Should I be worried?

     I ask, of course, because I am a bit worried, regardless of whether I actually need to be.

    See, I tend to check the stats tab on my blog, because why wouldn't I?  I mean, what else is it there for but for me to check it, right?  And today I found this:

    It's like...why was someone from Google's corporate administration accessing my blog?  I tried following the link, and it was some kind of official-looking sign-in page.

    I mean...maybe it's just a routine thing, that the company periodically checks on what's being posted on people's blogs, to make sure it's not anything they could get in trouble for hosting?  But it's still creeping me out.

    I guess they would have sent me some kind of warning email if I'd done something wrong, but it's still just sort of creepy feeling. 😭  Like, now I'm worried my blog will be suddenly disabled or something, even though I haven't done anything wrong.  (Unless posting fanfic is against the rules, but that seems highly unlikely, since it's my own fanfic. I mean, sure, posting fanfic someone else wrote, yeah, that would be bad, but...)

Plushie!!!!

 So, a while back I mentioned that I had just finished playing Sword and Fairy 7, and how much I wanted a plushie of this little cutie:

Well, guess what?

Not quite the same, since this is the friendly version rather than the peach-colored enemy type, but probably the closest I'll ever get.

And how did I obtain such a plushie?

Well, I happened to be in a Gamestop last night and noticed this on the shelf:

When I looked at the back, and saw that the contents included a plushie of the leaf fairy, how could I have resisted?

Unfortunately, not everything in the picture ended up being in the box.  😭  The "chipboard character standees" and the DLC download code card aren't there.  Well, actually, maybe the download card is inside the actual box of the game itself, but I kinda doubt the standees could be.  (Though I suppose it's possible? 🤔)  I already have the Nendoroid of Yue Qingshu and the doll of Bai Moqing anyway, so that's two out of four even without the standees. 🤣

Anyway, the important thing is that the plushie is safe and sound.  Also the four disc soundtrack!

Of course...I already had all the music as .mp3s I bought on Steam, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️  Having physical media is always a good thing.

....

There is, naturally, the slight hitch that I don't actually own a Playstation 5. 😅  But surely the price will come down on those things eventually, and then I can get one... 😅

Anyway, I just wanted to post about that.

Partially just because it's been a while since I posted anything. 😅

(Wow, am I over-using that emoji in this post...)

IWSG: Where did January go?

 

    Somehow, the entire month of January blipped past like I just blinked and missed it.

    I mean, I know part of why that is (*cough*gaming*cough*) but there's also a mysterious futility to it, like my whole life is just flashing by and I can't even reach out to grab it.  It doesn't help that my health is still awful--though my brother tricking me into watching a scary movie and me losing a whole night of sleep therefore and seeing my heart going absolutely insane the next day at least provided me with a good clue that I've been habitually not getting enough sleep for decades now, a problem I am slowly trying to remedy--but that's definitely not all of it.

    My writing has been blocked lately.  I'm the sort who can't put a project down partway through a draft if I ever want to finish it, and after having spent the majority of last year working on a single project, I can't risk not finishing it!  (Not to mention that I really do want to finish it...)  But I keep running up against plot points that I'm not sure how to resolve.  (And I'm the sort who can't write out of order, too, so I need to deal with each issue in its due place...)  I think the light is showing at the end of the tunnel now, though:  my current outline section actually goes all the way up to the actual end of the story!  Admittedly, with some scenes that have their node on the outline saying things like "something else needs to happen here, but i'm not sure what" and "jc isn't getting to do much lately and he's supposed to be the lead; give him something to do!" and the epilogue is a list of bullet points prefaced with "not sure the order yet, and there's probably some more needed" but...still, I have the plan of how to reach "The End" mostly in place.

    And yet.  I still haven't written in a few days (uh, as of when I'm pre-writing this post on Monday) because I know that one of the characters needs to do something to disable the magical teleportation the bad guys have been using, and that he needs the doctor to make some kind of powder or something to do it, but I'm not sure what kind of powder or why he needs to ask for her help, specifically, since anti-evil is his own field, not hers.  I mean, I know he wants to ask for her help to distract her from her own problems (in self-defense she accidentally took the life of someone who was trying to kill her, and everyone around her assumes she's shattered by that, so they're sort of coddling her) but he needs some kind of excuse that she'll accept, and that is really hard to come up with.  Okay, no, now I've written a bit, because I realized the obvious solution to all that strikethrough stuff, but still kind of struck a wall in the scene where I wasn't sure what else needed to be said before the rest of the scene's contents could happen.  Which sounds weird, but...

