One Abnormal Girl

So I totally finished my yaoi-con post.  It’s here if you wanted to see it finished.  It’s all out of order and haphazard, though.

In recent news, we have a router for the second time, because the first one we bought was the wrong thing, har har.  And although this one is actually the router we needed, I’m not sure it’s very good at all.  It seems to like dropping the connection intermittently, which hardly affects something like Internet browsing, but makes WoW all but impossible.  Or maybe it’s not the router, maybe it’s the Internet itself, but I’ve never had external problems with the Internet actually result in a message on the computer saying the cable is unplugged.  It might be going back.  Apparently my old one must not have been so awful: it actually worked solidly and steadily up until its burnout.

Also I can’t stop listening to Dr. Horrible and Muse, and I’m amused that the combination of those two names/titles results in Dr. House, whom I’ve been catching up on by ninja-ing the eps onto my iPod.  Somehow the laptop just isn’t portable enough.  And I can finally also put videos onto my phone now that I have the creepily tiny 2GB card for it, but then it would just be too small.  But it’s pretty sweet that I can still do it if I want to.   I just wish the BlackBerry could decode the same files I put on the iPod, then I’d only have to encode the file once.

Job’s going well.  It lacks many of the perks that seem commonplace these days, and it’s still temp work (no benefits), but at least I don’t really notice the passage of time.  Besides, waterjets and lasers are cool, even if I don’t work with them directly.  Best of all, I get paid.

OH MAN.

So I’ve been lazy in writing this, but I did take notes, so I’m hoping I remember it all.  You can check out crazyloststar’s post for cross-referencing XD  Also, this is probably too much detail for most people, but I want to remember it!

About a month before the con, crazyloststar and I came up with the idea to do Greed!Ling and Briggs!Ed for a convention in January, but then decided we needed to do it for Yaoi-con as a surprise to sky_dark, on top of the FAKE cosplay we’d already planned on doing.  Yaoi-con is three days, so we’d have a cosplay for each day, but only a month to make four cosplays, two for each of us.  And what was worse, we had to keep one of them a big secret.  SO DIFFICULT.  But we managed!

Many thanks to rattmice, sky_dark, psycholullaby, inugrlrayn, and militsa for the photos.  You can find out whose pictures are whose by checking out the image name.

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Not that I’ve been easy to reach lately anyway, but I will be gone starting in about 15 minutes until laaaate Monday night, so you probably won’t hear from me until Tuesday!  Unless you follow my Twitter at arcwin.

In other news, I have a temp-to-hire job that’s alarmingly like my sister’s job, but oooh well, it’s a job!  NOW OFF TO YAOI-CON WITH CRAZYLOSTSTAR!!!

I still need to do some touching up to my wig, but for the most part our FAKE cosplays are done! And this, more than two days before we leave for the convention. Unglaublich! (crazyloststar and I are also learning German, have I mentioned this?)

Here are pictures! They’re pretty silly, but they give a good representation of our 80s glamor.

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I can honestly say that progress is being made on the results of my writing request meme!  Currently I’m working on a response to crazyloststar’s “This Side of Me” prompt, but there will be more to follow, for crazyloststar, Bootses, and KalamityKat. 8D  THANKS GUYS.

But my excuse for being slow is a good one: YCON IS IN LESS THAN A WEEK HOW DID THIS HAPPEN.  I think everything is coming along, though.  Most of what we don’t have yet needs to be bought from a store, so that’s not as alarming as it could be.  Through the hurry and stress, though, I’m still so wildly excited about this year’s convention.  So many people I have connections with will be there.  It’s just a shame that it’s only three days!  How are we ever going to fit everything in D:  I also get to debut a new cosplay, which I haven’t done in a long time, and it’s very appropriate, so I’m extra excited.

In less joyous news, our router burned itself out, so we’ve been having to trade off the connection.  It throws off my normal rhythm quite a lot.  I do get the Internet all day, I just tend to want it most just before bed, so I end up staying up late to do that.  YES THAT IS MY EXCUSE FOR NOT SLEEPING ON TIME.  Maybe we can pick one up this weekend, but I definitely didn’t want to have to spend money on replacing something that wasn’t even that old.

And we need that router.  We need it because we have no cable and the new seasons are all starting up.  WE NEED IT NAO.

