{points of interest}

• [Love Sick] Looking for that oft-rumored, uber-rare yaoi doujinshi for Tactics, created by Sakura Kinoshita and Kazuko Higashima themselves? Yes, it exists. Yes, I scanned it. Yes, it's been translated. Yes, you can download it here. Enjoy!
• [Icons] Want to use one of my icons? Feel free! If it's an icon someone else made, though, you'll have to check with them. I have an icon journal here, tagged by fandom for convenience, if you're searching for something specific. Resource post is here.
• [Fanfiction] Looking for fanfiction? I have a little under my fanfiction tag.
• [Further Reading] Looking for original fiction? I have some under my writing tag, under the penname Kagamino Kage at Shousetsu Bang Bang, and at my writing journal, liminalhorizons.

Tags: hello!

I wrote the post below and then dinner was done so I ate before posting. Dave made this Greek-ish chicken pasta salad with this wheat-free/gluten-free quinoa pasta - it was quite tasty! I agree with commenters saying it would benefit from a thin tomato sauce mixed in, though. Also could have done with a bit of lemon juice sprinkled overtop (in addition to what the recipe called for).

FYI, if you try making this, it makes a TON of food. We only made half the recipe and it was def. enough for 3 or 4 people.

...

So my bathing suit came today and of course it didn't quite fit, since the world does not like making my life easy. Fortunately returns/exchanges with Land's End are easier than most mail order companies since I was able to return it to Sears instead of having to mail it back.

The top was too large and the bottom too small. I ordered what the sizing chart told me to order in the top (an 8DD) and the cups were just way too big. In the bottoms I actually ordered a size BIGGER than what it told me to (it told me I needed an 8, I got a 10), because I flat out didn't believe the lying sack of shit, but it was still a little too small.

I don't get it - isn't 38 inches 38 inches? Somehow, the size of my ass defies space-time, or something. As it turns out, they don't have a size 8D in the stupid suit top, so I had to decide between trying a 6D and a 8C. I went with the 6D. Hopefully it works. If not, I'll kill something.

(I suppose I should note, since I'm complaining, that Land's End seems to have excellent customer service and you can contact them through chat instead of having to use an awful icky phone. Thank goodness. I hate phones.)

...

As a counterpoint to bathing suit frustration, the new shower head filter thingie seems to actually be working. I took a reeeeaaaally long shower to put it to the test, and my face didn't melt off even once! \o/ Oddly, my feet and legs didn't start up with the whole excruciating pain business, either. It's probably too soon to tell - I mean, maybe I was just having a good day, pain-wise - but maybe I was actually having a systemic reaction to inhaling chlorine mist? Tissue inflammation in joints and muscles, &ct.? I was only attributing the whole face-melting thing to the water, but maybe the pain in the rest of my body was being exacerbated by it too.

Tags: life

Oooooh my GOD. So. Much. Better. Than ordinary chocolate cake mix. It's so fudgey it's like a BROWNIE, only fluffy like cake! And there's no horrible evil WHEAT in it!

Also, CREAM CHEESE ICING. Somehow I always forget just how awesome real cream cheese icing is. (The stuff out of a can is just. I don't know, it's like pure sugar they maybe passed some cream cheese over top of, and then slapped a "cream cheese icing" label around and called it done. Stomach-turningly sweet and no real flavor.)

THE CAKE IS REAL. AND IT IS DELICIOUS.

Otoh, it's so incredibly rich I think I'm going into a coma now.

Tags: life

Also AAAAH I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT AVATAR *downloads like a maniac*

Uhhhh can someone tell me the broadcast schedule? (East coast here)

eta: Oh yeah. If anyone else is as retarded as I am, get the episode here. You have to join the comm, though.

