game logic that makes me laugh, like the fact that your character starts out coming out of a 5 year coma, and yet immediately starts punching people out in fights and sprinting around, having apparently suffered no muscle atrophy at all. Also, my character is female, and I made an effort to give her wicked hair and nice makeup. And it was really very nice of the prison staff to keep that up while I was in a coma, and they apparently hated me. But they did, anyway. The main problem I have with the game is learning how to use the vehicles, which are quite tricky. But I'm better with cars after only a week playing it. And the only thing I really want to say about it is that it's quite nice that they've made an effort to be inclusive, and let you play as any character you want, including female. But it's still a bit weird that the only thing my character and her male friend/second-in-command can agree on is that their secret gang hideout should have stripper poles. Stripper poles seems to be all anyone wants in Saints Row. Also, today my character was upset because a local "massage parlour" was closing, when she'd been coming there since she was 15! I don't entirely mind though, because I just assume my character is a bit gay. Which is nice. And they do let women be a part of the gangs and stuff, and in charge of things, rather than just be prostitutes and utilize stripper poles. It's just a little bit jarring, is all. Or very inclusive, I suppose, depending on how you look at it.

So anyway. These are the computer games I have been playing, and my experiences with them. Hurrah.