Makotic Crack

• Right, that's it, I officially quit No Shave November. It was fun while it lasted but I can't stand it any longer. I'm all smooth again and I missed it. ♥
  
  
• I'm also giving up with the whole multifandom RP side of this fandom until further notice - yeah, yeah, I know, most of you aren't wankers, but I don't think multifandom RP was ever really for me anyway, at least not as anything more than a fun diversion. I'm sticking in the fic/art/meta/crack/vidding corner where MGS is still the most awesome fandom ever, thanks.
  
  
• And it IS awesome. The violence is sexy, the sex is violent, the creator is a Twihard and you can crawl on the mines to pick them up. And it has manly military men who ask each other out for cheese fondue, and deceptively handsome otaku who can't remember proverbs, and psychedelic in-universe TV, and a man whose superpower is bee control, and Big Boss is a nuclear-dicked swamp monster who's terrified of Edward Cullen, and spinoffs where a clone of a clone plays children's card games because that's what really matters, and octopuses are the ninjas of the sea. And if you put in your name at the node of the start you'll see it on the dog tag at the end, and if you tap the poster's boob she summons an alert.
  
  
• I have an essay to hand in on Monday. 1500 words about either Internet Culture, Mass Media Culture, Branding, The Music Industry or Journalism. Without debating how this is going to help me write better music, talk about paralysis of choice. I'm leaning towards an essay about DRM because thanks to this REALLY ANNOYING original slash (yes, really) bunny I caught the other night, I'm starting to find DRM in and of itself sexy.
  
  
• Why am I flooded with stupid bunnies now of all times when I have loads of IRL to do?
  
  
• I also want to write a REALLY DEEP META ANALYSIS~ of Advent Children, just to see if my age has improved the picture any, but that would involve watching the movie again. At least I'll be able to scream out all of my 'FOR THE FIRST HALF THE PLAYER CONTROLS CLOUD BUT IS LIMITED BY THE GAME AND AFTER THE COMA CLOUD CONTROLS THE PLAYER AND IS LIMITED BY WHAT HE WANTS' conspiracy theories.
  
  
• Talking of conspiracy theories, I think when you find yourself mentally debating the gender politics of Amazing Horse (NSFW for nonsexual horsedong), you officially need to do something better with your life.
  
  
• I brought £40 worth of bras today. But they all fit and they are all really beautiful and comfortable and they came with free undies and 20% off because they were having a sale. Sometimes I'm so girly I make myself puke. Ah well, my boobies deserve the treat and I'm not short on money, really.
  
  
• I really SHOULD DO THAT NANO when schoolwork isn't kicking my enormous Sir Mixalot ass. Or at the very least, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly In Fifteen Minutes so I can further my cunning plan on making you all watch it.
  
  
• Also, I really want to restart drabble nights. But I have ideas about that and I'm not telling you them.

Okay, guys, I'm furious.

The management at my hall of residence, along with being bitchy and uncooperative, refuse to accept parcels. The parcels are automatically sent to the industrial district, miles away (very few of us have cars).

Therefore, we have to apply to the Royal Mail to get the parcels redelivered to a Post Office. It takes about three days for redelivery to happen; there is a 50p charge; and it involves waiting for potentially forever in the busiest Post Office in the city. This is WHAT WE ARE EXPECTED TO DO, BECAUSE THEY WILL NOT TAKE OUR PARCELS FOR US.

Formal complaints just get the ass-cover 'oh yeah we don't have enough room in our office for parcels', but I AM WILLING TO COMPROMISE. IF THEY WON'T HOLD ONE STUPID PARCEL IN THEIR OFFICE FOR FIVE MINUTES, THE BASTARDS SHOULD PAY THE 50P, since it is THEIR FAULT. OR, AT THE VERY LEAST, TAKE A SECOND OUT OF THEIR LIVES OF PICKING THEIR TEETH AND HATING THINGS TO PUSH A LITTLE BUTTON WHICH WILL BUZZ OUR FLATS TO SAY 'HEY THERE IS SOMEONE HERE WITH A PARCEL FOR YOU' The people at the Post Office hate the people at my hall, and, apparently, vice versa. Naturally, I am incensed.

