I am a terrible person

 But aside from that, I'm gonna have to post the cultural narrative of the Slangebarn tomorrow because writing it is surprisingly hard and I am absolutely  shattered.

 I also don't have a series name like I hoped.

 I've been really tired so far this week, I'm a bit worried that I've got another case of the old insomnia.

 I'm pretty confident I'll be able to get the post done tomorrow, though.

 I'll also make sure to put up another post this week to make it up to you guys.

 Suggestions are welcome, tumblr is the preferred method for those.

 Sorryyy...

Writing Eyes: My Experience With Dilated Pupils

 So I have a nevus in the retina of my right eye and it showed up there sometime in the last four years.

 Nevi are basically freckles in the eye, they can appear on the front of the eye, like in the iris, or they can be like mine and show up inside the eye. Like freckles, they are usually benign, and also like freckles, they can turn malignant.

 Due to it appearing recently and the fact that it's very close to the macula (vision centre) of my eye, my optician wanted to have a better look at it to make sure it was benign.

 This meant that she put tropicamide drops in my eyes to dilate my pupils to make it easier to see my retina.

 Yes, this stuff has the same basic function as belladonna, the fancy name for deadly nightshade.

 Since this was a thing that fashionable ladies did once upon a time to make their pupils look larger, I thought it would be a good idea to write about my experience of having ridiculously large pupils.

Is this pretty? I don't know.

  It doesn't kick in immediately, so when it started I was in Boots (regular Boots, not the Opticians Boots who put the drops in) buying vitamin pills and a new hairbrush, and the thing I noticed first was that everything between one and two arm lengths away was incredibly and unnaturally clear.

 Everything else was intensely blurry.

 I'm short sighted, so I'm used to things at a distance being blurry, but not my own cleavage being blurry and difficult to make out.

 Yes, I could not see my own boobs clearly.

 It was really weird.

 This also meant that I had a really hard time taking the picture above because I couldn't see what was on my phone without holding it at arm's length and my eyes look really dark when they're photographed in anything dimmer than direct sunlight. (I had to expose the shit out of that picture.)

 So I took about five pictures while unable to see if the camera had picked anything up.

 For the first half hour or so, I had this weird relationship with light.

 If I kept my eyes open for too long, I started getting a headache that was centralised in what I like to call 'the migraine warning area'.

 No wonder migraines show up in oldy timey fiction if people were doing this to themselves.

 The other thing that happened was that I kept getting after images of the weirdest things.

 One thing this happened with was a poster advertising half price frames where the frames themselves would singe themselves onto my retina for a few seconds. Which is odd as they were by far the darkest thing on the poster.

 I'm also pretty sure I got an afterimage of a large mirror at one point. It was very strange.

 After my appointment was over I had some shopping to do in my local town centre, which is a mid range activity most of the time, so I was too busy to really notice much for the next few hours.

 Well, apart from how weirdly difficult finding stuff in Lakeland was. Which was the first shop I went in and has been rearranged for Christmas stuff.

 Once I got home though, I found that sitting at my computer was giving me a mild headache and felt really uncomfortable for my eyes. I was about half way through the life span of the effects, so I chickened out and took a nap because everything was really bright.

 So bright, in fact, that I had to use a long sock as a makeshift blindfold because my room is white and closing my eyes only made it so that I couldn't perceive my surroundings but I could still see a lot of light.

 By the way, it doesn't look like my nevus will cause me any problem in the short term, but I have an appointment for proper eye doctors to look at it. Which may or may not change my lens prescription depending on if I need treatment and what that might be.

 So sadly I can't get new contacts for up to three months.

 Eye based drama aside, I hope this comes in handy if you want to write about Georgian era ladies or women from Italy back when this was in vogue.

Electrics is surprisingly tiring.

 On the plus side, I know how to do a ring main and a two way lighting circuit now.

 I can't do it without an actual electrician to sign it off, but it's still something, right?

 When I'm not on my course I'm mostly playing Stardew Valley or staring at yWriter trying to write the Epic Fantasy Story.

