Looking back on the last few months

    So, things have been.

    Ahem.

    Yes, I know that's not proper grammar.  Or rather, it's very weird grammar.  (Technically, it's not totally wrong?  Things have indeed existed, which is basically what that means?  But's not phraseology that people would normally use.  Nor is the word "phraseology," but that's beside the point.  Actually, I'm not positive it's even a word, but this one character uses it in The Music Man, so...anyway.  Irrelevant.)

    My life has lately felt even weirder and more stagnant than ever.  Partially because I more than ever feel the need to hide in my house from the world, but it's definitely not just that.

    I had to buy a new computer because of the end of support for Windows 10.  And, as I believe I posted before, I absolutely HATE Windows 11.  To the extent that I've been putting off even turning on this computer so much so that one of my utility bills will be paid a day late and it took me a week to look at the results of the MRI I had done.  Also that this computer's battery emptied itself in the time between when I last turned it on and when I turned it on this morning.  (Though it also seems to have turned itself on at some point without my permission to download updates, which 100% should not be possible, but as soon as I plugged it back in and turned it on, it started installing updates.  I looked over all its settings as soon as it finally turned on (after it was done updating the stupid thing turned itself off again!) and didn't see anything authorizing it to turn on at random intervals to check for and download updates, but it apparently did so anyway.  (I think I'll put it on airplane mode before I turn it off, which will hopefully prevent it from doing that again.  Might not stop it from turning on and exhausting its battery, but it should prevent it from downloading anything when it's supposed to be off.))

    So, because of my new aversion to going online due to it requiring this overpriced hunk of junk (I didn't realize that the computer was named the Latin word for "conquered" because I was being targeted to be conquered by Microsoft!), I've been doing my writing on my old computer in airplane mode, because unsupported OS don't matter if the Internet can't touch ya! 🤣  (Ugh, those Windows 11 emojis are so ugly!  Why would they even make the emojis worse for the new OS?  Why would they even change them in the first place, for that matter!?)  Which means, of course, that getting any of what I've written onto the internet to, say, quote a passage in my blog, is suddenly somewhat tricky.  Unnecessarily tricky, in fact, considering that one of the changes to the way Blogger adds pictures to a post means that I can't add them on my phone anymore.  Also there's the fact that for some reason this computer has decided that I should not be allowed to access my own pictures on Blogger, nor even to upload new ones!  Thankfully, it turns out I can still add pictures by dragging and dropping (for the moment!) so I can still add pictures, but it's even more awkward than ever before.

    Anyway.

    What I've been writing lately has been (surprise, surprise!) another Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic.  Though I did at least get a little writing done on the rewrite of The Tablet of Destinies, but...ugh, it's such a mess.  It's actually really hard to rewrite it just because the current draft is such garbage.  It's much easier to just focus on writing pointless fanfic.

    I want to talk about this current fic now, blathering meaninglessly, as usual, but I think I'll put in a blocker line so the whole post won't go on the front page of the blog.

    Okay, that should do it.  So.  The current fic starts out with a time-travel gimmick:  following the Nightless City Massacre, Wei Wuxian decided that instead of destroying the Yin Tiger Tally, he would use it to send his mind back in time so he could prevent all of the tragedies that have befallen his friends and loved ones since the end of the Sunshot Campaign.  Naturally, he picks the Mount Baifeng Siege Hunt as his arrival point so that he can find out who it was that kissed him while he was blindfolded.  :P  That, of course, led him to get involved with Lan Wangji straight away...except that it was a fake relationship on Wei Wuxian's side, as he figured "everything I want to do will be easier with Lan Zhan's help, and he's actually really good at this, so it's a small price to pay!"  Obviously, once he found out that Wei Wuxian wasn't actually in love with him, Lan Wangji stopped sleeping with him immediately, but he still helped out with the whole "saving the Wen remnants and assorted other people" plan because it was virtuous.  Also because they had completed the three bows so as far as he's concerned, they're married, regardless of whether or not Wei Wuxian actually loves him.