So anyway. I want to get this rule changed - either asking for them to put A SMALL PARCEL RACK somewhere behind the counter, or trying to get a scheme where they will give us the 50p if we show them a valid Sorry, You Were Out card.

How do I do this?

My vision has gone a bit wonky and I'm plagued with eyeball-headaches and I tend to have one bout of hypochondria per six months, so I've booked myself an eyetest. I hope it's just eyestrain from computer use, but YOU NEVER KNOW and my mother's side of the family is pretty consistently myopic (I've previously assumed I came from my Dad's side, which is consistently 20/20. Also, before you ask, yes, my Mum's side of the family is the pretty side) and I've never worn any kind of eyewear before -

Poll #1469907 so let's go
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 36

Glasses or contacts?

If contacts, funny colours? (For reference, my eyes are grey-blue.)

If glasses, who should I try to look like?

Also, writing. N!S, I write best when tired. I think this is because, when I'm tired, I tend to have an easier time picturing what I'm writing in my head, and also tend to see more connections and so on (with that awesome thinking-of-two-things-at-the-same-time trick you can only do when you're tired, I think). Of course, after a certain level of exhaustion I can no longer physically write, but I continue 'writing' the fic in my head before I go to sleep. I generally continue until the mental imagery begins to be the kind of thing usually associated with Yellow Submarine; that's my cue to stop thinking about three-eyes-on-springs Otacon merging from the neck down into a blue, torus-shaped Snake as they ride on the back of a lizard with human feet through a forest made of ants and then go to sleep. This is what's generally called, I think, 'the creative process'.

However, this does backfire, because the more tired I get, the less I'm able to self-censor. I can only write smut when knackered, which is why my smut tends to be so dreamy, incoherent and hallucinatory (look, if I'm not allowed to call old-man revenge-sex interracial morphing-face somatosensory-homunculus-gunsex porn hallucinatory, I don't know what the word is for) but the lack of self-censorship isn't so great with standard fic. It doesn't help that I have little to no memory of what I do when I'm tired.

The result? I opened up my fic today and realised Sleepy!Me had written myself into a situation where I now have Otacon (who I was intially trying to write as nerdy and non-badass since he's pretty young here) running around the jungle alone, in a sweat-soaked sleeveless shirt, escaping pursuers, like Rambo. And a lot of dialogue in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. I'd be rolling my eyes but I don't trust them to work any more.

So for the first time ever in England it's gorgeous and sunny outside, and the pear trees have dropped their first crop and it's rotting in the back of the garden. It is being accosted by lots of beautiful little red tortoiseshell butterflies who are feeding on the pile of fermenting pears, getting completely pissed out of their skulls, and then flopping along unsteadily a few inches from the floor, crashing into things.

Comedy gold.

SO GUESS WHO SCORED EXACTLY THE RIGHT NUMBER OF UCAS TARIFF POINTS TO GET INTO HER FIRST CHOICE OF UNIVERSITY

I'M GOING TO LEEDS COLLEGE OF MUSIC TO STUDY VIDEO GAME SOUNDTRACK COMPOSING, BITCHES

Who is this guy, why is he on the Student Finance website, and why does he look like a cross between Simon Cowell and Max Payne in the first game?

So today I went to THE GUN SHOP. (Cultural note: I am English. Gun control is extremely strict and you cannot just buy guns from the supermarket - you have to go to seedy little places of which there is about five in the whole country.) As I walked in, I began to feel creeped out, being surrounded by people casually handling devices specifically designed for ending lives, and in order to not feel funny I forced myself to look at something that wasn't a gun. It was a huge rack of nasty looking hunting knives. I began to feel extremely strange, got my hysterical giggling under control after my mother whacked me for it, and left feeling disturbed.

