girlofprey

So, there are Hank/Connor shippers out there. There are also anti-Hank/Connor shippers out there.

I'm starting to think it's just a hobby for some people.

Looking for fandom on Tumblr is like looking for wildflowers in a field of nettles.

It was my mum's birthday yesterday. Apparently, she got woken up by her sister at about twenty to nine in the morning - her sister is in her seventies, had a stroke a few years ago, and her only daughter is currently in hospital recovering from an operation to remove a brain tumour, but they were expecting her to come out of hospital a few weeks ago. Then my mum had to go to a CPR training session. And after that, she decided to let my ON come over, because it was her birthday and because he normally comes down on a Tuesday, but she was working today. And - I didn't get the full story of this, but it was something like; a community/school nurse was at my sister's house, and wanted to weigh the kids and measure their height. My MN and YN weren't in, so my sister either asked my mum to go look for them, or my mum was just driving away with my ON and saw them. Much, much further away from the house than they should have been, considering my MN is 8 and my YN is 5. Apparently, when she stopped to pick them up, my YN was crying, and saying something about how a man had chased them, threatening to call the police, because my MN was throwing stones. My MN, at the time, just refused to get in the car, because he'd found some older boys to hang around with. It was around this time my mum's sister called her again, crying. But, after that was all done, we went out for a meal, and it was pretty nice.

Today my mum had a twilight shift at the hospital, which basically means she's working from 12pm to 12am - pretty much all her shifts are 12 hours these days, but sometimes she does day shifts, which are about 7am to 7pm. She normally only does one a week, but for some reason the shifts have fallen, this week and last week, so she's doing two on consecutive days. So she did the CPR session yesterday, is working a twilight today, and is working a twilight tomorrow.

So she was up this morning, getting ready for a 12 hour shift at the hospital, and apparently my sister called her, asking her if she could look after my MN for an hour, because she wanted to get ready for a Jobcentre appointment, which had been rescheduled from last week after she was 15 minutes late and they refused to see her. Because my MN is still not at school till tomorrow, because she didn't sort out his transport. She apparently said her appointment was at 11:40, and "you're not at work till 12, are you?". At which point my mum had to point out that no, she had to get to work for at least 11:45, to be ready for the start of her shift. In the end, she agreed to watch him, and my sister said she'd just meet her before she went into work, and pick up my MN then. Let's hope that worked out. Before that - I essentially woke up to mum telling me my sister had called her, while she was getting ready, and she also told me that my MN had apparently said that while he was out on his jaunt yesterday "an old man had forced him to smoke weed". When my MN came to our house, the story had apparently changed to it being one of the older, 12 year-old boys he was with who'd forced him to smoke weed.

Tonight, I came home and asked my dad if he'd heard about mum's exciting morning, and he said he'd had an exciting afternoon, because he'd gone over to my sister's for something, and my MN was acting like a lunatic. Apparently he was running around with a mop, and then my dad took it off him, so he started jumping on furniture, trying to push things over. My sister didn't react much to this, so my dad told her to do something with him, she tried to tell him to stop, he told her to fuck off, and she ended up kicking him. After which he ran outside, picked up a brick, and threw it through a window of their shed, smashing it. There are three windows in the shed, and he's broken them all, apparently. My dad then started talking about how my MN needed to go away, just go away somewhere, probably to a padded cell. And how my sister's been ruining my dad's life since she was 13, and it's all just bollocks.

And I'm not doing very well, to be honest. This might be obvious from the posts I'm making lately, but...this is just exhausting. And awful. And honestly, it might not be so bad, but given everything that's going on with my job at the moment, I just don't know what's going on with that either. If I could be confident that I could stay at my job, getting my wage, for as long as I wanted to, until I chose to leave, at least that would be something I could feel secure about. But, even though there's no particular indication the new company are going to let us go, I can't feel secure about it, not until we get some concrete news one way or the other. So I don't know what's going to happen with my family, and I don't know what's going to happen with my job, and I don't know what effect either of those things are going to have on my mental health. And I'm just really tired, and I can't tell if it's because the weather changed over the weekend and everyone's tired, or I ate too much, or I'm just actually not sleeping enough, or it's my hormones. But I just feel miserable. I cried at porn the other night. It was this really good dubcon, which was mostly overall consensual, just a bit pushing, but wasn't just about the 'empowerment' of complete submission, and it crystallised some of my attitudes/issues around dubcon. It was around the same time I saw a post on Tumblr shouting out to and supporting our new label, 'hypersexuals', who are apparently people who have kinks that upset or disgust them, have sex all the time, and have sex as a form of self-harm with people they don't like. Maybe? Maybe all of those features are supposed to be separate? I don't think they should necessarily be lumped in under one label anyway. But I definitely don't think it's helpful to just put them under one label and passively accept them in a way that lets people avoid talking or thinking about subjects, rather than thinking or talking about why people have those feelings or do those things. I'm sorry, I'm not being very progressive right now. I probably just don't understand tumblr, or young people, and how supportive but also critically-thinking they truly are.

