#blog will run on a short queue until a further notice

[the-kipsabian]

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[midfight-artchive]

Hello!! It's been a while and I feel like I should explain why I've been gone for so long despite the blog working on a queue system. The short answer is mental health stuff, the long answer is below.

What's important is that the blog will now officially be on hiatus until further notice. When I come back, I'm going to overhaul how I do things behind the scenes that will hopefully bring more of the archive to you without tiring me out as much. Thank you for understanding, and again a more full explanation is below.

I've been going through probably the worst mental state I've ever been in lately. Nothing to do with the blog itself thankfully, I'm very passionate about this blog and MFM as a whole to this day, but the circumstances I'm currently in make it difficult to run this blog.

You know the saying "it gets worse before it gets better?" I'm basically going through that, fully realizing my traumas and really putting myself under a microscope to pick out what needs to be healed and improved. Things are looking up for me overall, but the amount of mental strain and exhaustion I'm experiencing can't be understated either. (Not to mention the fact that I'm still in the situation that gave me this trauma in the first place, so healing is a little difficult when I'm being retraumatized pretty much constantly... x_x) Said exhaustion makes it very hard to even fill the queue for this blog, let alone have the energy to answer asks or even tag sometimes. It's rough! This blog isn't demanding by any means and it's still too much to even think about. (And I have thought about it a lot!!! I've wanted to come back numerous times but didn't because of the constant fatigue I've been feeling.)

Part of that is because I'm neurodivergent, though, and MFM hasn't been a hyperfixation of mine for YEARS. In fact, I haven't had a solid hyperfixation since about...2019-2020? Since then I've been coasting along on special interests and even my focus on those have lasted shorter and shorter the longer time has gone on. I started this blog way after MFM was in my brainspace full time, which is why it took over a year to even set up. I felt that the premise was more important than my brain's shenanigans, though, so I pushed through and tried my best to keep it up. The sad truth is that I don't think about MFM as much as I used to, and when I do think of them these days it's more of a "damn, I really miss them...." for a few minutes before my brain goes back to whatever it's currently grabbed hold of. It's not my choice, as many people with hyperfixations know, and trust me when I say that if I could keep them in my focus long enough to keep this blog running I would in a heartbeat. The fact that this is comorbid with depression really means I have to scrap for whatever energy I can, and that means focusing on things that actively bring me joy just so I can have enough energy to get out of bed, meaning even a fun side project isn't as possible as I previously thought.

HOWEVER, NOT ALL HOPE IS LOST!!! I've started medication and as I've said, I'm working to better myself. This blog going on the backburner is me taking a break, NOT a cancellation, and when I come back I promise to be better about not disappearing for random stretches of time. :P I can't say exactly when I'll feel well enough to pick this blog back up, but it absolutely will happen.

Thank you all so much for the positive reception to this blog, and I'm looking forward to continue archiving for you all!!

[canondanganronpaheadcanons]

Hey guys, important announcement.

The TL;DR: As of September 2, 2020, I’m deciding to get off Tumblr long-term. I haven’t decided if I will delete the account yet, since someone might want to browse through some headcanons. I plan to officially go completely inactive by next Saturday, September 12, after I post my drafts and answer remaining asks. 

UPDATE 09/06/2020: I will keep the account alive but I am still getting off Tumblr long-term.

UPDATE 09/10/2020: Asks– anon and otherwise– are officially closed until further notice.

Keep reading for specifics.

I think I will queue all of the drafts as they are just as a final thing I do. Mostly as a joke, because most of them are incomplete, but they’re lowkey kinda funny like that. If I begin the queue tomorrow, I’m predicting I’ll have all of my drafts posted by next Saturday, September 12. After I’ve posted all of my drafts, as well as answer my remaining asks/headcanons, I will no longer be active.

That said, if you have any headcanons/asks you’ve always wanted to throw at me, now’s your chance!

Why am I leaving? In the long run, I ultimately know that Tumblr and the things I’ve been following on this site aren’t healthy for me. Social media in general has just been getting in the way of my life, so I’m just cutting ties across different sites. 

It’s not because I don’t want to run an account, but I also know I can’t sustain a blog to this fandom indefinitely, and I definitely can’t sustain it long-term. I made this blog in April 2020, so it’s been a pretty short-run account, pretty small-scale account in general, and I just made this to pass the time. Like many people in the United States, I’ve been quarantined all summer. But for now, I think I’m ready to conclude the Canon Danganronpa Headcanons That Are Canon saga. 

I don’t want to say I’m permanently leaving Tumblr, because I can’t predict the future, but I am treating this as if I am. I don’t want to return if I’m not in a better, healthier place to handle social media, if that makes sense.

Random shoutout to @mythgirlimagines for being my first sub and having consistently liked and followed my stuff from the start. You are the real MVP!

To everyone, even though we don’t really know each other, we don’t know what we look like, we don’t know if we’d have been friends if we met face-to-face, I truly appreciate you guys. So keep being you!

Thank you for having been a highlight of my 2020. I pray that all of you may have a good rest of the year. :) 

[wetookanoath]

personal struggles, the fate of this and other blogs and apologies.

This year so far has been strange and not good for me and this blog. Some of you know my long history with hate in this fandom and while it’s always nice to hear your kind words, the hate I get is every day worse to the point I had to take off the anonymous option on this blog, my personal, the Library, the writing events and even the damn porn blog.

A few months ago I said I was gonna delete all blogs, and as promised I also deleted my twitter account, passed the instagram account to someone else (who hasn’t done anything with it yet), deleted other b*zzf*ed related blogs I ran, and left others I helped in.

I answered to every and all asks on this blog and the porn blog (most asks now on queue or drafts, waiting to be posted slowly to not spam), finished the event that didn’t went as good as it seemed and passed the administration of the Library to my personal account to never left it die down.

During this time, something happened in my personal life and I found myself in a very dark place I never thought I would go back to after it happened to me many years ago. But it did, and I had to dealt with it all over again, but this time there was a difference, this time I knew were to start and it helped me because I was able to ask for what I needed and get help.

I’m on meds again. I’m not proud of it and it... makes me angry that I’m ashamed to admit it. I’m making less money, lost a person, stopped writing, entered a rehab therapy for two weeks for depression (I didn’t tell anyone but my family, which won me a very long fight with my best friend and two of my best friends online), ended in the hospital last month. 

That long period I spent away from this blog, forgetting to answer replies I got e-mails for and the days of check-in and whatnot for the Exchange, god they were so good even with all that mess going on. I watched and read so many things, even if suffered not writing and other physical things. But I felt good, I really did. Which I think it’s why I was happy to get back here, just to find hate on my inbox yet again (from the same person as always, by the way. This woman really is the saddest person on the planet. Yes, it’s about you. I know you are reading this), and I really thought “why do I keep doing this to myself?”

And then weeks ago I finally realized why. And it’s because I like this show so much. I like the pictures and the stories, the chat group I’m in even if sometimes I feel like they don’t like me, and most important, in spite of all the hate we get here, I love the stories I write for this fandom, and my ship. I’ve never wrote this good, gotten the chance to improve and learn better english too.

I love the writer I am in this fandom and I have wrote so much these past few weeks, and all because I started to write shy*n again. 

So what do I do?

There are days when I forget this blog exists. It’s been so boring, this hiatus and how things have changed, the lack of content makes things dry and easier to forget. I just forget it exists, but then when I get in, it’s fun when there’s no hate. I find it entertaining to go into my blogs and tag everything properly, organize tag pages and make lists of films based on things, make edits, answer old asks I didn’t have time for before.

Since now that anonymous is off I don’t get any asks, I had have the chance to answer in depth so many things I had left behind before, it’s been fun. Like it used to be, January-July of 2018 came again to remind me of how things were before The Change. I enjoyed preparing this blog for my deperture, and I found myself not wanting to go.

My first thought after that revelation? “People is going to hate on me on anonymous for changing my mind”. Isn’t that fucking sad? That I have to condition everything I do so people won’t hate me on anonymous and say horrible things just because I complain bout things, then calm down and change my mind like any other normal person does on a daily basic... on my own, personal blog? 

So, so far, this is what will happen:

The blog reminds, since it’s also kind of an archive for this fandom with how much has been posted that I know it’s resourceful to people for all kinds of things.

Anonymous will perpeturally be off in all my blogs. The Library’s inbox will remain closed.

I’m still going to take my long periods of ignoring this blog, so I’m sorry if you sent me any qs and I don’t answer right away.

It will be on perpetual semi-hiatus, since I will come back once a week to answer things, tag stuff, stock the Library’s queue and the one on this blog.

About the updates, I’m just going to post things I would like to archive myself.

New fanfics/chapters of fics coming every Saturday until I’m done posting everything I wrote these weeks. I’m still writing, so I guess my day of the week to check replies, messages and asks will be on Saturday.

I don’t think I will be around for the new season, not the way I used to. I’m so gonna watch it, but no posts from me anymore. This is a big maybe, since I’m not sure of many things right now, especially with my health as fragile as it is right at the moment.