    It's very frustrating, but that feels like my whole life has boiled down to nothing but a whole mess of "frustration," and little to nothing else.

    *sigh*

    Sorry.  I seem to have spent yet another monthly post just whinging on about my own petty problems.

    (But, really, there's not much else I can talk about unless I allow myself to start waxing poetic over My Time at Sandrock...and this is supposed to be a writer's group, not a gamer's group, so...)

Sometimes I don't know myself

     Okay, so back in November I mentioned a strange love triangle I had added to the ridiculously massive fanfic I'm working on, and how I wasn't sure if it would ever be mentioned again, right?  And at the time I honestly didn't think it would be.

    It has been.

    Like, a lot.

    About a week or so ago, this passage happened:

            He wasn’t halfway to yimu’s side before he heard loud laughter from his other three cousins.  Wincing, he tried to calm his worries before he reached his destination, but he failed to do so, and thus his first words after greeting yimu were “Just what kind of flirting are those three doing with Chifeng-zun?”

            Yimu looked at him with only the mildest surprise and disappointment.  “I suggested they should invite him to our private hunting grounds.  There’s ample prey there even for someone as skilled as Chifeng-zun.  And it would give them an ideal opportunity to show him their own skills.  I’m sure he won’t want a bride unless she’s more skilled than the majority of his disciples.”

            That seemed likely to be Nie Mingjue’s position on the subject, Jiang Cheng had to admit.  “That’s probably a good idea.  But…ah…Zongying is…”

            With a weary sigh, yimu shook her head.  “That girl is too strong-willed for her own good.  Just like your mother.  When she fixes on something, she just won’t let go.  It’s easier not to fight with her on it, so I’m not.”

            “Oh, you…you knew about her…um…”

            “Really, Wanyin, you think I could fail to notice my youngest daughter mooning about like that?  Do you think your aunt is an idiot?”

            Jiang Cheng winced.  “Of course not, yimu.”

            “Nie Huaisang is considerably less worthy than his brother, but a blood tie is a blood tie, and if he makes my little one happy, then that’s all that matters.”

            “But you would approve of having two of your daughters married to two brothers?”

            “Ideally I’d prefer all five of them to bring in different alliances, but I won’t surrender Chifeng-zun to a woman from another clan.  He’s too fine a catch to be wasted on lesser women,” yimu insisted.

            Something about that sentiment left Jiang Cheng very unsettled, but he tried to tamp down that feeling and ignore it.  “You should seek out his brother’s aid, then.”

            Yimu scowled.  “I’d rather keep him ignorant until it’s too late to intervene.  That’s the other reason I decided to let Zongying have her way.  How better to distract the interfering little brat than to have him caught up in his own whirlwind of romance?”

            Jiang Cheng definitely had not seen any whirlwind.  Or romance, for that matter.  He had seen a willfully ignorant man actively pretending he couldn’t see the girl salivating at the sight of him.  “Interfering brat?” he repeated, laughing.

    (Uh, I should clarify that Jiang Wanyin is the courtesy name of Jiang Cheng, and that Chifeng-zun is the sobriquet of Nie Mingjue.  This setting is very complicated; most characters have at least two names (birth name and courtesy name) and many also have a sobriquet.  It's not actually that much to keep track of, in the grand scheme of things, but it makes it hard to quickly explain an excerpt to those unfamiliar with the canon material.  Also, "yimu" is the polite form of address for a maternal aunt older than one's mother, so the "yimu" in the passage is Jiang Cheng's aunt, Yu Jiayi, who is admittedly an original character for this fic...though at least canon did establish that Jiang Cheng's mother had two elder sisters.) {I should also admit that the passage above is just the first draft and that I can already see a lot of things that need fixing about it, but if I get bogged down too much with editing now, I'll never finish the draft...}

    Anyway, that passage leads into Yu Jiayi describing what happened when an unworthy woman came courting Nie Mingjue and Nie Huaisang chased her off by discovering all her most sordid secrets and threatening her with them.  🤣  That just seemed so very him to me.