Anyway. That post annoyed me. But they crying thing, I genuinely don't know if it's because it crystallised a few issues for me, or because I'm feeling incredibly emotionally raw because of everything that's going on at the moment. I got a bit teary last night, because my mum turned 68 and started asking if she was an old woman, she wasn't an old woman was she? And my dad started reminiscing about when he was young and used to punch people so hard he detached their retinas. I think they both miss their youth, and it upsets me to think in ideal circumstances, I will outlive them and they'll die and I'll have to live without them. And also their present is so awful, and that upsets me when I think about it, even though we've all kind of accepted it as normal at this point. I followed that up with a dream last night where my sister was younger, and just had one young kid, but kept coming into our house and insisting she should stay with us and eat our food because she didn't have any food for the kid at home, and she tried to make this up to us with beautiful singing, and I had to tell her that no matter how beautiful the singing was, it did not in fact make up for her invading all of our space and our house, and shouting at her that she was an awful cow and she was ruining all our lives. I told my mum about it this morning, and she was like "that was no dream".

Anyway. This sucks. I don't really know what to do about it. I could go see my doctor, but I honestly don't know what they can do for me. I'm already on anti-depressants, that I'm pretty sure I should have been weaned off of this spring. Other than that, I don't know that I have time for counselling or anything. I could call Samaritans to talk about this stuff, but they can't really talk back to you about stuff because they aren't trained, so it wouldn't really be like having a conversation about it. I'm just...I don't know if I should just hunker down, and hope for the best, wait for it to sort of get better. I've already had to take a step back from video game news, because it's just too stressful given what some arseholes on the internet think. I feel like crying right now, but I don't know if it'll help to just let myself be emotional about it. Because at what point do I stop? I should probably talk to my mum about this. But I don't really want to put any more on her shoulders. But I don't think I'm coping super well at the moment, and it might help the both of us to talk about it.

I finished Gravity Falls season 2, and then realised the shorts were not only not set after season 2, but hadn't been aired after that either, so probably had little to no effect on canon. I liked the show, but not as much as I was hoping to. It all ended just a little too 'pat', in a fairly Disney way. Not quite as emotionally overwhelming as I was hoping. I let fandom guide my expectations of the show a little too much, I guess. It was good, I just didn't love it like I thought I would after the first season.

But anyway. I went into the Tumblr tags for all the weird pairings, and they were all just full of posts saying that all ships are okay, don't let anyone make you feel bad for shipping something 'problematic', ignore the antis/haters, and everything is just so heartwarming right now you guys.

This tumblr post pretty much sums up my entire feelings about the EU referendum.

Also this post is a nice round-up of a few confusing, frightening, and hilarious things that have happened in the wake of the result.

Mostly the way the referendum has affected me - outside of how annoying and depressing it is, and being now worried about the future of the economy when I'm really going to have to look for a job soon - is that I've been arguing with my dad more. Some interesting opinions I've learned he holds: that human rights in Britain will be okay because we ended slavery, that nuclear weapons keep us safe, and that no-one will try to chip away at human rights for profit because 'people aren't devils'. Also, as usual, he thinks I have no opinions of my own, or that I'm willing to lie about them, because I only argue with him to spite him. He's a cock.

I am caught up with Emmerdale though. Nicola and Jimmy are gods.

Robert Sugden did a little psychological child abuse on tonight's Emmerdale, and I went on Tumblr just to see if anyone else hated it, and it's mostly people posting about how funny and/or hot it was. I should have learned. But I haven't.

Okay, but for real though, the worst thing about our new living room is that the cat is no longer allowed in it. Maybe forever. Because we have fake leather seats in the kitchen and her claws have made lots of marks in those, so she can't ever be allowed on our stupid leather sofas. Or near them, since she occasionally stretches up at us and her claws come out. So...yeah. Some people might have thought "hey we have a cat - maybe we shouldn't get leather sofas". But not my dad. So now we have to either watch her constantly like hawks, relegate her to the garage, or keep the kitchen door closed at all times. I certainly can't stroke her while she sits next to me or let her sleep on me, like she used to. Awesome.