There’s, so far, 131 original posts on queue. These are: lists that were requested on this blog on such things like all episode Shane called Ryan ‘baby’, personal favorite shyan moments with links (I worked so much in this one, I ended up hating it), etc., edits from many things, included shoots found in old articles and so on, the ongoing ‘fave insta pics’ series of Ryan, Shane, TJ, Sara, Kelsey and the boys in other people’s instagrams, more favorite fanfic edits, and more buzzships edits. Also, a few headcanons, rec lists and solo recs.

Queue will post three posts a day, one original text, one reblog, one original edit. Texts are less than the edits, so when they are over, it will be two edits and one reblog. I will be stocking the queue during my weekly visit, so I don’t know if it will eventually run off original posts or not. 

Library reminds what it is, inbox closed until further notice.

Writing Events is over, though. I’m too tired for that. At least for a long break.

This really all depends on my health and how things are once the show is back. I miss the interaction a lot, so having lost the anonymous option it’s really a big bummer for me, and maybe to the people who did like to interact with me and the blog’s content in a positive way via this option. We’ll see.

And finally, I want to apologize not only for the long of this but for my negative reactions months ago. It was wrong, childish at times and out of character. I didn’t realize I was getting bad, and when I did it had already gotten worse. I can now look at all those desperate posts and see how bad I really was at keeping it together and how desperate I was to be okay. 

While I still believe I didn’t deserve the harassment I was getting, I should had never given onto it and answer back. I shouldn’t. It was not only bad for me, but to the people who followed/follows this blog and engaged into the negativity too. 

I caused that by acting exactly how the hateful people wanted me to, and instead of showing myself as the imperfect human being I am, all people saw was a crying girl asking to be appreciated and loved back. And the reality is that forcing those things to happen won’t make it any better, on the contrary, it makes it worse.

All those times I said, “why does people have to insult me for you to care about me?”, it was because I made it happen. I decided to posts those answers and reply to the hate, and it made people, worried by my answers and the tone of them (yeah, I was pretty suicidal and paranoid, I didn’t realize until recently), send their support. It made it look like that was the case, that I needed to be hurt for people to appreciate me.

But now, I don’t post those things. Had to shut down anonymous asks. And last week I got one ask, just one, of someone saying they love this blog. There was no reason for it, just someone who saw me online and send in their positivity. And it was the best thing in the world, those short words, the best ones.

So yes. My sincere and deepest apologies to everyone, involved or not, for having acted, well, toxic in the past months. Hopefully, it won’t happen again. Meds, no anon and semi-hiatus will make a difference, I hope. And things will be fine.

Thanks for the support, the kindness and the love. And thanks for reading this bible.

Love you,

Nina.

[wowkinz]

WoWkinz- Warcraft kin rq blog!

Hello, admin Koltira here.

Warcraft (and associated universes) is a very important source for me, so I was saddened to see that there were mainly dead kin help blogs and low rates of consistent community whatsoever in its kin populace.

You may call me mod/admin/etc. Koltira. I have other Warcraft kins but Koltira is the main name I will use to identify myself. Identity is weird but I believe I am masc-leaning nonbinary. He/its is fine. I am over 18 years old.

My goal is to affect what positive change I can manage regarding that apparent fact and hopefully bring everyone a little closer, all while exercising my creativity to the benefit of others in the process.

On that note, a little bit about my intentions of operation:

Non-canons of all kinds are acceptable to submit requests for! Just got to be kin-related. (Muses and kin are not the same. You may kin your muse, however, and on that note a request would be valid.)

Until further notice, I, admin Koltira, intend to run this blog by my lonesome. This has potential to change in the future.

Calls will more often than not be put through upon being seen as this is a fairly low-energy task. However, as a general rule all forms of processing requests is most likely to be accomplished in a manner of timeliness while requests are open.

If a request is submitted without providing indications of how the requester wants it to be filled (i.e. specific inclusions, to abide by a certain color palette, to not involve specific color(s) or imagery, words, etc; saying you want a general [insert noun here] board), then the product is entirely up to the interpretation of the admin. It is perfectly ok to ask for a revision on a filled request but it is also the right of the admin to decline or postpone said revision in favour of completing in-process orders. TL;DR I do not intend to read your mind!

I will do my best to keep a record of individuals who interact with this blog, especially if they express desire to be included in our url /database (and/or #database). Registry counts as independent of requests. Feel free to include Warcraft kin related information, such as account names, kin list, people you’re looking to interact with. By default canon/timeline calls will be added to our records.

TBD

As of this release (31 Dec 2019), accepted request types include, relating to a person/being, responsibility, relationship (platonic, familial or otherwise), faction, location, and/or other theme(s):

Canon/timeline call

Relatively simple sketch of a described person/scene, time spent/attentive quality warranted to the piece adjusting as complexity rises (if inspiration strikes this could be spontaneously upgraded in the moment)

Aesthetic boards (3x3 image grid default)

A short, playlist, based on given information/context (~ songs, less than 9 as a rule for my sanity)

Small basic OR experimental collage (minimum of 10 Independent items including text and pictures, specifying “experimental” enables me to take greater risks in assembling the product such as playing with opacities/layering/effects and such which I might not be inclined to do otherwise)

Stim boards (3x3 gif grid default)

List of less than common words (at least five)/word collage to represent a described theme

TBD

Guidelines:

No themes of p/dophilia, r/pe, t/rture, er/tica, or g/re. If you have a request which may impede on standard guidelines, you may attempt messaging with your request so as not to subject the public eye. This is meant to encompass 18+ individuals who may want to request excessively violent and/or (consensually) nsfw themes.

If not accepting the default, specify what level of independence you desire from your request (i.e. if you want to be messaged the finished product instead of being tagged in the posted response, etc). The default will be to @ the user who submits the ask in the immediate text for the post, such as in this: “[Request type and theme] for @/user.” [followed by tags below].

Please only detail one request of any type per ask submission. If you send greater than one request within a period of less than a day, each beyond the first entry of yours in that frame will be interchanged within the queue as it follows the order of all other submissions within that time frame. (i.e. you (A) send three individual requests, three other people (B, C, and D) send just one per throughout the same day after you, it would be processed as A1 B C D _24hr mark_ A2 (other) _24hr mark_ A3 (other); Note that this only represents order of posting, and does not correspond with the immediate timeliness of (a) posted and/or filled request(s).)

TBD

It is true I tend towards expressing seriously, but I look forward to seeing what I can do for each and every one of you.

[out-of-this-dimension]

Fate’s Decree Updates

HEY ALL, sorry for the small break, I took some time to sort of gather myself since irl has been so hectic with my dad’s passing and to work on my novel for NaNo.  During this time, I sort of reviewed some of my Fate’s Decree works and decided to make some decisions!  Think of this post as like a uh... “patch notes” for a video game. Only, probably without making horrible choices.

To start off, you might be asking “What is Fate’s Decree”? You know all of those headcanons I post?  And all of those theories?  Well, I put them all in a canonverse I call “Fate’s Decree’, which I try to keep as friendly to the games as possible (no serious lore/canon diverging without sufficient warning, that is).  You can find all of the works here, on Archive of Our Own.  I was in process of moving everything to Fanfiction.net, but that’s a really tedious process with their method of uploading so I got distracted and uh... long story short, it’s not all there yet.

Anyways, some things will be getting changed in Fate’s Decree!  Primarily I will be revising “The Distress Call” to make it more about how Krystal ends up on Dinosaur Planet and ends up on her fateful trip to Krazoa Palace.  I will also be revising “A Stroll Down Memory Lane”, as it was originally written when I had planned on having the “main stories” of Fate’s Decree centered around Marcus McCloud instead of Fox.  I think the original version of that piece had like Fox retiring or something but that’s not going to be the case anymore.  I will also be redoing “Shadows in the Stars” at some point, but I feel like it’s not the time to do that so I will be removing it from AO3 until further notice.  This is basically because I came up with some plot revelations that interfere with the like 4 chapters that were already posted and, yeah, I have to rework basically everything on that piece now so that will be going bye-bye.

I honestly planned for Shadows in the Stars to be the “main” SF fic I worked on with everything else being companion pieces, but that’s... not really what has happened so I want to focus on things like Burning Stars and Love Guru, which focus on stuff that happens between SF games rather than post-SF Command fics.  So those two are going to be my primary focus, and then I’ll hop back onto Tempered Minds, which is a fic about Captain Shears during the Lylat Wars, complete with crash landings on Titania and Creepy Things. 

BUT since I’ve been brainstorming headcanons, especially for characters that feel less popular or characters I haven’t really written much on yet, I’ve been wanting to do some practice with writing them so I will be working on a few vignettes that will be posted (hopefully) throughout the week SO PLEASE STAY TUNED, HECK YEAH, TUMBLR MIGHT BE EXPLODING BUT I’M STILL GONNA DELIVER YA SPACE FURRIES.

Anyways, have a good night, I am drinking an energy drink at 9:30pm so I expect to be awake for the next decade.

Also, no, I am not leaving Tumblr and this blog will continue to stay SFW unless some random algorithm stuff happens and I get banned anyways.

Oh and a side update: I’ve had a queue running since basically the dawn of time, but now it should say if a post is queue’d or not.  If it doesn’t, then I blame Tumblr for being questionable at functionality.

