call your own bluff

this was always a bad idea: the redux.

to the rotation we have recently added hulu sans ads, apple tv+, and showtime via prime student, for the explicit purpose of watching stephen colbert's 2020 election night special. so now it's something like netflix, hulu, spotify, apple tv+, hbo max, disney+, showtime, prime, and pretty regularly being semi-alarmed by chuck todd's creeper facial hair.

the macOS app hunt goes on, doom days is in progress, literally no one knows when moving house is happening, radio silence is at a full month, neither phone nor macbook pro are even slightly closet to set up, and we're currently on the west wing rewatch number... four? five?

as is tradition, I have been overcome with the need to do all possible projects, so here's a list of a few things that are in progress:

• running a deep scan of an external hard drive, in an effort to retrieve a cache of files that were on the drive for a half hour, a month ago
• inventing a new file system, minus the two devices lost in the suitcase
• transferring all image and odt files to dropbox
• mirroring. so much mirroring.
• making the jump to dropbox paid tiers, for obvious reasons
• very, very slowly adding to the rec lists over @ wellfourthings
• archiving every fic that I add to the rec lists, making this a fairly slow process due to
• rereading every fic before adding it to the rec lists
• maintaining a five hundred word daily minimum
  

this is all very preservation based, which is probably not a coincidence, with the lost data.

however, in the past week I've also watched Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, Hidden Figures, Ghostbusters, Crazy Rich Asians, and the entirety of season three of A Series of Unfortunate Events. in that order.

It's been a week since seeing Cursed Child with fh14. I've spent a lot of that time thinking that I needed to post something, blog about the trip, tweet, instagram some moments, something. But somehow I kept just not quite knowing what to say. Now I'm back from the trip, I miss fh14 and snakeslide desperately, and I'm beyond exhausted. The fridge is making weird noises again and it took less than a quarter of a day for my downstairs neighbour to convince me to make formal moving plans. Being away in someone else's house spoiled me, it seems?

The rest of this post is just going to be me babbling incoherently about Cursed Child, your mileage may vary.

So, in no particular order (and with spoilers):
A significant part of enjoying this play is in actually seeing it, reading the script won't get you all the way there, it's very dependent upon the cast, the crew, and the staging. The actress who plays Hermione is great. There were at least two special effects that I can't figure out and don't want to figure out how they accomplished, one where the characters get sucked into a phone booth. Moaning Myrtle was entirely perfect, which I can't seem to say enough, and at least one reason why I personally liked Part One more than Part Two - one hundred percent more Myrtle. Delphini is also great, and I feel that that strongly depends on the actress more than the role. The production values were amazing, but perhaps slightly less precise in Part Two than Part One. At one point there were dementors in the audience, at another there was what appeared to be blacklight writing on every surface in the theatre, and in a moment toward the end that made much of the theatre sit up straight, Voldemort walked up the center aisle. I loved Scorpius, and all the parts where this story was Scorpius' and Albus' story. I tensed when Dumbledore's portrait had something to say, but I'm fairly sure that just has to do with my personal feelings about Albus Dumbledore, not his role in the play. The cast as a whole was fantastic, but there were certain people who stood out because they did something different than expected, like with Scorpius, or because they communicated volumes with a gesture, like with Ginny. Plenty was done while a character said nothing at all. As previously stated, a lot of enjoying the material is in actually seeing it live, and there is also something to be said for the audience you see it with. It's the experience of the thing, not just the thing itself.

I don't currently have any particularly original thoughts on all this, and what I have written down here is mostly half-factual babble, but it's what I have at the moment. I really, really liked the play and I'm more than a tiny bit sad that fh14 is going to see it again without me.

Not bad for someone who was maybe a little lukewarm on the topic when it was suggested, eh?

I finished writing something yesterday. 'Finished' meaning it's ready for a beta, but considering I haven't actually finished writing anything in literal years...

It's Potterverse stuff and I went to the discord automatically because I know no one who betas for that fandom. Now it's out of my hands and that's not nerve-wracking at all.

But now I'm thinking about Stiles and Peter and that whole sector of content. And the way I've been going off on tangents, I can't help but wonder if that one is next...

in keeping with the theme of being able to write everything except what I'm supposed to be working on, I was migrating everything to my icloud notes for the sake of certainty, and it turns out that at last count I have twenty (and counting) active drafts.

send help.

I am not good at keeping a regular blog. I have never been good at keeping any kind of regular daily or semi-daily record of any kind, in my whole life - I just suck at it. But we're a week out from NaNo, two weeks out from perhaps the most important midterms of our time, and then there's the lost weekend trip in December. So maybe, just maybe, with Things Happening, I'll finally get my house in order?

Not that I'm even remotely holding my breath.

so during yesterday's linkstorm, I did a brief test in the form of two tweets to see what sort of consequences would come of my talking about/retweeting the sex toy reviewers I've been learning from the last couple of days.

when deciding to do this test, I was thinking about the fact that following certain people was inevitably going to lead to the 'why are you retweeting a sex blogger' conversation, and the various ways that this could play out.

In all of this thinking through the potential consequences, not once did it occur to me that what would happen would instead be the blogger whose linkstorm I was caught in, herself, replying to me. did not see that coming. had absolutely no idea how to respond.

and then after that, and a conversation with a lovely person who for some reason continues to be okay with me going all rantypants on them, I proceeded to spend a really unreasonable length of time laughing about and at Lord Byron. even with the breaks in.

still sorta laughing about it on the inside. now have the new kinkshaming lord byron tag to live up to and a few toy related things in various stages of what the fuck. so.

I have, at this point, been laughing about Lord Byron for a half hour at least, with no sign of stopping. I've now got the tag 'kinkshaming lord byron,' and absolutely no idea how to follow through on that, but apparently we are officially blogging again, as opposed to curating a tumblr blog. so that... has happened.

we have since moved on to:

• getting trapped in old email accounts that hasn't been actively used in several years
• playing the unsubscribe-from-every-mailing-list-in-existence game
• while adding the line item 'change dreamwidth style' to the seemingly endless list we have going here
• making the decision that hulu is happening because of a change in circumstances
• and getting yanked, abruptly, into a google voice detour that was definitely not in the itinerary

oh, and apparently actually blogging, that appears to be a thing that is now happening. didn't see that coming.