 It's at over twenty thousand words at the moment, which is encouraging, but still, I'm more than a little stressed out on it at the moment.

 Mostly because my villain hasn't shown up yet.

 Is that normal?

 To be honest, I've not read all that much epic fantasy.

 I've not had much desire to.

 Let's be honest, it hasn't had the best reputation over the decades.

 The best of the genre has strong themes and/or characters and/or settings, and the worst are generic and overuse violence, misogyny and hamfisted racism metaphors.

 I've asked my friend, and he says that I should really put villain stuff in earlier, which is fine, but writing this novel has been much more up in the air about what I'm actually doing than any of the others I've tried writing in the past.

 Herd, My Name is Medea and Silver Crosses (NaNoWriMo projects in reverse order) all had clear antagonists from the outset.

 In the Shadow of the Stonehearted King has swapped antagonists during these first twenty thousand words because the way my story is set up means that, while the original antagonist is still totes evil, I can't use him as the villain for this book.

 So I have a brand new antagonist, who I do really like, who has not even been mentioned during the first twenty thousand words and likely won't show up for the next five to ten thousand because I have other shit I need to set up in those words.

 I know this is what rewrites are for, but it still punches me in the metaphorical gut.

 Bah.

 And I'm also intensely worried about how to work the new villains in without undermining the idea that all the shit that's happening is because of the Stonehearted King and his impact on the world around him.

 But on the other hand I love the idea of my villains not being intimately involved with the Stonehearted King, like they don't even have the same goals as him.

 Working all this out is hard, man.

 Oh, well.

 I'm going to try and get a post up about one of the ethnic groups from EFS up by the end of this weekend.

 It's either going to be an overview of the Crúbdaoine (including a guide on how to pronounce that), or an overview of the Slangebarn (also explaining how to say that) including a 'folk story' about how they view their own origins.

 Probably the latter, but I may change my mind.

Writing and Streaming (along with some life stuff!)

 I've not had another editing crack at that longer story yet.

 I was kind of worn out on the whole editing thing after I finished the last edit, so I need to get back to that.

 Lately I've been working on an epic fantasy story. There's a lot of information about it on my tumblr, I'll be tagging it all with the same tag to make it easier to find at some point. I'm not sure what the tag will be, but I'll post when I've done it on this blog as well as my tumblr.

 It's about thirteen and a half thousand words at the moment, and I have a hefty cast of characters planned for it. A lot of them are quite minor, but you need bit part characters, otherwise you'll find yourself with a small cast who are all inexplicably related to each other (coughOnceUponATime/cough).

 I should probably post on here about it.

 I've got some worldbuilding notes that would make sense to go up here, and I'm planning on posting the full short story here about how one of the characters ended up in his current position.

 At the moment I'm slowly building it scene by scene on my tumblr account, but once it's done there I'll edit it and have the final polished version up here for you all to read.

 So my short story to do list consists of:

1. Finish editing Two Thousand Lenses for submission to a literary agent
2. Finish and edit The End of Holger's Military Career
3. Come up with a snappier title for that
4. Finish that Lois Lane/Batman story I posted up the first half of up on AO3 last year because I see people giving it kudos and I shouldn't leave it unfinished. Seriously, I got Kudos on it today, and three weeks ago, that means there's at least two people who want to read it.

 I've got a lot to pack into my schedule, especially since I'm starting an introduction to electrical work course the week after next.

 I'm pretty excited.

 The only downside is that I need to get there by half eight two days a week and that's intimidating to the vampire that I am.

 I've started getting up at 6:30 and going to bed at 22:00. I'm not used to it yet, so I'm really tired during the day.

 I'll get used to it soon enough, though.

 Finally, I've started streaming. I did some a while ago, some yesterday and some today, and I'm going to stream once a week from 19:00 GMT on a Thursday. Which is also a challenge, 'cause that's one of the days my course is on from 8:30.

 I'm trying to challenge myself more because the only way I'm going to get better and be able to support myself is by being able to handle hard work and more of it.