In happier news (for me), a few weeks ago I was out having Sunday lunch with my parents, and we ran into a neighbour who commented on how I'd lost weight. Naturally my brain is translating this as 'drastic weight loss', but w/e. My mum said I had in fact lost some weight, so yesterday I went through my wardrobe trying on all the dresses I love that I thought didn't fit me anymore. And they fit me again! Even one that I really thought was like 'those days are gone, never to come back' and only hung onto because I loved it. And all the dresses I bought even though they were a bit tight fit. And all the 18s I have that I also like still fit too, they look 'comfortable' but not ridiculous or shapeless. I'm wearing one of my old sun dresses right now. My mum says she wants to go on holiday again just so I can wear them all. That was pretty top.

In other other news, I may have to come off Tumblr. The only time I seem to talk to anyone is to argue with them, or if they seem to be in a really dark place and I want to offer them a little support or advice. I was on there because I really like talking about Emmerdale, and quite a few people on there are doing that, but - this is going to sound a little xenophobic, but a lot of them are americans, and I don't think they understand...what they are seeing. Or how soaps are written. The dude I am arguing with currently is not the guy I was arguing with before, who runs a podcast, it is just this dude who constantly complains and talks about the writing and slams every character for bad behaviour while obviously being a fan of the most misogynistic, homophobic, borderline abusive sociopath on the show. And then yesterday he was talking about an affair storyline, where an outside character was saying they'd told their wife it happened and she just blamed the 'other man', while the married woman they were related to was "blameless, of course". And this dude said he loved that line, because it was clear even the character saying it didn't believe that, when - that was the entire point of the line. When pretty much no-one in England would use the phrase "[blank]'s blameless, of course" unless it was sarcastic. BUT HE'S SO CONVINCED HE'S RIGHT. AND KNOWS WRITING BETTER THAN THE EMMERDALE WRITERS. AND IT'S NOT HARD TO DO THAT LATELY, BUT LKSJDLKASJKFLD. AND I JUST NEEDED SOMEWHERE TO VENT ABOUT HIM. GOD.

Video games are being so good to me lately. Handsome Jack is basically getting his own Borderlands game next month, and might be partially in another one? They're bringing back my favourite villain from Saints Row in a new expansion, AND APPARENTLY HIS ROLE IS HUGE, HE SEEMS TO BE YOUR GUIDE THROUGHOUT THE GAME AND GIVES YOU JOBS AND STUFF. And they're bringing out an art/backstory book for Dishonored, which in a way is better than a new game because they're unlikely to bring Daud or the Brigmore Witches back, and outside of that I only really care about the art and the world-building.

Maybe they will fix elves in the new Dragon Age game.

Maybe they will do something interesting with the Batarians in Mass Effect 4.

Maybe there will finally be a sequel to Wet.

Also, to my weekendmates from this weekend: I solved the mystery of the lost pen and pen top. It turns out I took an extra pen. Sorry dudes. But on the plus side, I have an extra pen now.

Also I have been complaining about fandom on Tumblr lately - albeit mostly in my own head - but the other night I discovered a community about my favourite pairing from Wanted, which was being updated up till last year, and a TFLN blog, and they're both dead now, but I am so happy, SO HAPPY.

I haven't done a proper Livejournal post in about a fortnight, it seems. Wow.

In real life, I have been mostly tidying my bedroom, finally. I got my service worker to come over and sit with me while I did it, despite mum's objections. Mostly it was just him sitting there while I sorted through stuff, and decided what to keep and what to throw away, which was probably not very fascinating for him. At one point he sat and counted how many DVDs I was throwing out. And we had an odd and involved conversation about William Roache. But it's nice to finally have it done, and to throw out things I don't want anymore, even though I hate doing that. Also I hoovered things that haven't seen a hoover in years, I don't think. All I have to do now is put up some of the pictures I've been keeping in a stack by the desk, go through some old soap mags and throw most of them away, and maybe decide what to do with the big stack of boxes I'm keeping by the bed. Basically I'm keeping them because if I decide to move again, which I probably will do at some point, I may as well move things in the boxes they came in and which fit them. That seems like the best course of action. But it only seems like maybe I could keep them in a better way than stacking them up beside the bed.

But anyway. Mostly it's just nice to have some space in my bedroom again, and a place for everything to live in.

And there's also been some trouble with my nephews. ( Cut for violence against children/bullying )

Fandom-wise I have mostly been obsessing over Justin Hammer from Iron Man 2, shipping George Gently and Bacchus from George Gently even though I don't quite know how, but I love Bacchus' hair and when he is protective, and obsessing a little bit over the Lego Movie. The Lego Movie.