On the bright side, they had a .44 Magnum revolver in the display under the counter, so it was quite nice getting to see Dirty Harry's gun. But, still, auuugh, guns. How do you Americans cope?

The town we went to in order to reach the gunshop was - let's just say that, if it also contained the heart of the technology industry, I would be able to understand the usual colour scheme of current-gen games. Unfortunately it didn't and I was left vaguely wondering if my colour vision had somehow gone. Maybe it looks better in the sunlight.

I had a really vivid dream last night that Twilight was a graphic novel in the nine-panel page format, like Watchmen, and in the dream Jacob was the Comedian's son. And it was frigging awesome. They were chaingunning vampires together.

I blame this on the fact that my bedroom was so hot last night I went to go and sleep on the sofa instead.

Ugggh. Summer.

My brother has finally got an email account and he's sending me drawings he did.

( Cut for massive but awesome drawing done by an eleven year old. )

I love my family.

I voted for the first time today.

I am wholly unashamed that my main motivation for voting Green Party to the European Parliament is that they're pro digital piracy.

Also that almost all of the other parties on the list were creepy xenophobic fringe parties with names like The We Hate Europe Party - Putting Britain First and Eurosceptism.uk - We Don't Hate Continental Europeans They Just Make Us Feel Nervous and stuff like that. Cutting them out left only a handful of other parties, of which one was the Greens.

I do hope the Tories get out of the local council, though. They've been making an absolute hash of things lately, and while I don't think a new council will solve everything, they can't be worse.


EDIT: I have a copy of MGS Mobile for N-Gage. Now what do I do with it?

shittery shittery

peen

peen



cock



I have to write thirty eight pages of sheet music and I've pretty much autofailed my recording coursework because Sonar crashed when it was trying to save, meaning I don't have any drums on my track any more.

Then I have to write a whole booklet about how I made all my pieces of coursework, most of which I don't actually remember making. I will also need photographs which I will not be able to take as I do not own a camera.

I also have to do my music theory homework for my passive-agressive music theory teacher on Tuseday, three mock exams which I haven't revised for on Monday, which will consume my lunch break meaning I will not get to eat, and then I'll have to stay an extra hour after school.


FML does not begin to express what I am feeling right now.

bleeeeeeeh just had a permanent retainer fixed to my mouth


it's horrible.




INCIDENTALLY I am not going to quit the internet for my exams, because the internet is basically what keeps me from screaming ninja killy-panic, and having responsibilities towards people on it helps me keep in mind that I really shouldn't screw my life up. I should be studying more, so I've decided. Every day, I'm going to study and then write about something new I learned. It might not be interesting, but it'll give me incentive to learn and help me remember. I'd be honoured if you read the posts, but, of course, you don't have to, and I'll be cutting them.

HOLD ME TO THIS. If I'm not posting, ASK ME WHY I'M NOT REVISING.

Today, a Year 7 kid at school sat next to me on the computers and started talking about how he hadn't handed in his work. His mate saw the cap to my USB stick, which is adorned with Pokemon danglers, and asked me if I liked Pokemon. I agreed (they were also impressed with my keys, which are adorned with a little sand-stuffed snake (of the non-Solid variety) and a little LEGO Mr. Freeze), shared a few coping strategies for handling the extremely unbalanced teacher for whom he hadn't done the work, and then recalled finding someone's print-outs of the work in the unclaimed prints tray. I handed them to him as a good deed, sat down, and got back to my Biology coursework.

I then overheard him saying to his friend, "Wow! I never knew Sixth Formers could be this cool!"


THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I'VE EVER BEEN CALLED COOL IN MY WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE.



I kind of want to write something involving Snake and Otacon having to go back to Zanzibar Land, but I don't think I could do anything with it that MGS4 didn't do better with Shadow Moses.


Also, I ordered the Mother 3 book. Whoo.


Today was pretty good.

The HPV jab has left me really really really sore and swollen.

Even my tetanus jab wasn't this bad.

Ugh.

So today I went to the orthodontist.

Tomorrow I'm going to a university interview.