    This was a moment I particularly enjoyed.  Their town in the Burial Mounds has been plagued with weird, unnatural weeds, but something Wei Wuxian did should have stopped them from coming back, and he's holding a mostly-dead weed in his hands as the scene starts.

    That was after the declaration that they wouldn't have any more sex (or even kissing) unless/until Wei Wuxian's feelings changed, but of course Wei Wuxian is still being flirty with him because that's always been his default setting.  🤣  (And yes, these are phone photos of the screen of my other computer.  Because that's the easiest way to do this.  The other option would be to finally get around to installing Word on this machine (yep, still haven't done that), transfer the file onto this machine, then screenshot or copy-paste the associated text...and that's just a massive hassle.  Particularly for a goofy blog post that no one's gonna read except whatever bots have been scanning my blog so much.  According to my stats page, it's like 2k hits in the past month.  Probably some AI-bro trawling the entire internet to train some demented data set that they want to use to spit out more garbage to pollute the net with.  All the more reason not to copy-paste my writing directly into the blog post!)

        Of course, those weeds were part of the original plot post-time-travel, which involved gods and demons, quite literally.  Something that did not feature in MDZS in any way, and thus they felt more than a little awkward being shoehorned into a MDZS fanfic.  (I had just re-read The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System when I came up with the idea, so that was probably why I ended up doing something so crazy and stupid.)  After a while, I got to the point where practically every time I tried to write, I just stalled out because the more it got into the gods-and-demons side of the story, the more I just lost any motivation, because deep down I could feel how wrong it was or something.  I would end up writing a few paragraphs and then doing something like this...

    The really frustrating part is that that descriptive first paragraph is actually pretty good, but the whole "Jin Guangyao murders his father" plotline is no longer going to happen.  I'm still doing what I had in mind there:  because of Wei Wuxian's time-travel shenanigans, Jin Guangyao is now "evil in the service of good" instead of just plain "evil."  I may be able to salvage most of that first paragraph eventually, though, as Jin Guangshan will still end up dead.  (I mean, how could he not?  Dude's like pure evil.  And without the crazy OC villain, he's the closest this fic has to a true villain, though he'll die before sub-villain Xue Yang.  Partially because it's just going to fall out that way, and partially because Xue Yang makes for a better final boss than Jin Guangshan.  (Having tried it both ways in the past, I can say that with some certainty, lol.))

    Anyway, I mostly just wanted to share the two lines of nonsense caused by just slamming my fingers on the keyboard randomly.  :P

    In other bits that I liked enough to take pictures of them to share on my blog, there's this bit here.  After a while, Wei Wuxian flirted with Lan Wangji enough to drive him off entirely, and only after he's falling apart without Lan Wangji can he start to realize that oh, he was actually in love the whole time!  But while he's in the throes of trying to figure that out, he consults with Wen Qing, and asks her if she thinks that Lan Wangji stopped loving him when he found out that Wei Wuxian had married him under false pretexts.  Wen Qing is all-around disgusted by the entire line of conversation, but she says that surely anyone would stop loving a person who married them falsely; certainly she can't imagine that she would forgive something like that, but then that leads into this interior moment:

    That description of what a wife is really resonates with me; I'm very proud of it.  I know it's not always that way in the modern world, but I do feel like that's still the case in at least half of heterosexual relationships even today.  Probably much more than half, in fact.  They're just so inherently toxic!  I can't imagine why people would prefer to be subjected to that kind of thing when they could remain alone.  Gross.  People just make no sense.

    Anyway, not everything has gone perfectly, even when the writing was going along smoothly.  One mistake was so profound that I had to document it after I noticed it:

    Yup.

    I accidentally typed "laugh" instead of "last" because...um...no, actually, that couldn't have been making me laugh, so...maybe it was because it was making Wei Wuxian laugh?  Or...something...?

    Ugh.

    Even my own mistakes make no sense.

    

    Do you ever want to wake up and find that your entire life was actually just a bad dream and you're someone else in some other, better world?

    I do.

    All the freaking time.