[lindoig8]

Sunday-Thursday, 26-30 September

Sunday

I spent most of the day in the van working on my photos and blog: a pleasant enough task, but it always takes much longer than I ever anticipate. We went to the supermarket for a few things in the afternoon and then went out to the Beach Club for their Sunday Roast for dinner.

We missed our on the roast last time we tried because they ran out just ahead of us in the queue, so we got there just after 5 pm and ordered, imagining that they wouldn’t be serving it straight away. Sure enough, it arrived by 5.15 and we were finished dinner and twiddling our thumbs over the second half of our bottle of wine well before 6 o’clock. Needless to say, the restaurant was by no means full (although there were quite a few ‘reserved’ signs on the tables) so we could easily have arrived at 6 or 6.30 and still enjoyed a roast after that. Having said that, the roast was nothing to write home about (so I am writing about it here!). It was a big meal though with heaps of good veges and we needed a doggy box to take the remainders home again.

Monday

We had quite a productive morning once we got up and moving.

After breakfast, we did a little bit of hand washing (an almost daily task lately) and then we tackled replacing our broken door mechanism with the new one we purchased in Exmouth. It was a very fiddly job with quite poor instructions but we finally got the new piece in place and everything is now operating correctly. It is nice to be able the separate the fly screen from the main door and to lock the door securely again. A small but welcome achievement.

Next little job was to clean the flush water for our loo. It had started to grow some algae in the flush-tank so we emptied it and flushed some chemicals and disinfectant through it, then quite a few litres of clean water and it all looks sparklingly clean again.

That took all of the morning but we packed our lunch and set off to explore a little south of Onslow. When we had visited the Information Centre a week or two ago, the woman there recommended that we go to the Ashburton Port ‘to see what they are doing out there’. Onslow is in the Ashburton Shire and close to the mouth of the Ashburton River (and coincidentally, Heather and I both lived in the same little street in Ashburton, Victoria, albeit at quite separate times), so we took her advice and went to check it out. The Port is about 15 kilometres off the highway but when we got there, the entire area is closed to the public. There are two large gas processing plants there (Wheatstone and Macedon) and the whole area is well and truly off limits to mere mortals like us. (Wheatstone is interesting to the physicists among us due to the Wheatstone Bridge – a device used for determining where breaks in power lines have occurred – regrettably, nothing to do with Heather Wheat – even if she were stoned!)

Not ot be discouraged, we left the precinct and headed a few kilometres further to the turnoff to Old Onslow. We explored this area 4 years ago and I recall the scores of caravans free-parking along the banks of the Ashburton River. It is a surprisingly large river (but virtually dry upstream) and we found a place at its very edge to sit and enjoy our lunch. There were a few birds around and we relaxed for close to an hour before moving on to the site of the old town.

There were scads of caravans scattered right along the edge of the river with more coming and going as we drove in, but we eventually reached the site of the original Old Onslow. It seems to have been at least as big – certainly in area – as the current town and there are still a few remnants of the old structures and equipment there. We drove right around the area, out to where the old port had been, around where all the pubs, stores and public buildings had been, even out to the old cemetery. It is quite amazing: there are tens of kilometres (maybe hundreds) of track in and around the old town – all of which was simply picked up and moved to the current townsite more than a hundred years ago. There is not a lot to see – a single bollard where the pier used to be, several acres of broken bottles adjacent (and non-adjacent) to the old pub-sites, a more substantial ruin of the police station and courthouse, but not a lot else. We explored as much as we could and eventually found a beautifully-maintained gravel road that we followed for perhaps 15 kilometres until it simply stopped at the fence of the Macedon gas-plant. It intrigued me why such a wonderful road would be so meticulously-maintained if it led to nothing at all! Very strange indeed!

In due course, we got back to the main road and returned to the new Onslow where we explored a few more local roads, past the salt plant belching fresh salt into a gigantic stockpile, out to the marina and nearby industrial area, and eventually back to the safety and security of our own little cubbyhouse.

Tuesday

Heather started with a big load of washing – time to do the bedding again – while I went back to the industrial area to try to get our tyre fixed. That was a big disappointment because the guy out there found two big tears in the sidewall due to driving with the tyre being too flat.

We spent a fortune on tyre monitors a few years ago, but don’t use them because we have never had a single day without false warnings and failures of the system. We took them back to the suppliers numerous times and they replaced them and did some troubleshooting, but we have never had a day’s value out of them. Their only value is that the system beeps at you if there is a problem with any tyre – under- or over- pressure, rapidly changing pressure, overheating, etc., – and because at least one of the twelve sensors was always malfunctioning, we were subjected to beeping from the moment we started the car until it was turned off – and we never knew if it was a false alarm or a real problem. In this case, if we had the system installed and working, we would have known of the slow leak and saved ourselves the roughly $700 for a new tyre.

But that was not the end of the issue. The guy in Onslow didn’t have a tyre that would fit – and he said our tyres are very hard to get at present. He suggested we ring ahead in an attempt to have one waiting for us in Carnarvon. Alas, none in Carnarvon. Hamelin Pool? No! Denham? No, but he might be able to get one sent up from Geraldton – with a $45 freight charge. But if we are going to Geraldton anyway, he will ring his mate down there to ensure he has one available when we get there next week. Fnigres coresds – you try typing with your fingers crossed!

Wednesday

We fuelled up at the more expensive servo because all four of the bowsers at the cheaper one were out of order. The one we had to use is one of the automated ones so everything takes a bit longer and we had to join the queue of travellers trying to purchase their fuel before we got our turn. Eventually, we achieved our objective!

We then drove the 469 kilometres (by our odometer) to Carnarvon. The map indicates that the distance should be 493 kilometres but our caravan park is 6 kilometres out of the town centre. This is very consistent with all our measurements, with our speedometer and odometer both always being 2 or 3 percent out. This has always been an issue because we have oversized wheels and tyres on the car so all the readings we have are about 3% less than actual. What this means is that although our records show (according to our odometer) that we have just ticked over 17000 kilometres towing the van this trip, it is actually a tad over 17500 kilometres. We always have to over- or under- estimate our figures depending on what we are trying to do – it’s very marginal but if we were running very short of fuel, it could be critical.

We left the tropics behind us when we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, but we haven’t encountered any temperate rain forests yet. It was an interesting drive though with very noticeable changes in terrain and importantly, vegetation as we moved slowly south. Then, just a few kilometres out of Carnarvon, a really big change occurred with lush banana plantations and other fruit and vegetable farms filling the landscape. Our caravan park sits right on the edge of a large pomegranate orchard, something I don’t recall seeing anywhere before. It is also right under the Space Museum that we enjoyed almost exactly 4 years ago. Maybe I won’t bore anyone with that, but it was one of the more important NASA stations during the lunar ventures as well as being the key OTC station that introduced Australia to international television. It is a great museum and anyone who gets close to Carnarvon should definitely give it a visit.

At night, we tried to watch more of the short series of DVDs we started last week, but it wouldn’t play as it should – long pauses and complete pixilation being the main problems. We tried to clean the lens, but maybe our cleaner is not in good nick. We were able to watch a film on DVD without a hitch, although when we tried the following night, nothing would play correctly. I will try to buy a new lens cleaner (we have been looking for one for at least 5000 kilometres) but maybe our old TV has reached its Use-by date.

Thursday

We had a fairly relaxed day today – a bit of shopping in the morning and then a drive out to the ocean. Almost by accident, we ended up driving around Babbage Island – an island on the map, but with a road out that indicated many years since it was an island, definitely a low-level causeway rather than anything like a bridge. We drove out on some 4WD tracks and I enjoyed photographing a few shorebirds out there, but we then drove to the end of the island and enjoyed watching a few fishermen and picnickers across the lagoon – but we chose not to tackle the very sandy track out to join them. We also explored the entrance to Oyster Creek – a few desolate clicks out of town in the opposite direction, but quite interesting due to the very shallow area of the ocean that it empties into. All mangrove areas.

We also explored an area shown on the map as a large area of water just north of the NASA telescope. There is not a lot of water there are present, but what there is has attracted hundreds of birds and I did a bit of bush-bashing trying to see what they all were. Most of them were relatively common for me, but I was pleased to see quite a few dozen Black-tailed Native Hens – that I last saw about 15-20000 kilometres ago.

[jongdaekims]

hewwo.... its me.... okay so my exams are coming up soon and uhh i need to study so im going to be going on a short semi hiatus!!! i’ll be back in like a week or two!! i won’t be gone that long but this blog and my nct sideblog (@jaeh-yun) will both be running on a queue (hopefully... if i remember to update my queue...) until further notice!!! i’ll try to reply to messages/ tags as soon as i can but i might take some time to answer so yeah im not purposely ignoring you im just probably not online shjxksjx

[ekebolou]

New Book Prelude: The Armistice

Okay, I said I would create another blog for this, but I didn’t.  This is sort of a free-story lead in for New Book.  I’ve posted it before.  It’ll be in several parts.  I’m going to post the first chapter of New Book after I get done with this.  Maybe posting will force me to come up with a title.  You may have seen this before, since I’ve posted it before, but the first chapter should be new, I think...

Be warned: Naughty language ahead.  Link to the next part at the bottom of the post.

