two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl

Okay, so I've now got the hard drive from the previous laptop hooked up to this one as basically an external hard drive without the casing.

So I'm copying my files over (having wrestled with Vista for a while over their stupid "permissions" thing, even though it's scarily easy to override - hey, look, security flaws already!) and I suddenly realise something.

I don't have Microsoft Word installed.

So all those fic files that I was panicking over getting onto the new laptop so I could actually open them and keep writing ... are still inaccessible.

Eheh.

The laptop came with a disc with Microsoft Works on it, but I think I'll dig out the original Office discs instead so that I can have the full versions. They're still around here somewhere. I think.

On the plus side, I've been playing Neverwinter Nights 2, and holy crap, it works like a dream. The old laptop was lucky if it got more than one frame per second - this is seamless. And yes, I am going to keep geeking out about the new laptop for some time to come.

Okay, so when I said that next time I was getting a laptop it was going to be a Mac? I ... kinda got seduced by a certain Toshiba notebook and ended up getting a computer with Windows installed again. And not just Windows, but Windows Vista. Oh, how I have fallen.

On the plus side, the laptop is insanely powerful. It has the dual core Intel processors, and then on top of that it has two GeForce 8600M graphics cards, which mean when playing games its processing power is boosted to stupid levels. I installed Oblivion, set the graphics setting as high as they could go, and it didn't even blink. I realise I am an enormous dork, but I may in fact be in love.

The one real downside is ... Windows Vista. It's a pain in the neck, put bluntly. It's almost impossible to stop the programmes that are set up to run on startup from doing so without installing a programme like TuneUp Utilities that will give that capability. Add to that the fact that it's set up to whine at you every time you don't let it do whatever it wants with updating etc., and this may get very annoying very quickly.

Well, if all else fails, I still have the discs for XP! I'm pretty sure that someone will have got around most of the issues Windows Vista has with regards to user control, so I'll go hunting on the web at some point to see what I can find.

Anyway. Still no data recovery from the old laptop, though. That might take a while longer. In the meantime, I shall play Disgaea and enjoy the geeky power levelling.

(Also, look, new icon! It cracks me up. XD)

My laptop died on Thursday night.

As in really, seriously, is-not-coming-back died. It had noisy error beeps and everything.

And it's been about four months since I last did a backup.

My dad is going to try to fix it and/or extract the info stored on the hard drive, but I'm pretty sure that'll take a while. So in the meantime I'm looking for new laptops (and being shoved at Alienware by my well-meaning best friend whose parents happen to be millionaires, no I am not kidding ouch Alienware is expensive) and, well, mourning. I appear to have been more attached to that laptop than I thought I was.

Anyway. FYI, no fic shall be forthcoming from me for a good long while. 'Twas all on the laptop, see. Like my CV and dissertation and the outlines of several novels and oh yeah, half my life.

:(

I would suggest that anyone with an interest in DDS fanfic go read this fic. Right now. Oh my god I'm in love.

Sometimes, when reading something, you'll come across a seemingly inane or random comment that nevertheless manages to sum up something you know quite beautifully.

The most recent example I have seen of this came from this fic. (Which I have not yet finished reading.) The example reads as follows:

After wiping the soil from her hand, she came and took Teddy back. "Harry Potter, godfather," she said. "Do you believe in God, Harry?"

"Not particularly," Harry confessed. "I was raised Church of England."

Just. So beautiful. ♥

(NB. For those who do not have a working knowledge of English history, the Church of England was established by King Henry VIII because the Pope refused to grant him a divorce from his first wife, Catherine, so he broke from Catholicism so he could go marry Anne Boleyn. Technically, if you are Church of England, you are Protestant.

However, in terms of actual use, Church of England is widely known in the UK as what you put down on forms when they ask you what your religion is and you don't give a flying toss but feel like you have to put something down anyway.)

I am alive! Really! I've just been very, very busy. Started my new job today. That will leave me even more stupidly busy. But a happy sort of "I have work! Yay!" busy. Anyway.

Have a fic! Or part one of a fic. Incomplete and will be edited, so some bits may change here and there.

( A Tale of Archadian Passion, or, Penelo's Navel. )

More to be written . . . when I feel like it.

Yep, I see your problem.

Sooooo...

About the job interview I went to yesterday.

I got the job. XD

First of all, I have not been here for the last little while because my internet was a broken thing of broken. It was going slower than a 56kb modem, I tell you. I know this because on 56k, pages will actually finish loading.

Anyway.

Today, I have had a GOOD DAY.

First of all, I had an interview in the afternoon. While I have not yet heard about the job (duh, interview's only just finished), I did come out of the interview feeling like it had gone well and that I couldn't have done anything more to state my case. So, as job interviews go, that was pretty decent. Or at least not a catastrophic disaster.