    Technically, what I most wanted to share here was the "willfully ignorant man actively pretending he couldn't see the girl salivating at the sight of him" part, of course.  😋  I especially liked that part.  But I also liked describing Nie Mingjue as "too fine a catch to be wasted on lesser women," too.

    Reminder, this is what the Nie brothers look like:

    Anyway, it turns out this just keeps coming up.  Which, I mean, really, makes sense; the fic is entering into another period of interclan warfare, so it of course it's about to become important to have a marital alliance with the powerful Nie Clan and its super-powerful warrior leader.

    But this is why I keep having to work up new outlines every so often, because some little something I threw in on a whim ends up coming up again and again.

    Which is good for keeping things fresh.

    But is not so good at allowing the thing to just flipping end already.  'Cause my outline just keeps expanding as new things pop up that really need dealing with and/or things turn in a slightly different direction so that they either have to take a more circuitous route to the destination or I have to forcibly turn them right around again.

    It's deeply frustrating, and makes me feel I need to sit down (after I finally finish this thing) and take a long, hard look at my writing methods and maybe finally revise them, because this is just growing untenable.  😭

IWSG: Happy New Year!

     Not sure what to say today.  I feel like most of my insecurities have been the same ever since this past spring, just more worries about my health and how it's impacting on everything, especially on my writing.  Unfortunately, that's not really something anyone can help me with.  (No one except my doctor(s), anyway.)  So there's not much point in blogging about it yet again.

    I can't even answer the monthly question, because I've never heard of BookBub.

.........................................................................................

    Well, I guess I can talk about my plans/hopes for the coming year?

    I have a book I've adapted into a lightly interactive format that was almost ready for release when I started having my heart palpitations; it was just waiting for a little more polish, more glossary entries and a summary of the previous novel in the series.  I'm hoping I'll be able to finish it up and release it at some point, the sooner the better, but...I feel like my heart starts flipping out every time I even think about it.

    ...

    ...ugh, I just can't think of anything to say that's new.

Looking back on 2023...

    So, 2023 is ending, and I thought I should post about that, because that seems like a thing to do.

    To be honest, the Year of the Rabbit has not been kind to me, it feels like.  Which is weird, because I was born in the Year of the Rabbit myself.  Then again, I recall reading somewhere (around January, I suspect) that each cycle is connected to one of the five elements, so I guess whichever one 2023's Year of the Rabbit is connected to is bad for whatever one 1975's Year of the Rabbit was connected to?  (Or, you know, I just had a bad year and everything else is unconnected to that fact. 😅)  

    It's kind of weird, though; I don't really remember any of the past Years of the Rabbit, or even if the fact that it was same even mattered to me in the slightest.  I mean, obviously I didn't care for the first one.  Uh, I mean, the first one after 1975, since I was obviously unable to care while I was a newborn infant.  But I don't really have any memories of being 12.  Or rather, I have no memories connected to being 12:  I'm sure I remember plenty of things from that year, I just don't think of those memories in terms of my age at the time. 1987...I wanna say that's the year I graduated grade school?  Except that sounds kinda late for it, doesn't it?  Wait, if one typically is six when one starts first grade, then...yeah, being twelve when you graduate sixth grade does track.  So, yeah, that would be the year I graduated grade school and started high school.  (My high school was a combination high and junior high, so it was one school from 7th to 12th grade.)  In which case it was actually a pretty decent year for me in some respects--I met my high school best friend, the only person from high school I still have any contact with--but in other respects it was awful, since my entire high school experience can be summed up with one word:  pain.  As to the year I turned 24...nope, no memories whatsoever connected to being 24.  That would have been 1999?  Ack.  Nevermind.  Waaaaaaay too many memories, almost all of them bad.  That's when I...actually, no, if I go into too many details then I will totally be doxxing myself if anyone who knows me happens to stumble across this.  (Which is unlikely, but I'd still rather not take that risk.)  But it was a bad year for me.  So...turning 36...that would have been...2011.  Hmm.  Yeah, I actually do have zero memories connected to that year.  I'm wanting to say I got my second BA in 2010, in which case I was not currently in school in 2011, but maybe it was the year I started volunteering at the museum where I used to work.  In which case 2011 was probably pretty good for me?