 Part of that is starting to post on here more often, so expect some world building posts on that Epic Fantasy Story.

Editing and some other stuff

 So, in a previous post I talked about editing a pair of short stories.

 The shorter of the two I did actually manage to finish editing, and I'm happy to send it off to a literary agent in the near future.

 The longer one, however, was indeed a complete pain in the proverbial. I didn't just need to clean up the prose, I needed to change huge parts of the story.

 I managed to drop one and a half thousand words because I took so much extraneous crap out.

 This presents me with something of an issue, though.

 With such big changes, I feel like I do need to give this another few rounds of editing. Which is an issue because I'm challenging myself to submit to a literary agent by the end of August.

 So these big changes are making me even more nervous than I was previously about doing that.

 I suppose I should stop being such a coward and start a new edit of it.

 I've heard changing fonts can help with this, so I'm going to try that out. I just need to decide which one to go for. Hmmm...

 In other news, I'm in the process of tidying the office (it's saddening that I won't have this when I move out, but I needs to be freee you guys), so I'm going to start painting again, and finally finish this thing:

Other brands of cider with fruit flavouring are available

 I'll also be able to fit my exercise bike in here, so my dream of playing Dark Souls while on an exercise bike will finally come to fruition.

 My friend Doug suggests turning up the resistance every time I die, but I reckon that's going to put me on the highest setting in about fifteen minutes.

 Prepare to die, indeed.

 I'll keep you updated on the progress of that short story editing, and I'll be sure to blog the horrors of searching for an agent (although I won't name names, that'd be a dick move.)

 I'm looking forward to when this longer short story is done, it's been a long time coming.

Has it really been five months?

 Wow.

 It feels like it should be less and more at the same time.

 Do you ever have that feeling? I hope not, it's confusing and not very nice.

 To be honest, I'm not really sure what I should be doing with this blog if I bring it back properly. It's pretty awkward with the Breath of Fire IV lp log. I feel like I should continue that, but I'm not sure if I can get myc save file back after changing computers.

 I'm pretty sure I saved it to an external drive, but I don't really remember.

 Then there's the fact that I never finished writing up the latest play session.

 I've got to be in the top ten of least competent people in the world.

 As for what to do aside from that, I'll probably write a drabble or some poetry for you guys in the next few days.

 I'm trying to get into a good writing pattern, but I'm finding it really hard to do that. I have a short attention span, so of course I've started two more projects since my last post.

 I'm also having major regrets on Herd. Which I'll just have to get over at some point (at least for this first draft) but for now I'll work on these two other projects.

 Honestly, getting The Sims 4 has made pinning down character appearances a lot easier for me. Particularly for relatives of characters thanks to the play with genetics feature.

 Though I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I find the faces of certain characters kind of samey. I have preferences and they are interfering with my creativity and work. (I'd also be lying if I didn't admit that I got one of the Herd characters dead on in TS3 and have a hard time replicating him in TS4.)

 I might write a review of TS4 for this blog for its use for story telling.

 Especially considering the new gender customisation update, which has been a long time coming admittedly, but is very nice nonetheless.

 Oh, and I have done a bunch of youtube videos, on and off. I'll probably do a post dumping them all on you at once.

 If you'll excuse me, I have beans on the boil.

My God, I Never Thought I'd See Them With My Own Eyes (And Some Bowls)

 I needed to deposit a cheque in my bank account, but unlike a sensible person, I don't live anywhere near a branch of my bank, so I needed to go into town.

 While I was there, I decided to do some some shopping.

 First of all, I needed to go into Muji for a couple of bits and bobs, but instead of leaving  with just bits and bobs, I ended up buying four rice bowls I don't actually need.

 Muji's selling these rice bowls made with traditional methods from various parts of Japan, and there are six altogether.

 I originally saw these online and I actually wasn't expecting to see them in store, so when I did I found myself compelled to buy them.

 Well, some of them. Four of them were about the same size and shape, one was the about the same shape but noticably smaller and one had straight sides and was noticably larger.

 I didn't like them as much as the four about the same size, so I didn't get them.