The day after tomorrow I'm going back to the orthodontist.

Then Mum comes home holding a slip and tells me triumphantly that she's arranged for me to get the HPV vaccine on Friday. "Get it sorted out before you go to university! While you're still a virgin!" ...I appreciate the idea she has that there might actually be a chance anyone would ever want to devirgin me, but really now.

I feel like some kind of medical experiment. I should arrange to donate blood on Saturday. On Sunday I could sell a kidney. Anyone on my flist want a kidney?

DEAR UCAS

I HATE YOU, YOUR SYSTEM SUCKS, AND YOU CAN GTFO MY APPLICATION DATA

DOESN'T HELP THAT I'M GOING TO BE NAGGED INCESSENTLY UNTIL YOU DECIDE TO WORK AGAIN, EVEN AFTER I HAVE CONFIRMED WITH MY PARENTS THAT YOU ARE BROKEN

ALSO YOUR HELPLINE IS THE WORST HELPLINE EVER AND I HATE YOU ALL

Love Fly ♥


EDIT: I've decided to stop watching the watchdom community because of flist spam. This isn't important, I just thought it was ironic.

my stomach hurts for no reason, frigging ow

So, er, meme:

List ten ways in which your fandoms have changed your life. Funny, good, bad, life-affirming, sad, trivial or major, we want them all.

1) I've picked up an Americanish pronounciation of the words 'research' (stress on the last syllable instead of the first), 'cigarettes' (stress on the first syllable instead of the last), and 'patriot' (first syllable pronounced 'pay' instead of 'pah'). Guess how.
2) I also picked up a serious ass fetish. I constantly find myself checking out peoples' butts. THANK YOU, SNAKE.
3) I got into science because of FF7 - yes, I know. When I was first writing FF7 fic - when I cared about what I was writing enough - I kept looking up scientific theories so I could make Hojo's crackpottery sound a bit more legit - but then I realised that science is really, really interesting, and fell in love. When I was very little, I wanted to be a scientist. FF7 was what made me realise I still did. Without FF7 I wouldn't have realised how important science was.
4) I have a horrible suspicion that my recent writer's block and feeling of hardly-relenting yuck is due to MGS4.
5) I started taking music seriously. Basically, I decided to start playing piano again because I wanted to be able to play the FF7 soundtrack on it. It was through practicing Cloud's Theme (which was way beyond my abilities when I decided I wanted to play it) that I finally began to make that mental leap between 'playing notes' and 'understanding how music fits together', and then I started being able to compose. Honest to god, if not for FF7, I wouldn't know how chords worked and I likely wouldn't care.
6) Meta. Oh god. Thanks to MGS - particularly MGS2 - I can't watch so much as a Saturday morning cartoon without thinking 'symbolically, this scene is a nostalgic repetition of the earlier event but reversed to show irony'. I am getting so much more out of everything I read, watch and play, thanks to MGS. Tiny messages I didn't notice are obvious to me. I pick up on themes, symbolism, and what the symbolism actually means rather than its basic presence. Analysing MGS gave me more ability to understand stories than all my years of English teachers forcing their interpretations down their class's throats. I can honestly say that it was MGS that taught me how stories work. I seriously don't even have slash goggles any more, because my Meta Goggles are big and x-raying.
7) Er. I have a pet hamster named Zanzibar.
8) Okay, here's one. I didn't completely go off the rails in my early teens. I was a miserable little thing, and I didn't have any friends or motivation. I both hated myself for not fitting in and hated everyone else enough never to want to. I was horrible and I was in a horrible place mentally. It was Cloud's dilemma in FF7 that helped me get over myself and realise that liking other people and fitting in are two different things of different levels of importance. It helped me realise that the problem wasn't mine, and that if I did what I could, life would be better. I identified so hugely with his constant need to improve and get better and be better than everyone else and with his general naivety, because - I've always been like that. I still am, really. Five years and another fandom later, and he's still the fictional character I hold the highest, because he helped me realise I couldn't expect to be perfect. But, AC Cloud, you can go off into a fire, and take KH Cloud with you.
9) Related to the last point - MGS was what helped me and Miri reconcile over an epic fall-out when we were both fourteen. I honestly thought she'd never speak to me again. I suppose it's appropriate or something that FF7 taught me to love myself, and MGS taught me to love someone else.
10) I can honestly say, if not for fandom, I probably would have even less friends.