Anyway, here goes:

The Armistice: Part One

“I will tell you the great secret that so escapes you, muj – a soldier’s life is very simple.”

Each swept their own heavy flap of fabric back to enter the tent, but it was Boera who pushed to the front first – and truly pushed, for a good wager brought a good gathering.  Through a crowd made twice as thick by layers of armor and twice as loud by game, he trailed his dark company by the inexorable and – for his companion – unfortunately irresistible bond of friendship in vast parties. 

“This is what troubles your life – you don’t realize this.”

As they had settled into the front, a hand was instantly flat before him – whose hand, what kind of hand, how did it matter?  Gamely, Boera fished in the purse at his belt and took out few bits, pointing to his chosen contender to place his bet.  It was a fine contender, its shell shiny, its squeaking high and impassioned, and even his sour friend nodded his approval.  “It is only this: Do as you’re told!  And when nobody is telling you to do anything–”

He knelt and gestured down at the elaborately constructed dirt-track circus.  “’Ta! Rev, then you do as you like.”

The rat racers were ready to unleash their steeds; some even had intricately woven leashes, made from filched silver thread and scrounged bits of metal.  These were nothing compared to the finely worked hats perched delicately, even jauntily, between their tiny rodent ears.  One had wings, to match those fixed to the twine holding its turtle shell on! Boera repeated his enthusiastic gesture as the race began, bald tails scraping the ground as the rats scampered down the track.

“No, Boera,” Rev said.

Boera’s enthusiastic gesture wilted.  Rev stepped over his shoulder and walked to the edge of the track.

“I like the little hats, for instance,” Boera tried.  “That’s new.”

“Life is complicated when it’s short.”

“And there is Rev, our shining bright dawn,” Boera rose and stepped away from the crowd. 

“I am,” Rev said, grinning.

Over the objections of seven nations worth of soldiers, Rev took a hunk of cheese from his pocket and tempted one of the competitors away from its circuit around the circus so he could coo and scratch its chin.  The Sathian among the crowd threw their arms up, much as Boera had, while their Erro allies sighed.  The Baathians immediately tried to renegotiate the odds, Sivery as quickly trying to block them.  Felanese, Sulerian, and Tarkesh soldiers all shouted for their race to continue despite this interruption.  The tent, quite beyond the cacophony of rats, filled with the chittering, sliding, bellowing sound of a half-dozen languages mixing in a way that had no meaning to anyone, yet was understood.

Get the fuck out of the way, so we can lose money reasonably!

Shrugging, Rev let the rat down and stood, nodding his head for Boera to follow or not as was his wont.  Boera rolled his eyes, aggrieved at this faithless turn – of course it was against his wishes, but he would follow.

Rev kept his grin; his ears felt empty – nothing jangled, tugged, or rang – but that was what four years’ campaign would do to a man.  Each and every Sivernisat had gone back to their tent and carefully and with much thought removed the heavy bangles piercing their ears and set them aside. It was a grave and serious ritual, completed in a moment, which meant they could commence the labors of peace instead of shouldering the burdens of war. 

They could, for example, construct tiny hats for racing rats, and set odds using an elaborate system of tortoise shells for handicaps.  Or, as Boera would have pointed out, fuck an innumerable host of their former allies and enemies alike.

The labors of peace varied from Sivery to Sivery, Sivernisat and Sivereponet; the earrings were mostly the same.

They shouldered their way out of the tent, through a hole that probably shouldn’t have been in the tent wall.  Of course Boera would follow.  Boera had been his tentmate for the last eight months, since the others had died.

“All of the handicaps will have to be recalculated,” Rev cried, throwing his own hands up.

“Yes,” Borea said, leaning away as they walked, leading despite his implied intention to follow, “you’ve weighted that one with cheese.”

“That’s all it was fit for.”  Ren turned, roughly guessing his next trajectory and angling it to agree with Boera’s.  “Weighting rats.”

“And soldiers,” Boera agreed.

In truth, the cheese was the best cheese they’d had in nearly a year. It was certainly better than starving. Certainly better to have a companion.   Certainly better than the cold. But it was the soldier’s prerogative to complain, and they were still soldiers, if only for as long as the celebration.

As if to deny the cold of their memory, the night was warm, weather neutral as the armistice that gathered them here.  Loud, foreign insects did their best to drown out the celebrating ‘honor guards’ and ‘escorts’ and ‘name-your-dynasty’s-ruler’s vaunted immortals’ – the mighty survivors.  The moon was full and pendulous; the stars glittered under the few faintest wisps of gray-black cloud.  Warm as it was, Boera and Rev passed by numerous bonfires filling the camp, because, so it was: fires and festivals and soldiers and the end of war – warm or not: big, big fires. 

“Rats like soldiers,” Boera said, leaning in close, well aware the conversation had only begun to tiptoe around the actual subject.

“Rats,” Rev replied, “are so much more noble.”

“You were stood up.”

“Stood up!”  Rev threw his hands up, identical to a thwarted Sathian gambler.  Bringing them down, he seized an errant tall stalk of the local grass, not yet beaten down by the young festival, and stuck it in his teeth.

“Stood up,” Boera clucked.

“Almost stood up,” Rev admitted.

Boera nodded sagely.

“Eh...” Rev elaborated.

Boera waited.  A small troop of naked soldiers scampered by, no doubt aiming for the river nearby, by their trajectory going to miss it by some twenty yards.  Either that, or they really wanted to run through the tent that several others had set up to cover a very somber discussion of the philosophy of war and a rousing game of dice.  The chase to the river would be fantastic.

“It just didn’t last very long,” Rev said, tossing down his piece of grass. 

“How could it!”  Boera gestured out at the madness around them.  “How could it!” he repeated, gesturing with a remarkable lack of ambiguity at Rev.

This was not a compliment, but rather a statement of stale disbelief. As this was not the first day of the festival, nor the first day of their tentmate-ship, the conversation had been had long before.

“It’s been so long,” Boera snagged his own piece of grass, whipping Rev in the chest with it before sticking it in his teeth, “since you have let someone fully enjoy your... physique, you have become an infernal expert in the... extraneous arts.”  His gesture was amply illustrative.

“Don’t stress your Sivereponet tongue, Boera, you’ll want to use it later – and who calls those extraneous arts?”  Rev returned with an illustrative gesture of his own.

“Anyone who just wants a simple fuck!” Boera shouted, calling the attention of some thirty reveling soldiers around them.  They focused like hawks, howled like wolves – a few Felanese, by their uniforms, went so far as to queue up.  Rev raised his brows, then his shoulders, then had to glower and close his posture off with an elaborately undiplomatic line of Felanese (or – all the words he knew) to dissuade them. 

“You’d think we’d learned better than to volunteer,” Rev muttered.

“Eh,” Boera shrugged, “for war.  For fucking, why–” and he performed a little triple-step, ending in an elaborate presentation of himself that received scattered applause, “–begin the line here.”

Boera took his bows, and they continued their walk, now directed by his impeccable sense of ‘finding something to do.’  “You are a complex fuck.  You are the Alta-puzzle of fucks.  Scholars for generations will talk about what it takes to actually unlock to combination to your pants.  Actually – no, you’ll just test a man until he spends himself before he can touch you. And that means you’re not a puzzle at all, you’re actually just a choosy bastard.”

They’d had this conversation before.  They paced out its rhythms and responses as they walked, encased in the total silence of uncrowded merrymakers.  Until they got to the important part; call and response.

“You could choose me.”

Rev shook his head.  “The bed moves for lovers, but a wise men stakes down his tent.”

“It’s a fool’s adage, I tell you,” Boera groaned.  “A travesty to believe tentmates should not be lovers.”

“You’ve not yet broken it, and you’ve all the cause in the world.” He lifted a finger to correct himself. “All the character in the world.”

“With but your consent I would.”

Rev gave him a sideways look.  They walked in silence.  Relative silence.  There was a great deal of singing.

“Boera,” Rev said, and waited for his friend’s sly and eager glance. “That is a terrible notion.”

“Yist,” Boera chirped.  “But I, my dear, would consider it a personal achievement to be able to hold out against your extraneous enticements.  How long is the average?  Nevermind – to know would dissolve my dreams – how do you resist?”

Rev laughed, and kept his secrets as Boera entertained him with a series of exceedingly crude gestures.  This ended in another companionable silence while Rev pretended not to notice how Boera nudged, bumped, and directed him with false fronts of fleeting interest in yet-further-away displays of debauchery. It was no issue, until Rev noticed a decided turn in the tone of the slurred singing, a slight change in the way the camp sprawled around them, a different mixing of the colors of fabrics.

“Boera.”

“Mu’ vlastni?”

“Where are we going?”

Responding with only a look, Boera quickened his pace, dragging Rev behind yet again.  After a moment it became clear enough that Boera intended to go into a long tent bedecked with wildly colored flags.  That was part of the strangeness – the way the tents stretched to great lengths rather than peaking like the Erro or draping like the Felanese.

“This is the Baath camp,” Rev hissed.

“So you noticed?”

But Boera didn’t slow down, leaving Rev with little recourse beyond sulking silently in step behind him. 