    Anyway, as to why this year was not good, well, there's a lot on this blog about it already.  I was taking part in a game jam in my fledgling indie game dev hobby, and started getting heart palpitations, which became so bad that I dropped out of the jam and stopped writing altogether for about a week (maybe only a few days), and then decided I wouldn't do any more game dev until the heart palpitations were all cleared up.  (I did permit myself to write for non-game dev purposes...which in this case meant fan fiction.  So, so, so much fan fiction.)  They, uh, still aren't.  They're less frequent--a few spells per month--and pretty minor, but they still happen.  Meaning I haven't felt safe returning to game dev, despite that I was in the middle of rewriting an old series of my (many) unreleased novels and releasing them as interactive fiction.  So it's just sitting out there, the first two of seven, taunting the universe.  Admittedly, very few people have even interacted with the game pages, let alone actually read them, but that doesn't change how annoying it is not to be working on them.  But heart health is a scary thing and I don't want to tempt fate.  (And yes, I have seen doctors about this heart thing.  It's just that they can't find anything wrong with my heart.  I don't even have high blood pressure.)

    Looking back on the year, that's honestly been the major part of it.  Just more and more and more doing nothing because I'm scared to do anything.  Though also my favorite Chinese restaurant closed shortly after my birthday (my birthday was the last time I ate there, in fact) and although a new one has opened in the same space using the same name, my parents have eaten there since it reopened and they said the menu has changed and isn't as good.  😭  I also feel like my house has become even more of a roiling, uncleaned chaos, but I think part of that is the health thing; I'm afraid to do anything for fear of upsetting my heart.  Which is dumb, but somehow I got into that mindset and it's hard to push myself out of it again.

    But this is depressing, so let's change the subject!

    Please be amused by my very amateur attempts at photography instead:

    Since rabbits feature heavily in a few choice moments in Mo Dao Zu Shi, Goodsmile released special Year of the Rabbit Nendoroids of the two leads.  And somehow I didn't actually take them out of the boxes for some photographs until today. 😭  But they're super-adorable, right?  😁  I'm not sure how clear it is in this picture, but their eye highlights are little bunnies.  🐰  The bunny-ear headbands were the pre-order bonus for getting them directly from Goodsmile.  😁

    Anyway, looking ahead to next year...

    I don't do New Year's Resolutions.  Those seem like "promises I don't intend to keep," you know?  But I do have goals for next year.  Things I want to do, and hopefully will do.

    My goals (in no particular order) are:

• Polish up and release book three (it's already gotten a couple new drafts and I've already put it in the game engine, so it just needs polishing and some work on the glossary)
• Finish this @#$^#@$#ing fanfic that I've been working on since like April (it's at like 385k words now!)
• Post my dragon-based MDZS fanfic tomorrow (since it had gotten to nearly the end of the year, I figured may as well wait and post it in the Year of the Dragon, lol! (yes, I do know that technically that doesn't start until February, but humor me))
• Start exercising in some manner (if nothing else, there's supposed to be a Vocaloid version of Fitness Boxing coming out in a few months, that should help)
• Try to fix up my awful diet at least a little (I do plan to talk to my doctor about weight loss when I see her in January)
• Do at least a little cleaning around the house (hopefully enough that I can replace my dying refrigerator)
• Try and give away or sell some of the crap I don't need/want/use anymore
• Get my car fixed (it died on me again)

    Okay, admittedly, a lot of those sound like exactly what everyone says every year, but a lot of my health problems are coming to a point where I can't keep on going like this much longer, which has given me a lot more motivation to fix the problem, only I keep trying to diet too strictly and going off it and making things worse. 😭  (Hence why I plan to ask my doctor about it.  And hope she'll have something to say other than "let's cut you open and staple your stomach shut" because that is just cursed.)

    Hmm...what else did I want to say?