A fundamental difference between the working of my mind and my mother's mind is our creative processes.

For me, whining is an essential part of the creative process. Give me a task and I will initially need to go off on an 'OH GODDD IT'S SO HARD THIS IS PAINFUL I SUCK' tangent and then I will just do it, having gained renewed vigour.

For my mother, however, whining is a sign of the creative process being wrongly executed. If my mother is complaining about something being too hard, she 1) means it and 2) sees it as something to be tackled.

This leads to conflicts of communication when I see a page in my textbook I don't understand yet, immediately vocalise to her 'I don't know what [scariest looking word on the page] means, oh god what the hell is this' and she immediately leaps up to grab a huge textbook from the top of the shelf and looks up the word and provides me with a useless definition and insists on helping me. This is another conflict of communication, since I hardly ever accept help, even when offered.

Since Mum's training to be a teacher and I'm exposed to lots of trendy learning-styles personality test things, it's possible that I, an auditory learner, needs to vocalise my immediate thoughts to allow me to focus on and address the problem (I will talk to myself when trying to perform a task, too, but it gets worse when there's someone with me). My mother, a visual learner, needs lists and diagrams before she can address a problem, naturally lending itself to a more hands-on physical approach.

I know she only does it because she loves me, but it would be a lot nicer if she, of all people, realised that my complaints really don't mean anything. I mean, she's my Mum. She should be at that stage already, shouldn't she?

Sorry, everyone, I spent the last couple of days in Leeds, trying out for the Leeds College of Music.

Long story short - I think my interview went really well, and also I bought a Rorschach figurine from the comics shop there, which is the most ironic piece of merchandise I've ever bought.


If all goes well, I'm going to have some tricky decisions to make soon. I've cruised through life on the default setting for long enough, though. It's time to actually do something.

The RAF are now officially my favourite branch of the British military.

I had a soft spot for them when I was sitting in the cinema to go and watch Quantum of Solace, and I saw the most unintentionally creepy advert ever. My initial thought was 'this is exactly like one of the MGS4 PMC ads'. It turned out to be a recruitment ad for the RAF.

Of course, even before that, they were one of the many military groups trying to attract young stupid children to go off and get shot by bribing them with Counter-Strike, which bothers me - not because of the ethics, but because I really don't want my country defended by people too stupid to know that reality =/= FPSes, thanks. I know what FPS players are like. I imagine it's extremely demoralising to be fighting a war in Godforsaken Nowhere and suddenly you're kneecapped and the arse next to you punches the air and yells "TKED lolllllll!!!"

On the other hand, I do believe in natural selection, so, while I would troll the recruiters hard if they came to my school and tried to sell me war as a video game what better way to raise the ultimate soldier, I don't actually have enough of my mind made up about the ethics of the policy enough to actually care.

Now their campaign is the 'best nicknames ever' campaign, which has popped up at the top of my email inbox and encouraged me to put in my real name so they can come up with a 'best nickname ever' for me. I did this, not having anything better to do. It flashed a bunch of bogus 'ANALYSING QUALIFICATIONS' and 'REVERSING THE POLARITY OF THE NEUTRON FLOW' crap to make it look futuristic, I suppose, and then dubbed me the name 'CORPORAL HOLLY UZI B*********'

Are they seriously trying to seduce people into joining the armed forces by promising them nicknames? I honest to god don't see where they're going with this, so I can't help liking them in the same way you end up liking the desperate stalker guy in the romantic comedy.

I think it helps that the only chance I would ever have of getting the nickname 'Uzi' in any armed force would be "ha, funny you asked, we call her that because when she gets shot she's really 'oozy', seriously, try it."