“What are we doing here?”

“What, you think they’ll kidnap you in the middle of the armistice signing?”  Boera was slightly more delicate with his tone; he made sure to laugh.

“I think we were better off with the rats.”

“You mean back by the Sivereponet?”

“Them and the small rodents in shells.”

Letting himself be mocked was Boera’s concession, and he rounded it off with a laugh and an arm over Rev’s shoulder, bearing him down to have his ear tweaked as if Boera were an extra-heavy earring.  He did not, however, then let Rev go.

Rev’s incredulous and confused expression stood in for many words.

Wordless stammering was also the bones of an old conversation: Boera couldn’t possibly have brought Rev down here for a fight.  Though a soldier sick of war, as all soldiers always were, if they were sane, he would admit he picked fights because he enjoyed it.  The very notion disgusted Boera.  Like a spouse with a drinking habit, Rev had come to slinking about when he went abroad for trouble. 

This time, Rev refused to help as they barged into the tent and got a face full of canvas for his trouble.  Blinking back the light from what might have been the most furious bonfire of them all, he breathed the heavy, sweet scent of Baathian fruit-and-honey wines, as well as fresh timber and old sweat.  Several tables and benches pushed together created a single long table the length of the tent, blocking them from the impressive pit and chimney (those surely weren’t stone bricks – even Baathians weren’t so foolish as to have hauled stones to a treaty camp) over the bonfire, long and low as it could be made while still being ferocious. 

He freed himself from Boera’s arm and fixed his tentmate with a look of grave disapproval. 

“So, I have followed you here, Boera.  What business could even you have among Baathians?”

“Well, muj, the people I know, you know I know, and I must know at least a few Baathians...”

“Bullshit,” Rev said.

Boera looked mortally offended.  “You are a man of pressing needs, o tentmate, and I only seek to relieve you of them.”

Rev narrowed his eyes, pulling his head back in a gesture of suspicion that would have been much more effective if accompanied with the slow jangle of earrings.  “You didn’t bring me here for a fi–,”

Boera’s hand came up so fast, Rev thought he was going to be punched, but instead, he pressed soft fingers to Rev’s lips.  He only removed them after a tedious spate of muttering what Rev assumed must be highly sacrilegious prayers, as Boera believed in no gods.

Boera took a deep breath.  Seeing impatience still writ large on Rev’s face, he made a weighing gesture with his hands and started peering about. 

“There’s a man here I want you to meet.”

“I don’t want to meet any Baathians–” but before Rev had finished, Boera seized his elbow and dragged him towards a gap in the long benches. Whatever comforting noises Boera was making to try to ease the scowl on Rev’s face were soon lost in the raucous conversations of the soldiery at the tables.  Both of them had to skip lightly aside to avoid a man launched bodily over the back bench by a Sathian woman who’d mounted the table to plant her foot in his chest.  She paused to secure her footing, bare chest shining with sweat and hair backlit by the fire such that she seemed to embody the night itself, imbedded with stars, before she stomped down on the bench to step over her foe and continue a leisurely stroll towards the hogsheads. 

“Not that man, I hope,” Rev said.

“Ah, no,” Boera said, but as the soldier next to him slipped head-first backwards off the bench, he used the chance to throw Rev down in a the space just cleared.  Before he could protest, Boera slapped him on the shoulders, and made fading excuses as he disappeared after something for them to drink.

Rev refused to have anything to do with this.  He would demonstrate his displeasure with a sullen silence, completely useless as Boera wasn’t here to be bothered by it.  He adjusted his seat on the bench, considered eating a bit of cheese from his pocket, remembered he’d given most of it to the rat, renewed his scowl.

He didn’t like Baathians.  He would admit that Baathians in general had a pleasant aversion to shirts – or maybe that was just because they seemed to be mostly celebrating with Saathians, who saw shirts as a sign of weakness.  Maybe Baathians did, too, though everybody – Saathians included – wore something into battle.  He wouldn’t know, not liking Baathians one bit, and certainly not enough to have learned any of their cultural mores.  He demonstrated his distaste by not participating in them, which was completely useless because it amounted to sitting there doing nothing.

His scowl deepened when he realized just how unoccupied Boera had left him.  No one tried to speak to him, too busy being Baathian, which was simultaneously offensive and uninteresting.  He, of course, couldn’t understand Baathian, so he couldn’t even sneer derisively at the right moments to insult people who were speaking, no doubt of reprehensible Baathian things. 

He did really like the Baathian aversion to shirts.  Not being able – or, rather, unwilling at least while Boera was waiting upon him – to pick a fight, and so cruelly forced to idleness, he could do nothing but watch people parade past, and kick away the soldier trying to take her seat back when he woke up.  The other Baathians seemed to approve of this, as the woman next to him issued something that was either a congratulatory cheer or the final stages of a wasting disease, and slapped him on the back.  This did not lead to fight, but rather, due to his morally-maintained silence, to more watching people parade past.  He was rather more relaxed when Boera returned. 

“I see no man,” Rev said, peering around Boera and raising his hands.

Boera knocked him in the forehead with one of the mugs he was holding and threw a leg over the bench.  “You see your favorite man.”

“I see a man who abandoned me amongst savages.”

“And who brought you delicious Baathian wine, gained at great personal risk from the horde of savages by the barrels, without you so much as even having to move or attempt to summon to your tongue enough Baathian to order it.”

Rev checked his hair for spilled wine, and sipped what was obviously meant as a libation of appeasement.

“Who do you see?”  Boera grinned at him.

“I see... very nearly my favorite man,” Rev replied.  He glowered at the Baathians around them.  “If only he kept better company.”

“I could not agree more,” Boera grumbled.  Before Rev could grasp this reversal, Boera had turned and said something witty enough in Baathian to get his own slap on the back, not that Rev was jealous.

The Baathian wine was good enough – and alcoholic enough – that Rev fell easily into the business of getting drunk.  Decently drunk, that is; not nearly sober, but just drunk enough to ensure he wouldn’t cause someone to come over the table at them.  Also not drunk enough to try to speak to any Baathians, no matter what language they chose, so the burden fell to Boera, who was able to slide into the conversation smooth a snake in a mail suit. 

Boera, in turn, felt far more comfortable when he finally noticed Rev falling into a pleasant and languid silence beside him, almost half as drunk as he needed to be to not start any fights at all.  In fact, for the past few minutes of mindless, half-Sivery, quarter-Felanese, quarter-mimed conversation, Rev had paid no attention at all, no doubt due to some ridiculous notion he was somehow being both superior and insulting.  So Boera let his own attention wander – he let his smile grow warm, let his pose grow alluring, let his current company knowingly begin a grinning departure and smiled broadly as decidedly different sort of company approached.

Boera sampled and rejected a few, who did not take it poorly.  After all, the armistice signing was a veritable open feast, full of soldiers happy to no longer be dying, and eager to express their zeal of life by wasting copious amounts of its generative fluids. 

But finally, a very smooth-looking Baathian, sadly shirted, slid onto the bench beside Boera.  They ran through a few different greetings in sundry languages until it turned out the Baathian spoke decent Sivery.  He passed a number of tests Boera lobbed his way in the form of gratuitous insults, ridiculous challenges, and pointless diversions, proving he could survive a conversation with Rev.  In fact, Boera dared even believe he might thrive.  Then, with his most practiced lascivious and welcoming smile, Boera turned, seized Rev’s lapel, and used shunting him into the Baathian’s lap as a means of levering himself off the bench. 

“Let me get us drinks,” Boera said, then turned his grin to Rev. “Stesti!”

“Stesti-fuck!  Boera!” but Rev called to a hand waving farewell over the passing walls of Baathian soldiers.

“That went poorly.  Is that your friend?” the Baathian asked.

“No.”  Rev seized his flagon – full, he noticed, which it hadn’t been a second ago but somehow Boera must have dumped his in before he disappeared, which meant Rev now had a disgusting mix of peachy-berry wine Boera had been drinking and the salty-bloody wine he’d been drinking.

“You’re the only Siver here,” the Baathian pointed out.  “I think.”

“That Eponet, horse-thieving scum is not my countryman,” Rev growled.  In his furor he took a drink of the wine, which was worth spitting on the table. 

The Baathian laughed.  “Baathian wine doesn’t agree with you?”

“Nothing Baathian agrees with me,” Rev growled, topping his threat off with a grin. 

“I agree with you,” the Baathian said.  When Rev gave him a skeptical look, he half-stood to reach over and sniff the wine in Rev’s cup.  “That would taste terrible.  Why did you mix them?”

Pulling back, Rev slopped wine up his sleeve and cursed.  “You know I didn’t, you fool.”

“Better a fool than a lush,” the Baathian said, still sporting a small smile, perfectly undisturbed.

Rev was getting a good look at that smile because the Baathian hadn’t moved back.  Rev would have, of course, leaned forward so to follow up on his threatening tone, but the Baathian had moved in for him.  It didn’t feel properly threatening that he only to had to lean forward an inch or so to put himself in biting distance of the Baathian’s face, but he did it anyway. 

“Better anything than a slaver.”

The Baathian’s expression didn’t waver.  That, Rev had to admit, was the teeniest bit admirable.