    I've made a few plans for the turning of the year.  I managed to finish the book I was reading today (volume 4 of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun) which is good, because I did not want that to be the first book I read in the new year, 'cause about half the volume is just the two leads being insanely horny for each other and refusing to do anything about it, until I just want to scream at them.  (It's a pity it's so insanely thirsty, because the actual plot of the novel is fairly interesting, but I'm not sure if I can put up with any more drowning in lust garbage.  It's agonizing to read.  Especially as someone who is both aromantic and asexual, because I can't even connect with it in the slightest.)  I'm going to read something short before the day ends so that it's not the last thing I read, either.  (The only short thing I haven't read before that's lying around is a sexually explicit fan comic for Promare, but I have a feeling it will actually contain far less horniness than that volume of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun.)  And then, at some point before midnight, I will start reading a book I got for Christmas, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines by Garret Ryan.  It was one of the few presents I wasn't expecting, but I'm really looking forward to it:  I read one of his earlier books, and it was a lot of fun, a combination of things I already knew some of and interesting tidbits about the ancient world that I didn't know.  (I seem to recall that there was one thing in the previous book that I didn't agree with, but I can't remember what it was, specifically...though I'm betting it had to do with same sex relationships.  That tends to be the spot where straight male scholars drop the ball most often.)  Anyway, I figure that of all the unread books on my shelf, that's the best one to be reading at the turn of the year.   Well, that and I promised I'd let my mom read it when I was done with it, so I don't want to wait too long to get to it. 😅

    I have some sparkling apple juice to drink at midnight (I don't drink alcohol), and a naughty-but-not-too-naughty snack to enjoy with it, too.  I'll probably either get lost in playing My Time at Sandrock and barely notice midnight or I'll start watching Dungeons & Dragons:  Honor Among Thieves around quarter past ten to be watching that when the year ends.  Not connected to New Year's in any way, but it's on my unwatched Christmas gift pile, so...hmm.  Then again, maybe I should dive into Doctor Who instead, to usher out the 60th anniversary year?  (I got the second season for Christmas.  And I do mean the actual second season, as in the 1964-1965 season.  There's some real gems in there.  Also the unbearably awful "The Web Planet" which my brother and I couldn't even finish when we tried to watch it before. 😅  But it starts with "Planet of the Giants," which is pretty good, then goes into "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" which is better, and...anyway, there's a lot of really good ones in there.)  Hmm.  I'll have to think about which to do....but I'll probably end up gaming anyway. 😅  Oh!  That's right, I could also watch some anime on Crunchyroll:  there should be a new episode of The Apothecary Diaries, and I wanted to start watching Frieren...  (I still haven't had the courage to check out season two of Heaven Official's Blessing, in case the subtitles are as bad as the ones on the blu-ray...and New Year's Eve seems like a very bad time to take that risk...)

    Oh, yes!  Gaming!  That was it!

    Someone on one of the Discord servers I'm part of posted a thing about the games they loved that they played for the first time this year.  I thought I should do that, too.  In chronological order...

    (That's order played, btw, not order released.)  Technically, Sword and Fairy 6 probably doesn't belong, as I didn't quite love it, but...because of the different sizes of Switch and Playstation covers, it was going to be even more lopsided if it was only eight, like the version the person on the Ooblet server posted.  (Said person being primarily a PC gamer, they didn't have the different image shape issue.)  I mean, I suppose I could have tried to balance it out by removing Oshirabu, but...that would have felt much more wrong.  I did play more games that I loved this year, but there were a lot of remakes and remasters in my year, including things I had played in their original versions:  Xenoblade Chronicles, Final Fantasy, Grandia II, and Sam and Max Beyond Time and Space.  (There may have been even more than that and I'm just blanking on the others.  Though technically I only played about half of Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii; I hit the point where one of the characters said something that pissed me off so badly I was like "yeah, I'm just going to put this aside for a while until I cool off..." and then I never ended up picking it up again. 😅)  I kinda shouldn't include My Time at Sandrock on this, since I only started it like two days ago, but...it's the type of game that's much more make-or-break on its mechanics than its story, so I already know.  😆  (Thankfully, there's a full character creation at the start, so you don't have to play as Mr. Generic from the cover there.  I'm playing as a woman with purple ponytails.  💜  Though if I'd known the town doctor was going to hit my character design sweet spot, I might have played as a guy after all in order to romance him.  (I do not do het romance in a game if I have any choice in the matter.  Just not how I roll.))  I still would have probably gone with purple hair, though.  I almost always choose purple hair when it's an option.)  Even more technically, Forager kind of doesn't belong, because I first started it when I bought that copy a year or so ago, only the TV I had at the time was not compatible with the Playstation 4 and I lost so much of the edges of the picture that the game was literally unplayable because so much of its UI was off-screen.  Therefore, I had only played like two, three minutes before I gave up in despair.  When I got a new TV this year, I started playing it again for real...ah, crap.  It and Sword and Fairy 6 are in the wrong places; I got the TV because I was already playing Sword and Fairy 6 and was losing too much of the edges of the screen, and I was determined to keep playing it, enough so that I actually went to buy a new TV.  (Thankfully, it was a cheap one...)