 These are the four I did get:

 These are, from top to bottom, from Hagi, Banko, Mashiko and Iga, which was the first one that caught my eye.

 The Hagi and Iga ones are my favourite because they have that cracked glaze I like so much (well, the Banko one has two cracks in the glaze, but I'm pretty sure I did that when I bashed it into the side of the bus when I was climbing up the stairs).

Hagi

Iga

 They also have interesting bottoms, the others had pretty standard unglazed feet, but these two have something a little more going on.

 I initially thought the notch on the Hagi bowl was a chip, but in closer inspection revealed them to all look like that.

 According to the Muji website, the notch is a traditional aspect of the pottery dating back to when the potters of Hagi had to damage their own wares in order to be able to sell them and not be forced to give them as gifts to the Mori clan. Proving that posh people have always been dicks everywhere.

 Now, for the most interesting part of the shopping trip, for those of you who have not watched The Great Pottery Throwdown and like short grain rice as much as I do.

 I went into a Christian Learning Centre.

 Some of you are thinking, 'why, Harriette, why did you do this thing? Why would you risk life and limb going into that hive of scum and villainy?'

 Well, I have a good reason.

 See, while I'm not let's playing, knitting a scarf, hating myself for not working on Herd like I should, or playing Skyrim, I'm slowly working on a novel about the Christian hell.

 Very slowly.

 Honestly, what I just said makes it sound like I'm working on it way more than I am.

 One of the things I'm slowly trying to do is gather resources for it, I'd like most of the descriptions of hell to be based on Christian literature about hell.

 Normal bookshops don't seem to be swimming in books on the subject, so I thought that maybe the CLC would have some of the resources that I'm looking for since it's a specialised bookshop. (I was hoping for the works of a Father Furniss, but they're quite old, so I wasn't holding out a whole lot of hope.)

 I'm not saying I was expecting a section in the CLC titled HELL, but I was idly hoping that it might.

 It did not, and although my initial plan the first time I meant to go in there a couple of months ago was to ask them, I found something that made me change my mind on that very quickly and very permanently.

 Books on evangelism are one thing, but these are a different kettle of fish.

 I've touched on Chick Tracts before, but I never expected to see them in real life. We have a much lower tolerance for this style of evangelism in the UK, and these things are amongst the worst examples of American evangelism you can find.

 Yeah, I'm not going to talk to people who sell these things, asking for a set of writings by a Catholic priest.

 I misinterpreted 'Christian' as Christian, not 'crazy ass Protestants who openly hate people like me and Catholics along with everyone else who isn't one of them', clearly, I was a fool for taking the name of this bookshop at face value.

 It also had a section entitled 'spiritual warfare', which I had a cursory glance at. It might have some of what I'm looking for, but I'm doubtful and not keen on going back in there after I found those Chick Tracts.

 I think my best option is to seek out second hand book dealers and see if I can find copies of what I'm looking for that way.

 Most of these are going to be out of print, so it's not going to cheap or easy.

 On a more fun note, I found a shop near the Arcadian that sells East Asian cosmetics. Well, Japanese and Korean cosmetics, at least.

 It's nice to have somewhere I can buy sheet masks from nearby instead of having to order them on the internet all the time.

 I would have bought some mascara and eye liner, but they didn't have a card reader, so I just went for a sheet mask instead.

 next time, though, I'm definitely getting those things, I really want new mascara and I do need to practice with liquid eye liner, so it's a good chance to try something new.

 Besides, it's the mascara with a seventies Shoujo heroine on the packaging and I just can't turn down that kind of genius marketing.

Why I Cut My Hair

 For the last ten years I've been growing my hair long.

 For the last few years it's been longer than waist length and before I cut it, it was at tail bone length.

 It was my pride and joy, I loved my hair.

 I brushed it thoroughly every day, I soaked it in conditioner, I even oiled it. I would avoid washing it in order to try and keep it healthy (before you think 'ew', you'd be amazed at what the aforementioned brushing could do to keep it presentable).