“We agree again,” he said.  This close to his face, Rev noticed that he said it with delightfully curved lips. 

The Baathian’s hand was moving somewhere over to Rev’s right, but Rev wouldn’t let himself look; it’d break his intimidating stare. 

He needn’t have worried.  The Baathian broke first, as he brought Rev’s cup up to his lips, and glanced down at the liquid before turning – only just enough to sip. 

His expression folded instantly into disgust, and he pushed away, laughing.  “Dear God, that’s disgusting, Siver.”

“Yes!”  Boera said, appearing from behind with three newly filled cups.  He intervened between them only long enough to set the cups down, then forcefully and with several intrusive nudges forced Rev over on the bench so he’d be next to the Baathian.  Actually ‘next to’ didn’t cover it, as Boera pushed so close Rev could barely move his arms with elbowing one or the other.  With unobliging eagerness, strangers pushed onto the space Boera cleared, leaving Rev with nowhere to run. 

Rev was all right with that, for the most part, as Boera had noticed. Boera reached across to push a cup towards the Baathian, whose confusion at Boera’s change in position didn’t go so far as to refuse a drink.  At the same time Boera blocked all of Rev’s attempts to use his right hand to grab his drink, forcing it into his left so he couldn’t elbow the Baathian without spilling on himself.  

“How are we going to get you properly drunk with that disgusting slop?” Boera said, with rather more teeth than were strictly friendly. 

“How am I responsible for that disgusting slop?” Rev hissed back.

“How can either of you get drunk on wine?”  the Baathian asked.

Both Sivery turned, and he shrugged at his cup.  “I always end up behind a tree first.”

After a moment’s shared silence, Boera threw his hands up.  “What a manly constitution!”

“What a crock of shit,” Rev said.

“What is going on here, exactly?” the Baathian asked.

“A pleasant evening among friends and allies,” Boera replied.

“Baathians are not friends,” Rev hissed.

“Nor is that Siver, according to you,” the Baathian said cooly, sipping his wine.  “Horse-thieving epo-something scum, wasn’t it?”

Rev’s head sunk between his shoulders; it had been a bit much, the horse-thieving part.  Through one squinted eye, he glanced at Boera, whose expression bore the marks of infinite hurt.  Reaching out, Boera slapped the back of Rev’s head so hard his forehead hit the table.

“I need someone to fuck my friend,” Boera said, while Rev whined like a kicked dog.

“That one?” the Baathian said, glancing at Rev.

Boera’s expression confirmed this, with the utmost reluctance. “Though if you pass him over, I’m not too proud to become a runner-up.”

“I am not to be passed over, for I’m not being offered – offering – and I wouldn’t be passed over, anyway, were I even on the table, which I’m not.”

“You’re on the bench,” the Baathian observed.

Having confused himself in his own retort – perhaps he’d already drunk too much – Rev chose to ignore him.  “I am not involved in this!  Boera, are you insane?  And if I were, it would certainly not be for a Baathian!”

“Muj – muj Povstalec,” Boera said, seizing Rev by the back of the collar.  Generally a peaceable fellow, it wasn’t so much that Boera was being so confrontational as it was that he’d called Rev by his real name – or as close as the Eponet got – that told Rev he was serious. 

“We are all so very aware of your opinion on Baathians.  How could you doubt me, think I would not take this into consideration?  Have you not courted every other breed of soldier around here?  Have you not found yourself disappointed at the end of each one? Are you not, infected by your madness, beginning to yearn to fight someone, you great idiot?  It is an armistice.  In the war, it was madness to try to get yourself killed when three other nations were offering to do it for you, but now it is insanity.  Tasteless insanity, too!  Even the great, be-medaled fucks and flouncing court fops have finally seen that we should not be fighting anymore.  The insanity that afflicts you is now out of place, even more so than usual.  Fuck someone, please, so that I don’t have to deal with your madness disturbing our nice and peaceful tent while the armistice is being signed, so I can fuck whomsoever I like without you deciding to fight them when they wake up.”

“That was once!”

“Three times!”

“Those other two were assholes!”

“Which I thoroughly enjoyed, and you had no right to treat any of them that way and you know it, you bastard!”

Releasing Rev’s collar, Boera gave him a great clap on the shoulder, pushing him towards the Baathian.  “Look – if you do not like him enough to fuck him, then you can fight him instead; either way you will finally be satisfied.  I would put my money on a little bit of both.”

“You know, I’m right here,” the Baathian said.  “Don’t I get a say?”

Both Sivery fixed him with stares like a pair of cats in the dark. 

“It’s an armistice!  Who’s being picky?” Boera said, ignoring Rev’s glare.  “Besides, don’t you like my friend?”

“I can’t say he’s taken a shine to me.  If I say I do, do I still have to fight him?”

“Well, I don’t like you,” Rev replied, “and I’ll fight you any time.”

“Well, if any time includes never, then we have a deal,” the Baathian said, sipping his wine.  “But there are quite a few others here who I would neither fight, nor fuck, and your friend here hasn’t exactly been charming me from my cup.”

“Ah,” said Boera, sweeping himself up from the bench to put a hand on each of their shoulders.  “But that’s because you haven’t heard the best part.”

“Is it not the fighting?”  Rev asked.

“Is it not you?”  The Baathian said, and smiled. 

The shine of that smile made him completely impervious to Rev’s burning glare.

“I like him,” Boera said.  “I’m reconsidering this plan.”

“Then I can fight him in the morning?” Rev asked.

“The best part,” Boera said, leaning heavily on the Baathian, “is that nobody gets to fuck him.”

“How is that the best part?”  The Baathian asked, genuinely confused.

“You have not heard my challenge,” Boera said, gesturing grandly.

“I am not a challenge,” Rev roared, and stood, and the standing was an issue, or at least standing so suddenly.  He didn’t quite fall, and didn’t quite trip, but did get an uncomfortable rush of blood, and the bench didn’t help him stand.  Boera caught his shoulders -

Boera grinned at him.  Rev’s eyes widened, and he shook his head, but Boera’s grin only widened.

Twisting his grip, he threw Rev’s unsettled weight into the Baathian’s lap. 

It was not for nothing that the Baathian had on that soldier’s uniform, for he dodged any untoward damage from Rev’s violent upheaval by throwing himself into the drinkers behind him.  Could not have been more than a second Rev spent in his lap.  In his fury at being so mishandled, Rev only managed to clip Boera’s temple with an open-handed slap, stinging his fingertips to a degree that nonetheless satisfied his vengeful impulses.  He ground the dirt under his heel as he turned to stalk out of the tent, a meaningless and rising cacophony of Baathian following him out.

Part Two

[thenightisland]

explanations/updates under the cut

i haven’t been able to maintain much in the way of interaction with most of the people i care about, also haven’t been able to do much more than get out of bed every day because it’s one thing to be depressed and another to have just had such a goddamn terrible few months that there’s no way your antidepressants can keep up with all the awful

i already had several weeks without my second in command because she’s cursed and had to have another surgery. our unit lost two of our main techs (for new people inexplicably reading this, i charge a locked acute psychiatric ward, and losing techs is a /massive/ loss). the admin demons have been instituting various new things that have been having terrible effects on the units which i won’t get into because that would be a really really long explanation with a lot of jargon in it. one of the things though is the fact that the “do not readmit” list has been low key thrown out the window, so all the pts who were on that list /with good fucking reason/ are of course, now coming back, and spoiler alert they’re just as terrible still.

this one bookstore closed which sounds stupid as fuck but that place was the closest thing i had to a church and it literally kept me alive when i was in high school like i say that completely without exaggeration so it closing was the equivalent of someone hacking off one of my limbs because it was still the main place i went to when i was upset and wanted to feel less miserable and i don’t have it anymore and you wouldn’t believe how hard it is like imagine if your church got demolished or whatever you believe in like it destroyed me and i feel unmoored i don’t have that safe space feeling now because it’s gone

meanwhile the person i spent seven years of my life in love with had a baby with the boyfriend she described as Guy Karen, named me godmother of their firstborn son, and unknowingly made his middle name the pen name i’ve used for a decade because fucking of course this might as well fucking happen too. but i have other romantic bullshit going on now that’s honestly fucking me up worse.

also somehow i still can’t escape a little life like it has haunted me every waking moment since march 2016 and i hate how much i am like the protagonist and it’s kind of fucking with me??????