And then. I came home.

And SMT: PERSONA 3 had arrived. A game which is half DATING SIM and half SUMMONING DEMONS by SHOOTING YOURSELF IN THE HEAD.

There is also fusion. Mm, fusion.

This game. Arhjfggjf. My joy is a boundless ocean.

Aaaaaand I still haven't finished playing SMT: Nocturne. Hush.

I have also created a new layout for Pharmakon which I am actually happy with. This is deeply unusual. I have a feeling this satisfaction will last long enough for me to get the site up and running, and then vacate the premises for parts unknown.

I shall now depart to enjoy my good mood - and my GAME - while it lasts. XD

I hatehatehate it when people (usually students or other people young enough to think they know everything HEY IRONY RITE) badmouth Descartes.

Descartes' works are used as target-practice for students first venturing into Philosophy because until the teachers impart certain extra bits of information, you can't see how they'd ever work. This leads to many, many people calling Descartes stupid.

HELLO, THIS IS THE GUY WHO INVENTED THE GRAPH. A RESPECTED SCIENTIST AND MATHEMATICIAN BEFORE HE EVER TOUCHED PHILOSOPHY. NOT STUPID.

And you know why Descartes' works don't seem like they would ever work?

Because Descartes used a different definition of cause to us. This definition of cause was known as the causal adequacy principle. (By the way, wikipedia states that the causal adequacy theory was proposed by Descartes. This is not accurate. I don't know who it was proposed by, but I do know that Descartes used the theory of cause generally accepted at the time. Trying to define causality is haaaaaaard.)

It's too early in the morning for me to go dig out my notes and explain why this new theory of cause makes Descartes' arguments a lot more sound. This has annoyed me so much that I may end up doing so this evening anyway.

This rant brought to you (once again) by morons in a roleplay comm. I take things that annoy me way to seriously. ^^;

So today, when coming home from work, I got on the wrong train. Going in the right direction, but down the wrong section of the right direction.

In my defence, I was distracted by the fact that work have asked me to stay on indefinitely (just a temp here, remember). Not much of a defence, but hey - work with what you've got.

So while going through the Classifieds looking for jobs today, I came across an advert for a gardener.

A gardener marketing him/herself as Lady Chatterley's Gardener.

What worries me is that it seemed to be entirely in earnest, and not some sort of daft prank. Unless fence-mending and hedge-trimming actually have the euphemisms my dodgy mind is coming up with. (Which, I admit, is actually quite likely. Oh, internet.)

This reminded me of the small children on the train yesterday morning, one of whom was going on about how she'd had several German lessons before she'd realised what this "Deutsch" and "Deutschland" thing the teacher was going on about was.

As bad as that is, it's nothing compared to the fact that her friend jumped in with, "Deutsch is the capital, isn't it?"

Aha. Ow.

(You know the best bit? These were private school students. Well-spent money, there.)

I only wish I was making this up. I fear for the future of humanity.

Oh god, I've succumbed to ebay again. Someone help me, I'm clearly not in my right mind. Especially since I'm bidding on Vagrant Story, which, while I want it like a WANTED THING, is clearly not going to help my attempts to actually finish my other games.

Also, I logged into my semi-defunct old email account to find that FF.Net finally decided to send me its two-year backlog of review notifications. Approximately 90% of them are for Not Heaven. I'm not sure whether I should be worried.

I also had 479 spam emails, not counting the ones the filter didn't catch. Most of them were in Russian or asking me about my penis. The Russian ones may have been asking about my penis too. This is irrelevant, because I'm not so much lacking in penile parts as overflowing with uterine and mammary ones. And overflowing is entirely the wrong word, but it's staying because I can't think of another one.

Updated the recs page, too. It's only been sitting there waiting to be uploaded for, oh, a month and a half.

Dammit. There has to be someone, somewhere who has actually written decent Sephiroth/Cloud. I refuse to believe that all the stuff on the internet is crap. Despite all the evidence to the contrary.

My internet connection is also flaky like a flaky thing, and this maaaaay be contributing to my irritation. Just a little. Maybe.

Furthermore, the overabundance of godawful Sephiroth/Cloud makes me want to write FF7 past!fic and/or timefuck!fic, with the intention of going some way to balancing the crap with something good. Except that I don't like over 95% of what I've written, so this is clearly not a sensible course of action, because I would have to give up all hope of ever finding a decent S/C fic and go live in a cave with moss in my hair.

For some reason, this isn't preventing me from attempting to write decent Larsa/Penelo. Possibly because I haven't been failing in my search for good L/P for quite as long. There's only so much FF7 badfic I can take.