    Anyway, top three of those are....

    At number three:

    And at number two:

    

    (To the extent that I've bought the doll I found of the secondary female character, and the Nendoroid of the heroine.  😁)

    And--drumroll please--the number one favorite of the year...!

    I've even bought all three of the Ooblets plushies released through Fangamer!  (And will likely buy every other Ooblets plushie they make...)

    And on that note, I'll bring this post to a long and rambling close.

🎉  Happy New Year! 🎉

Randomly....

     I have lately been watching the anime The Apothecary Diaries.  (Or rather, over the past four or five days I've binged the show, but as it's simulcasting that just means I've watched the first ten (or was it eleven?) episodes and caught up to its current status.)

    It's really good (so far), and obviously it must be doing well, because Goodsmile has pre-orders up for Nendoroids of the two leads, and a Pop-up Parade of the heroine.  Without knowing how the story will end, I'm not sure if I want to spring for all three, but I will probably have to get the Pop-up Parade because of the following weird brain logic.

    I was thinking about the figure and mentally commented to myself that the Pop-up Parade of Maomao might fit in nicely next to the Pop-up Parade of Wei Wuxian...and suddenly I found myself thinking how cool it would be if Maomao was the reincarnation of Wen Qing.

    So now I suddenly and totally headcanon that she is, in fact, the reincarnation of Wen Qing, and I kind of want to write a fanfic wherein Maomao meets the still-existing fierce corpse version of Wen Ning, who recognizes her as his sister, and he's thrilled to get to see her again after so many centuries.  I don't think I ever could write that, since The Apothecary Diaries is set in a much more realistic world without magic and monsters and the undead, but it could be a fun cross-over regardless of that.  (Uh, aside from the fact that it might be a little dubious to have a cross-over between an actual Chinese IP and a Japanese IP that's merely set in ancient China. (Okay, technically I don't know for a fact that The Apothecary Diaries is originally Japanese, but...I feel like if they were just adapting a Chinese novel or whatever then the characters would all have family names, and yet they don't, which is just really weird to me.  They all just have given names, unless Crunchyroll is purposefully screwing up the subtitles so that a whole lot of people with two single-character names are being treated as having one two-character names, which is equally implausible.  There's also the fact that if it was based on a Chinese novel or comic or whatever, then you'd expect a Chinese animation studio to be doing the adaptation, not a Japanese one.))

    Long story short, now that I've come to the weird brain conclusion that Maomao is Wen Qing, I almost feel obligated to buy the Pop-up Parade of her. 😅  (Especially since lately I've been putting together Nendoroid dolls to represent various other Mo Dao Zu Shi characters besides the two who have official rep, but I have not so far done one for Wen Qing.  Just Jiang Cheng, Jiang Yanli and Wen Ning.  I did spot a dress I could buy that would do for a Wen Qing Nendoroid doll, but finding a Nendoroid with hair that could do for Wen Qing is another matter entirely, and much more difficult to pull off.)

    On an unrelated note, some time ago, I reported on some crazy activity that seemed to be entirely one (or more?) bots loading my blog's main page over and over again.  And then later on I reported that the bot seemed to have moved on after more than 11,000 pageviews.