a fucking garbage man bashed off the side mirror on my car which i still haven’t had the fucking time to get fixed that was great

spent my whole vacation anxious having panic attacks like what is the point in having a long vacation if you’re going to be constantly stressed over nothing like goddammit can’t i just have this

within the last month and a half five people i know have died. three of them were our patients which like doesn’t sound like a thing that would cause that much distress, but due to the nature of our unit, we’re the only family a lot of our career patients have most of our pts are homeless, schizophrenic, intellectually disabled, just plain unwanted people of varying illnesses, like we literally look after the people no one else wants so when we hear one of Our Patients has died it fucks us up so badly. and it’s even worse because it’s not like they died in their sleep or something all of them have been post-discharge suicides like our work already feels like a revolving door exercise in futility because that’s the nature of the field unfortunately but it still hurts like i spend forty hours or more a week with these people i literally see them than i see my friends and family our patients are mostly so close to us that like when the day shift charge nurse came back from maternity leave, pt who had been there when she was pregnant who were there again were asking about how the baby was doing so three of our pts killing themselves in the last month in a half is soul crushing

then the closest thing i had to a friend in nursing school, well, she died too. out of the fucking blue, out of nowhere. she was a 28 year old healthy woman with two young daughters. she worked so hard for her and her girls she went to nursing school to build a better life for them and she genuinely wanted to be a nurse meanwhile i originally got into it for the money like she only got to live her dream working in L&D for two and a half years. and then she was on vacation in florida with her girls who were doing like a cheerleading camp. and she just. went to sleep and never woke up. and i still don’t know what killed her no one has posted it on facebook, and unfortunately, all the people who might know are the people that i cut out of my life because the rest of our class was a toxic mess so i can’t very well be like heyyyyy so i know i deleted you years ago and all but what killed linda? so still no closure. i just hope to god her girls didn’t find their mother dead. like it wrecked me.

i also say that every time i come back from a vacation something awful happens like when i came back from boston/nyc i discovered i was the only nurse left on my shift and when i came back from st louis last fall my dog died a very traumatizing [for me] death, so when i came back from dc i was like hmm what next.

well, another fucking person died is what next. /one of my coworkers/ my alpha tech from my original 11-7 team one of the people who has literally saved my life and kept so many people from getting hurt this is someone i saw five days a week for the last two and a half years of my life. he was already going through a lot because him and his wife split, so he was staying at a friend’s house, a friend who happened to be an NP for one of the psych docs, and the NP’s sister who works as an internal medicine assistant. and then on cinco de mayo we got word that his car had flipped and killed him. and a lot of people attributed it to a classic cinco drunk driving fatality but it gets worse because of course it does because lol it wasn’t /his/ car that flipped. it was the NP’s sports car. and apparently, the NP was driving, and the sister was following. the sister and NP were off the grid for a couple days and then the sister came back to work, but the NP has been taken off the on call list “indefinitely” so not only is one of our team members dead, but he is probably dead from a /drunk driving vehicular homicide done by another team member/ because apparently the world was like fuck our unit specifically.

then i got to spend several days being targeted by a pt who was a behavioral case [aka they’re not actually mentally ill, they’ve learned to play the system to avoid going to jail, basically] and that involved her being in seclusion for seven goddamn hours and her literally endlessly threatening to kill me for days to the point that i was confined to our walled in nurses station because she was you know trying to kill me and just constantly standing on the other side of the glass throwing around some of the worst verbal abuse i’ve ever experienced like i’m already exhausted and fatigued and miserable can’t you shut the fuck up i need to find some kind of meaning in my job because it’s all i have and you’re making it very hard for me to feel like i’ve done any good for anyone

all of this built up nicely into a good old fashioned nervous breakdown to the point that i had to call in sick because lol turns out that that is a lot of fucking shit to deal with in the span of a month and a half and emotionally things are only going to get harder from here this year for a variety of personal reasons that suffice to say have literally kept me up at night and upset me enough that i even had some nightmares break through the medication because i’m seeing so many of my friends find their happiness and i hate that i can’t feel that happy for them because i’m so tired and when the fuck will it be my turn i don’t want to resent my friends’ happiness and successes i’m just fucking exhausted and would really like for some good goddamn things to start happening here any time now i’ve been under so much stress i’m just a human version of the song running on empty at this point it’s all too much and i still can’t write i’m still stuck in the same hell from a manuscript i wrote nearly four years ago all i’ve been able to write is Coping Poetry to keep from going off the deep end and honestly everything in my life just feels completely out of control and i’m just tired of so many bad things happening in such a short amount of time like i can handle my own emotional problems until you dump all this other fucking nightmare fuel on top of them then it’s too much

so for the unfinished ao3 wip i’m sorry for the sheet music requests i’m sorry for the unanswered messages i’m sorry i’m safe i’m not in any danger of hurting myself or anything but i’m overwhelmed and i barely have the energy to get through all the shit that’s been happening lately so i can’t even promise when my interactions with anyone will be back to normal especially given my already awful skill at withdrawing from the people who care about me because i don’t want to bring them down any so just. tolerate the queue’s work. if you see me posting more but not answering you it’s not you it’s me i just cannot manage even talking to more than like three people max right now hence the until further notice psa you’ve seen at the top of my blog

the worst part is that there’s actually /more/ but it’s also three in the morning and i have to work tomorrow so here’s the highlights turns out averaging one death a week takes a toll on a person who’s already isolated and exhausted

hopefully at some point, things won’t suck as much and i can go back to being regular me. till then, apologies, and enjoy the queue

[smartworkingpackage]

You Better Watch Out: Santa’s Got Evernote

The first thing you notice when you arrive at The Workshop is the cold. You expect it to be dark; it’s pretty far north, and it gets dark earlier the further north you go. My host points out a sudden glow of green light in the sky. The Northern Lights pulsate and glisten and turn the snow a reflective green so that the whole place looks, for a moment, like a glow-in-the-dark toy. It’s a resemblance that all of the employees there cherish.

It’s mid-November, and the entire company is in high gear. Their busy season begins in June when the days are long, and the customers are few.

The Workshop depends on the holiday season, with little to no time for late shipments. With such short, precise production time and a tight delivery schedule, working in harsh conditions, you’d expect tensions to be high and tempers short. But this workshop depends on Evernote to keep business communication and production running smoothly, so all is calm, all is bright.

How the boss manages email himself

My companion, a bearded gentleman who looks significantly younger than the age he claims, invites me into his office, pulling off his red outdoor gear and hanging it on the back of the door. (“Gore-Tex,” he whispers. “LL Bean has us on that one.”) Once behind the desk, he whips open his laptop and shows me the vast amount of email he receives daily. He seems to scroll endlessly as his eyes whisk past each request.

“That’s a crazy amount of email,” I comment. “You get this every day?”

He shrugs, then laughs the nonchalant “Ho Ho Ho” of a CEO who knows he’s steering his company in the right direction. “Sometimes more,” he says. “It’s okay. Watch this.”

He opens up the first email, briefly scans it, and then hits ‘Forward.’ He plugs in an Evernote email address that he’s saved in his contacts. With his fingers flying over the keyboard, he adds “@nice,” then “#Spiderman,” followed by “#actionfigure.”  The email disappears. “They all want Spider-Man,” he mutters. “I’m more of a DC man myself, but whatever.”

“They say I make a list and check it twice,” he laughs. “Oh, they have NO idea.”—Santa

“Wait, what did you just do?” I ask, eager to learn some of the great man’s magic. He explains that he’s forwarding email to Evernote, where he’s using the “@” symbol to sort it into two notebooks he keeps—“@naughty,” and “@nice.” In the same ‘To’ line in the forwarded email, he’s sorting the request by tag, so that his employees can quickly pull up a list of how many of each toy to create.

Learn to forward emails to Evernote magically >>

“Spider-Man car, Spider-Man plush toy, Spider-Man vinyl pop,” he says, scanning his emails. “You have to keep track of all this stuff, and you can’t get it wrong. Evernote keeps it all organized for me. As soon as I add a request to the queue, the E.L.V.E.S. can pull it up on their devices at the same time, so we’re all on the same page.” He winks. “They say I make a list and check it twice,” he laughs. “Oh, they have NO idea.”

Field Trip of Dreams

I ask to see the factory and to learn more about how the workers use Evernote to organize toy creation. I’m introduced to a small but driven woman named Krystal who heads up E.L.V.E.S. (Employee List Verifiers Entrusted (by) Santa) operations. Krystal, who was, until recently, COO of Lollipop Guild, LLC, embraced Evernote as soon as she arrived at The Workshop. “It used to be that the only path I could reliably follow was made of yellow brick, and that was pretty inflexible. But Evernote updates automatically across everyone’s devices, so we’re always up to date.

“We don’t need to keep track of Naughty and Nice like my boss does,” Krystal explains. “We just need to make sure that we’re turning out the right stuff.” She solves that issue by duplicating notes from Santa’s lists and re-inventing them as tables so that all the E.L.V.E.S. can see the production schedule on a single note.

Discover Krystal’s secrets for working with tables >>

“It’s a big job,” Santa admits, sipping a hot cocoa in the break room. “I have to keep my eye on my customers 24/7.” He shakes his head. “Between you and me, it’s kind of boring watching them when they’re sleeping. That’s why I don’t have time to be involved in the day-to-day operations. But wherever I am in the world, I can always check into whatever’s going on because it’s all in Evernote.”

How the right toy goes down the right chimney at the right time  

The Workshop has a unique, proprietary shipping system called SLEIGH, and in charge of that department is Elrod, who comes to The Workshop from MiddleEarth, Inc., with an extensive background in long journeys. One of his challenges was to find software that could integrate with SLEIGH, and he landed on creating shipping manifest templates and keeping records in Evernote.