So I had this fantastically great idea for a fic in which Larsa is - well, Larsa, in all his fantastic semi-crazy manipulative mildly dorky awesomeness, and as I'm writing it I think to myself, "hey, wasn't there this really funny fic where Larsa basically organises his marriage to Penelo and she doesn't know about it but has this really bad feeling?" and then spent a couple of hours looking for it, diverting here and there to read other fic and mourn how nothing quite captures Larsa/Penelo the way I want it to.

And then I notice that I've got Word open, and take a look and think, "oh yeah, I was writing that, wasn't I" except that now I've forgotten where I was going with this scene.

Eh. I have a four-day weekend. (And now that I am working, I truly appreciate just how wonderful bank holidays are.)

Also, why did it snow today. It makes no sense.

Deleted my greatestjournal account. The site was basically dead - not quite sure why whoever owns it was still paying for it to be up and running. So it looks like I am here permanent-like!

Also, I am busy like a busy thing and tired like a really tired thing. I blame my period. And the weather. (Where did the BBC's 24 hour forecast thing go, anyway?) Will write something more informative when I have energy and a head that isn't full of dull throb.

The KH2 Demyx battle in Hollow Bastion is the most annoying boss battle ever. I died four times before I said "fuck this" and went to go level up to, ooh, about ten levels higher than I had been. And I still nearly died.

(Well, no, I didn't nearly die - I kept nearly failing his stupid little "defeat X water forms in X seconds" annoyance and then nearly dying from those effing geysers.)

The whole irritation of the battle nearly distracted me from the hilarious woobie that is Demyx talking to himself and attempting to play nice with the Keyblade Master. And also made me think that the whole "Demyx is not a good fighter" thing in Jiminy's Journal is really undeserved. This is my second playthrough, and when I played through the first time Demyx was the only boss to ever give me trouble. (On the understanding that I didn't fight Sephiroth or the paradox cups. Plot boss battles, I mean.)

KH2 is also a leetle bit of a broken record in terms of how it deals with situations. Any time there's something plot-related that Sora needs to get through, what do they do? Start up a scripted battle. It's getting really monotonous. The Dave told me about this when he was playing it, but I thought he was exaggerating.

In more general life terms, I am once again working, and have been for the past two weeks. Yay monies! On a more hilarious note, one of my new work colleagues has a surname that - I kid you not - is "Moar". This is the same place that has a project which abbreviates to "PWP" - and not only that, it is frequently referred to as the "PWP project". Sometimes I have difficulty stopping myself from giggling at the inadvertently inappropriate subcultural references.

Since I've got a fairly long journey into work, I've been ploughing through the various academic books I kept wanting to read and never getting round to. I still have a reasonable list that I want to sell, though, so I might stick some details up here once I get it sorted out.

Whaaaaaaaaat.

Shlomo Benizri, please stop giving Richard Dawkins ammunition. He doesn't need your help. Yeesh.

I can't work up much of a reaction to this, because it's just such a mind-bogglingly stupid thing to say. Yes, the sexual habits of humans have a direct causal relationship with the movement of the Earth's crust. This is clearly the case. Yes.

HOW DID I MISS FINDING OUT ABOUT PROJECT CHANOLOGY? HOW?

The Dave sent me this link, which is a report of the London PC demonstration. I could have been there, yelling internet memes at Scientologists. Dammit.

Also, woah, /b/ grew a conscience? When?

I am ill. Horribly ill. So ill my stuffed-up sinuses are affecting my hearing. If anybody's sitting to the left of me, they'd better speak up.

To cheer myself up, I've been playing Kingdom Hearts II. And cackling over how Squenix are doing a PS2 remake of Chain of Memories. Anyway. Decided to go looking up KH fics, and eventually ran out of recs sites and good authors and delved into the pit of FF.Net.

This was the first fic summary I saw:

"Sora, a humanbirdhybrid, has come to Destiny Islands to escape the institute that he was in. He meets Riku on the beach and the boy seems to friendly... Or is he a spy? bad summary, Warning: Yaoi RikuXSora maybe Mpreg and more pairings! more inside!"

It huuuuurts, precious!

I felt like reading Riku/Sora, so I searched for the characters of Riku and Sora (duh), and then after about thirty seconds just started skimming through the summaries counting the number that mention mpreg. I stopped after I counted four and wasn't even halfway down the first page. Sheesh.

Since my head is stuffed with cotton wool (and possibly a few nails, ow headache), FF.Net's bullshit fails faster than usual. Will now go play with Roxas some more. Kinda wish I had KH1, though, since when I first played that I spent a good couple of hours making Sora jump and giggling at how silly it looked, with his huge feet flying straight out either side. That could probably keep me entertained for the rest of the week right now.