( That two-sided review I've been wanting to make, Spoilers )

I've recently discovered what actual fandom is like on Tumblr, and I don't think I like it, oh my God. Maybe it's just not for me, or maybe it's my own fault for getting into it with a fandom as odd as the Lego Movie, but. I have never seen so many people projecting so many of their issues onto fictional characters so intensely, and fighting with each other over it. Also it's filled with people who write in text too small to read and have music autoplaying whenever you open their Tumblrs. And people who wonder if it's morally wrong to sexualise children's toys in a children's movie in the first place. askdjajlad Tumblr.

Other than that I have mostly been researching medieval England for a fic I might write for Dragon Age, mostly as a way to procrastinate writing it I think, and then throwing the whole thing out anyway because Dragon Age itself can't seem to decide which historical period it's set in; they have magic so being specific about technology doesn't make much sense; they did bizarre things like having pumpkins growing in Ferelden even though it's meant to be faux-England and there is no faux-America that we know of; and Ferelden isn't even an island country, so looking up which plants are native doesn't even make that much sense anyway. Plus they just plain old made up some new plants like Deathroot and Elfroot anyway. Plus in the medieval period people were already sailing around moving plants and technology around anyway, so there's not much point being that rigid about it. It has been fun researching stuff, and it gave me some vague ideas, but eh. I think we'll count this one as a hodge-podge anyway.

I still do have complete my Origins replay with the different decisions I want to make, and the DLCs, and then a Dragon Age 2 replay (sigh) so I have the backstory I want for when Inquisition comes out though. Darn.

And the soaps are all kind of terrible at the moment, and have decided that killing young women off is totally the way to go and how to get ratings. So.

But on the plus side, it's March, so my self-imposed ban on Creme Eggs and easter sweets is over, and it'll be my birthday in about four weeks. Yippee. Also it's Pancake Day on Tuesday. THE MOST WONDERFUL DAY OF THE YEAR.

I feel like I have been waiting for my period for months. Livejournal and my computer calendar suggest it's actually been nearly 8 weeks. I've had gaps like this before, but I keep getting 'symptoms' that things are about to kick off, like stomach pains or spots, but nothing is in fact kicking off, I just keep getting the symptoms for weeks on end. I mean, nothing is really as bad as my cramps, but I don't feel like I ever signed up for stomach pains for weeks with no apparent purpose. Right now I'm getting stomach cramps and nausea, which is lovely. That may be because I only had 5 hours sleep last night/today though.

Soon a new episode of The Following will be on. What will happen? It's difficult to say now that it's almost impossible to take it seriously anymore.

On a related note, I caught a bit of Coronation Street last night. Right, I understand the trope of making your ordinary characters a bit stupid to advance or string out a plot. I don't like it, but I understand it. But police officers? I know they have a long, proud tradition of incompetence. But last night two police officers went to Dev and explained that Sunita probably set the fire, stayed in the pub as part of an attempted suicide, banged her head trying to get OUT of the pub, then woke up from her coma pulled her own tubes out. That doesn't even make sense in the sentence I just typed. But apparently a very believable motivation and chain of events in Coronation Street world. Never mind the fact that they suspect a woman with no history of violence, in fact the opposite when faced with mad stalkers in the past, of having set the fire, rather than the man who recently kidnapped his ex-wife. Is that not something the police know? Gloria announced it to everyone else. klasjdk.

I can't even really watch Coronation Street at the moment. I can't believe Karl and don't want to see his face. Both Emmerdale and Corrie at the moment seem to be featuring cheating wankers who are murderers, characters I can't enjoy on any level. My mum seems to think the truth about Karl will be coming out soon. I find my faith in Coronation Street a little shaky.

One of the dreams I had since I told you about my last dreams was one where people were investigating a murder, and I slowly realised it was Coronation Street and Tracy had been murdered. Even in the dream I remember thinking "They wouldn't have done that. This must be a dream".

On a positive note, I went to see The Croods today, with my mum and ON. I quite enjoyed it. Some bits were a bit weird, and the messages were often either weirdly mixed or driven home with a sledgehammer, but I did really like it. I slashed the dad and the love interest more than anyone else. No-one else on the internet seems to have done the same.

Also, I have decided not to use Tumblr so much for my fannish needs unless someone makes a post with all the pairing names for every fandom on it. EVERY FANDOM. Because otherwise it's sort of impossible.

Could this be the funniest post I've ever found on Tumblr, ever?

Quite possibly.