“Nothing gets by me,” Elrod boasts, as packages arrive from the manufacturing floor. “All I have to do is check Santa’s original list and add each line item to the template.” He keeps a note for each package, and since individual notes automatically get a URL in Evernote, Elrod turns each link into a QR code. “I slap the code on each package, and all Santa has to do is use the code reader on his device, and Evernote shows him the right child and address,” he says proudly. “I like to say that we’re sleighing it,” he adds.

Make Elrod’s magic with templates in Evernote >>

Not every employee is directly involved in production at The Workshop. I’m introduced to Belladonna, who works tirelessly as head of the E.L.V.E.S. Resources department. “Keeping employees happy is Belladonna’s main concern,” she tells me, always referring to herself in the third person. Belladonna keeps an up-to-date shared notebook in Evernote that serves as The Workshop’s intranet. There, employees can check out policies on vacations, benefits, and career growth information, as well as have visibility into other areas of the company.

From links in Evernote, all the E.L.V.E.S. can track Santa’s journey through NORAD, and keep tabs on the reindeer while a live feed continually updates Santa’s “@Nice” list.

See how humans and E.L.V.E.S. alike can manage HR in Evernote >>

Evernote helps Santa stay on top of trends

Santa is particularly excited to have me meet with his head of Research and Development, who goes by only his initial, B. “He’s head and shoulders above the others when it comes to this stuff,” Santa says proudly.

B works a year in advance, so when the other E.L.V.E.S. are making toys for this holiday season, B is hard at work discovering what next year’s hottest requests will be. “If we’re going to start making these in June, we have to know now what raw materials to order,” B explains. He keeps tabs on the trends by using Web Clipper. “I just love it that my job is grabbing pictures of upcoming movies, TV shows, and games,” he grins.

As Santa shuttles me out of R&D, he explains that our visit is over. “We’re very busy,” he apologizes. He looks across the darkened horizon. “Winter is coming.”

I turn before I leave to take one last look at the Workshop. Santa is pleased. As I go, I can see him sipping his cocoa, and I hear him exclaim, “I love this place.”

Whatever, however, and wherever you celebrate, happy holidays from all of us at Evernote.

from Evernote Blog http://ift.tt/2ADnDbu via IFTTT

[broadcaststorm]

Cisco Live 2017 - A new experience even for the 9th time

Cisco Live US (Las Vegas) has come and gone - quite honestly, this year was a very different experience for me. First, I didn't know I was going until 2 weeks before the conference - which leads to many challenges I'll describe below. Second, my wife came to the conference on a social pass for the very first time (to Cisco Live and to Las Vegas). Third, unlike my previous eight Cisco Live events (starting with "Party Like It's 1989" in 2009), I did not attend as a customer. I was not weighed down with a significant training, certification, and vendor meet-and-greet checklist that had no hopes of getting done in the conference's 5 days.

Late but great - learning side of CLUS 2017

In previous years, I have registered as early as 9 months before the conference began. NetVet status secured. Early access to scheduling sessions. I never had to worry about not getting a session I wanted - instead it was the usual multiple week drama in March or April trying to select one of the 5 classes (all of which I absolutely wanted to attend) because each one only had one offering, all of course being at the same day and time.

No - this year was quite the opposite for as any Cisco Live late scheduler knows, it doesn't take long for the popular sessions to get full and start the seemingly futile "wait list" game. Registering two weeks before the conference translates into playing that game for just about every session. So a different tactic for identifying and attending sessions was in order.

The short, short version (TL;DR even though that tag is sooo 2016) - unlike previous years of shotgun selection of various topics (based on in-flight or near term projects), I opted to have laser focus on two subject areas (VXLAN fabrics and SD-Access, if you’re curious).  Since scheduling sessions met with frequent "session is full" road blocks, most everything of interest ended up as a "favorite". The scheduler calendar view can't handle that many favorites though - even if there aren't many actual scheduled sessions.

However, you can get all schedule and favorites together in one view by printout out your schedule. It comes out in agenda format instead of calendar style but it is easily referenced - and is complete with room assignments. From there, the last task: rank the favorites so you know what your priorities are.

The first casualty of war is the battle plan

So, the plan of attack focused around one aspect of scheduling sessions that is communicated (by Cisco Live) but really isn't fully appreciated (by attendees): just because you scheduled the session doesn't guarantee you a seat. Many an attendee has been heard (or tweeted) complaining about not being given access to the session even though the had it scheduled. You see - 5 minutes BEFORE the session starts, anyone not scheduled but queued up will be allowed into the session. Once fire code room occupancy is reached, no session for you!

This is where my printout of favorites came into play - by knowing which of my favorite sessions were occurring and in which room it is occurring, I could very easily scout each location ahead of time to get an idea of the room size and interest in the session (queue size).

Now, regarding those complaints of being scheduled but not having a seat: in full disclosure, there were several sessions where the "wait list" line was admitted well before 5 minutes prior - leading to some legitimate grievances. However, for the most part, the 5 minute rule was honored - I know, because I was in many of those lines!

My strategy worked extremely well. With one exception, I got into every session for which I had registered or was marked as first favorite.

Phenomenal cosmic content, itty bitty little living space

Which brings me to that one exception and an area that the conference must simply do better at - room size selection as a function of the subject matter. I am relatively confident there is no reasonably accurate crystal ball which can properly anticipate subject interest (as a function of subject topic, attendees and other concurrently scheduled sessions) to then properly match the room size.

But - as Lee Corso is fond of saying - not so fast. The one, central (technical) theme at the conference (and arguably the most important) was "The Network. Intuitive" - around which a new platform of switching hardware and Software Defined Access was launched. Not surprisingly, there were sessions that covered multiple aspects of this new message and platform.

And, in an encouraging sign to Cisco leadership, every single session related to the new Catalyst 9K or SDA applied to "X" (wireless, e.g.) was full (from what I heard of the ones I didn't try) - and understandably so as there should be a large amount of interest in a new launch.

However, the "sold out" nature of those sessions needs a bit more context (such as when a substance or lifestyle behavior doubles your risk of cancer... from 1 in a billion to 2 in a billion).  My limited statistics, personal experience noticed that each SDA/Cat9K session for which I was interested was allotted a smaller room size than other topics.  As an example, and I'm horrible at head count estimates but, an overview of building VXLAN fabrics (2 yr old topic) was being held a room for 1000 people but was less than 50% attended... while the banner launch material for the new Cat9K and SD-Access were held in rooms for 150-200 people.

And, keep in mind, while the public announcement of the Catalyst 9000 was the week prior to Cisco Live, there were internal and partner launches prior to that. I’m sure the public session catalog couldn't say anything until the week before but otherwise it could not have been a surprise what the new launch and message at Cisco Live was going to be.

In short, the last minute scheduler take away is this: it worked and worked well for me.  Keep in mind there are high demand subjects (like new launches at the conference) that can divert you so just remain flexible - and that’s where many pre-prioritized “favorite” sessions in each time slot help immensely. 

The remains of the day

It was another record setting year for the U.S. edition of Cisco Live - early estimates of 28,000 attendees, use of multiple Vegas venues (for better or worse) to support the expanded content and activities, etc.  Despite the frantic run up I had prior to the conference started, I had a much more laid back experience in attending this year - simply because I had a narrow session focus and an open (social) engagement agenda.

Everyone should keep in mind that any conference will have logistical challenges arise. The real measure of a conference hangs on: (during the event) what's the response and (after the event) were they preventable and how are they prevented next year.

The latter requires awareness (conference surveys and Cisco Live blog reviews) so make your opinion be known! I can honestly tell you that Cisco is survey driven (to a fault sometimes!) and they do listen. Just look at Justin Cohen's blog about CLUS 2016 meals for further proof - the egg and cheese options this year hit the spot!

As for "live response" during the conference, the conference does a great job making important information known through social media - and for that, we have Kathleen Mudge (@KathleenMudge) and the Social Media team to thank!

For example, when lunch meals ran out on Thursday, many folks left (upset of course) and went to find their own lunch on their dime. Less than 15 minutes from event staff turning people from the lunch hall, the Social Media team was announcing that lunch vouchers were being issued - a $20 tweet right there.

Not sure when seating for the keynotes was opening up?  Tweet the question to @CiscoLive to find out... or, if you follow them (with notifications turned on), they were pro-actively posting that information.

Or, received that awesome #DEVNET solar 8000 mAh charger?  How about a reminder not to pack it in your luggage?

Better yet, unexpected punny banter with the team that just makes you laugh.

Wrap up

As I started off saying, this was my ninth straight Cisco Live. I am a Cisco Live champion/evangelist - for technology training for engineers in all stages of their career, to learning about ecosystem products, to #DEVNET, to engaging fellow engineers - whether at meal time, receptions, or in the Social Media Hub lounge.

While I think there are real growing challenges the conference is experiencing, it is worth the effort and the expense to get there.  The experience is definitely worth it - even after 9 straight conferences.

Disclosure

These thoughts, observations, and opinions are mine and mine alone.  No one asked me to write them or publish them.  As I said, I am passionate about Cisco Live and love personally writing about it to help people enjoy it more fully.  If you have trouble believing that, feel free to check out my previous blog posts about Cisco Live.

That being said, I am now a Cisco employee (Virtual Systems Engineer, Data Center) and am completely unaffiliated with the conference planning and execution. These are my words and not the words of Cisco.