 I'd plait it every night before bed, I bought a shower cap so I could keep it dry while I showered between washes, I bought satin scrunchies, I even bought a satin scarf to put on at night.

One o' these.

 I'd always let it air dry, unless I was in a huge hurry, so it wouldn't get heat damage despite the fact that it would take several hours to do so.

 I looked after my hair like I was a middle class Edwardian housewife.

 It was my crowning glory and I treated it as such.

 But then I got ill, and I just kept getting iller.

 It got to the point that I couldn't even muster up the motivation to brush my hair everyday. I'd leave it in a ponytail or bun for days at a time, and it inevitably ended up getting matted and de-matting it turned into a distressingly frequent task.

 I thought about cutting it for months, but I kept putting it off, just getting it trimmed occasionally.

 But then I had to stop ignoring it. I'd been mistreating it to the point where I had splits halfway up hair shafts and I was constantly finding split ends. And once there are split ends, there's nothing that can be done to salvage it, it needs to be cut off.

 I'd have to cut nearly half of it off anyway, so I decided to get a bob.

 So I went from this:

 To this:

 And let me tell you, I don't regret it at all.

 I'll follow up with another post about writing hair with my experience of having long hair and some of the things I'd learned about long hair in history during my time as a brunette Rapunzel.

Sudden absence

 Yeah, if you follow me on Tumblr or Twitter, you know this, but if you don't, don't worry I'm not dead.

 I realise that this is a legitimate concern in my case.

 Lately I've just stopped caring much about this blog.

 I've been lacking much motivation to do things. About the only thing I've managed is recording a let's play session with my buddy Raincoat Videos, and that's probably only because there was a friend involved. Everything constructive I do on my own has just ground to a halt.

 It's just been really hard.

 I still feel like utter shit, but I'm hoping that I'll start to perk up soon. I'm getting a haircut on Friday, and they do say that a change is as good as a rest.

 I'm going to try and post at least two times a week, but anything other than that isn't going to be guaranteed.

 Oh, and the BoF4 LP is going to be way more sporadic for a while. Sorry about that, but I feel really demotivated right now.

 I have a couple of things in mind, so I'll go and work on those.

 Additionally, I'm going to put the LP videos with Raincoat Videos up here like I do with my own Let's Play videos.

Okay, kind of back on my feet.

 It's been a tough few days, but I think I'm able to get back to my normal self.

 So the next LP Log is going to be up tomorrow, and there's a post coming tonight with the new Anna video.

I have some 'cool' news

 My fridge is finally fixed!

 This means that I'm going to be able to buy lots of food again and not worried about it going off in a matter of days.

 It's been way more of a stress than you'd think to go from not having to worry about food going off to suddenly having to worry about it.

 Yeah, this is the time when people will go 'hah, first world problems', but it's true of anything. When something goes from not being a concern to being one it's always a stress, regardless of how minor it may seem when it's not a concern.

 What also makes it worse is that we don't know how to look after food. Yeah, that sounds pathetic, but for the most part, I don't think most people know how to look after food aside from sticking it in a fridge.

 Fridges really are a life saver.

 There's also one extra good thing about this.

 Since my fridge is no longer making tonnes of 'hey, something's wrong with me!' noises, I can actually start recording let's plays again.

 Yay.

To be honest...

 I'm not really feeling up to anything as time or labour intensive as an LP post today. I'll get Part Seven done for Friday.

 I'll try and get something up today, but I can't guarantee it.

Finally feeling better

 These last few days have been awful in terms of my mood.

 Once again I was laid low by PMS. Some months it's a real nightmare.

 I'm going to start posting again on Monday.

Just a gentle reminder

 You've probably already noticed, but I do have the Breath of Fire IV and Writing Tips masterposts up now.

 The Breath of Fire IV one can be found here and the Writing Tips one can be found here.

 I also finally added a new drabble to the rabble. I'll be trying to do that more often from now on.

 And since I recently finished The Night of the Rabbit, I'm going to be writing a post for Fission Mailure reviewing it, so you can look forward to that.