In other news, I’m hoping the new temp agency I signed up with will prove helpful, since the old temp agency never contacted me once about anything.  Urgh.  But mostly my thoughts are consumed by YCON.

So I don’t know if I mentioned this, but our new cosplay for Yaoi-con this year is Ryo and Dee from FAKE!  I’ll be Dee, and we’re using these as our clothing reference:

We still need a lot of accessories, though most should be on their way.  We do, however, have to make the jackets, and one is just about done!  Still need to press it and add buttons and shoulder pads, but this is pretty much it.

Also earlier today we went to a Maid Cafe and enjoyed High Tea with the surprising guest of wasabe spread on the tea cakes.

Nom!

Now I need to sleep so we can keep working tomorrow aaaah

And I’m not doing very well with the standard fare.  So I’m going to try this instead!

I NEED YOUR HELPS.

1. You upload a song for me.
2. You name a fandom I’m familiar with and a pairing/character.
3. I write a drabble or more on #2 inspired by #1.

The song can be something you’ve associated with #2 before, or just a song you like.  And I only really feel comfortable writing in the FMA fandom for now, so I hope you have something from FMA in mind. 8D;

SO LET’S TRY IT?  8DDDDD;

It’s about that time again–time to overhaul the Website.  I’ve also gone ahead and changed the Wordpress theme.  I really liked the old one, but the main page was somewhat confusing with its vogue two-post set-up.  Now I’m back to something a little more traditional, though still very plain.  I also needed to choose something newer so that I could take advantage of the new Wordpress features without trying to figure out how to code them into the theme myself.  I think I made a decent decision with the new theme.

I also plan to redo the Website.  Again, I like the current version, but I’m in the mood for something else.  There’s a lot on it I just don’t use anymore, so I’m looking for a way to make my own experience more efficient with it.  It’ll also be good practice with coding, as I don’t do that often enough anymore.

And with these changes I have some tidying up to do.  There are currently two working feeds for my fanfiction posts–one is automatic, from Wordpress, and the other is manual.  The manual feed was useful because you could subscribe to it via e-mail, but now that Feedburner does that, I’m migrating its functionality to Wordpress/Feedburner.  I just need to send out a final manual post about the change–I think.  There was a time when I imagined this would be a complicated switch, and I feel like I’m missing something, because it no longer seems so complicated.

I also need to transfer more fics over here from Livejournal.  I only got so far before I gave up for the time being.  It’s not difficult, just tedious, especially with my Wordpress taking freaking-forever to accomplish anything involving its database.*  I need to look into that, but I hardly know where to start.  Probably with the plugins, grr.

Most of this is waiting on me getting a desk, though, since I need space for the external drive and so on.  A desk will be very exciting.

*Turns out it was an extension called Bad Behavior.  It was meant to block phishing sites from clogging up my list of referring Websites, but I’m not sure it’s worth it if it slows down the administration and commenting this much.

I’d need a cigarette.  I just ended up submitting a fic at 11:59pm on the day it was due and my nerves are shot.  It’s my own fault for procrastinating, but I really didn’t expect its final stages to take quite that long.  MUCH THANKS TO LACIDIANA FOR BEING MY AWESOME BETA-ON-DEMAND.  I think I ended up with something at least cohesive and interesting, I just hope I didn’t somehow disqualify myself by submitting it so freaking down-to-the-wire.  I also hope I didn’t overlook something egregious.  And that I followed directions when I submitted it.

But even if something did go wrong, and it can’t be entered, at least I wrote something.  It’s something I can’t bear to look at for two months (until the contest is up), just in case I see a mistake I want to beat myself for, but I haven’t written anything of worth in so long that I’m glad I forced myself to do it, and with an idea that isn’t terrible.  Confusing maybe, but not terrible.

Now I need to go relax, kick back with some Jon Stewart and maybe a little Dick Van Dyke, and definitely some cookie dough.  I thank hulu.com for those first two, but I get credit for the last one.

So I used a Walmart giftcard (courtsey of the team at my last temp job when I left!) to buy myself this.  Now I’m about to zoom off to the bank on it!

Pay no attention to the Xtreme Danger depicted on the Webpage for the item.  These are also used as non-fatal modes of urban transportation.

Now I just need to find a gate that isn’t locked so I can get out of here and back.  lulz no gate key.