Somehow I ended up having a seven hour nap.

 Joy.

 While having this excessively long nap, I ended up singing the opening verse of Three Lions on a Shirt.

 Which was amazing, because I didn't realise I knew all the words to the first verse until I had that dream. I probably wouldn't have been able to recite them to you if asked.

 I think the reason I dreamed that is because it's St George's day today.

 A day that very few people in England actually give a damn about. I give so little of a damn about this, that it took the Google splash card to tell me.

 Well, anyway, here's the video for Three Lions on a Shirt while I order pizza and ice cream and work on tomorrow's post.

Scheduling and stuff

 I'm having a hard time getting back into the swing of things with the LP Log. I think I'm going to try for a Tuesday/Friday schedule from now on, it's a bit easier on me and a bit more logically spaced out.

 I genuinely thought that I'd be breezing through this, because I love Breath of Fire IV, but I've been so down and tired and demotivated lately.

 It was only through the power of righteous anger that yesterday's lengthy rant about hair happened. (By the way, I'm going to do a second post on that topic addressing the major problem with the whole 'white dreads' thing. After all, I am so white that looking at me in direct sunlight is inadvisable, so my post does reflect that.)

 Aside from being angry and in a slump, I did get a little bit of writing on Herd done, and a few scenes for a future work.

 I actually ordered a book for research for that future work and it arrived today.

 I did basically order it sight unseen, and it didn't turn out to be what I had hoped, but it's still full of fascinating information and I'm confident that I can work what is in there into my novel.

 Well, 'novel'. I have my doubts it will end up being that long.

 I've got some typing up to do and an LP Log to work on, so I should get on doing that.

 (BTW, I am going to check in on the hot Eurovision news and get back into my Countdown to Vienna series. So don't be sad if you miss those.)

Success! (The keyboard saga)

 So, as I stated in my last post, I'd spilled cola on my laptop which made the keyboard go absolutely mental.

 I ordered a USB keyboard, which came today, only to learn that a USB keyboard does not override the built in keyboard.

 I also learned that you cannot disable a keyboard in a laptop through the device manager. Not without downloading some kind of remapping software and arsing about with that, anyway.

 So what I ended up doing was taking my laptop apart and manually disconnecting the keyboard ribbon cable.

 Right now I am ridiculously grateful for my recent obsession with electronics YouTube videos or I would have had no clue what I was doing. I probably wouldn't have even tried.

 I'm fine with the fact I've basically turned this into a laptop, I'm planning on getting a gaming PC sometime after Windows 10 comes out, and once I have that I'll probably end up getting a new netbook, because I miss having something I can easily carry around with me. So I'm probably not going to keep this laptop past the end of this year or early next year anyway.

 (By the way, I'm slowly working on setting up a Patreon page so you guys can patronise my work if you like. If you've got suggestions for patron exclusives, please let me know.)

 Thursday's LP log will be up tomorrow.

I'm sorry

I spilled coke on my laptop.

 The keyboard is fucked.

 I want to cry.

Excuses, excuses

Yesterday I was having a real problem with my sleep pattern, then today I went out to meet a friend for lunch and hanging out purposes.

 My original intention was to write about half of the BoF4 post before I went out and finish it when I can back, and I did the before bit!

 But alcohol happened when I was meeting my friend in town, so I was the drowsiest human being in the world when I got back and ended up falling asleep.

 I'll put it up tomorrow, I promise, I'll work on it right now for a while before I go back to bed.

 The moral of the story is that Raincoat Videos is a terrible, terrible person and an enemy to livers everywhere.

Phew

 I'm feeling a lot better now.

 It's amazing that video games and a mind numbingly painful stomach ache have the ability to kick one out of a depressive funk, but apparently it's a thing that they can do!

 It didn't turn out to be anything serious, but it did rob me of a full night's sleep.

 Anyway, I have done the first day's gaming and am poised to write the first part of the series as we speak.

 I aim to have it up tomorrow.

 Are you excited? Because I am super excited. I love this game, so I'm gonna write like the damn wind so I get to play more of it.