Latest two dreams of utter bizarre and wtf:

- Gojyo (from Saiyuki) having sex with two lesbian lovers. Not at the same time or anything. Separately. And this was the cause of much retarded drama which he then felt guilty for causing. And my sleeping brain was trying to set them up as a threesome, and then some other part of my sleeping brain interrupted with a "wtf r u doin, Gojyo/Hakkai is my OTP!" and then my sleeping brain started to try and figure this into the romance schematic and it all got really confusing.

Upon waking I realized that ACTUALLY, those lesbians were totally like AU female versions of Gojyo and Hakkai despite looking nothing like them. One girl was this aging disillusioned punk, had dark messy hair with purple streaks, smoked too much, was surly w/sarcastic sense of humor. Other girl was blond and neat and very sweet and soft spoken, but had vast amounts of crazy lurking beneath the surface.

I have no idea why my brain saw fit to throw Gojyo in there.


- "Trinity Blood" fanfic dream that had nothing, in fact, to do with Trinity Blood. I do not know. My sleeping brain thought it was Trinity Blood, and the art style of the characters and the clothes they were wearing had a similar aesthetic to TB, but no. Totally was not TB.

It was some strange fantasy-tinged sci-fi with all these elaborately dressed military (I think?) people on some alien planet trying to terraform it or otherwise make it hospitable somehow, and there were lots of dinosaur-like creatures in suspended animation for some reason relating to this. There was also this guy in suspended animation - I think he was a high-up military official who had committed some great crime - and someone disobeyed rules to wake him up. Said fellow was very handsome in the ~ooo creepy vampires~ way of TB, and was very sinister and was in fact up to something, though no one was sure what; he released a lot of the dinosaur creatures from suspended animation long before they were supposed to be released and this got many people's panties in a wad. There was this woman, who I think was actually his sister or half-sister or something, who was in love with him and pledged to do his bidding, though I think she also had her own secret agenda. (She was def. totally in love with creepy dude, though, no faking there.)

In the dream I recall thinking, "too bad this isn't really part of canon! Everyone is so in-character!" Uhh... sure, brain, except for the fact that these characters do not actually exist in Trinity Blood...

Still, oh man, so cheeseball and elaborate and nonsensical and hot and FULL OF AWESOME. A+++, should totally be an anime.

Tags: anime/manga, dreams

I has a shower head filter! \o/ ...well, actually, I have a whole new shower head with a filter built in. It was only, what, 35 bucks or so? Which is weird, since all the ones I was seeing online were more expensive than that. There were only three things to choose from at the store, though, and they were all the same brand, so... :\ Hopefully it works.

...btw, is it normal for your car place to give you a cookie when you take your car in for a check-up and oil change? I felt like I was being praised for being a good girl. XD;

note to self: do not attempt naptime when you have only had one cup of coffee rather than your usual two.

Tags: life

Complaints of the day:

• I hate how whenever you make mexican food your kitchen smells like ass for ages. Not right away or anything - you have to wait an hour or two for the pungent ass aroma. Do they put time-released essence of ass into those spice packets or something?


• Clothing manufacturers continue to convince me that their idea of the average woman looks something like a 6 year old's drawing. You know, a circle for the torso and sticks for arms and legs? Basically these pants were like, accommodating a non-existent pot-belly on both my front and back, but there was absolutely no room for my thighs and ass.
  
  
  
  ??? IT IS A MYSTERY


• Stores that package their belts in such a way that you can't actually try the belt on before you buy it. What?


• The fact that I was supposed to have my new bathing suit 3 days ago, but since UPS is apparently fucktarded, my package was mysteriously damaged on the delivery route to my house and thus got sent back to the company and they just received it today and no one is telling me anything so I have no idea what the hell is going on.


• The fact that I have to go get my car serviced tomorrow. Which also means I'll probably get sick tomorrow, and then get blamed for being sick, because, you know, that is totally and obviously my fault.


• YOUR MOM.

Tags: life, rants

Holy EXPLODESCOW, the running total at livelongnmarry has passed $27,000. That is totally amazing.

And now I have to get to work on my fic. You guys, oh my god, you are going to love magicnoire so much for her Mononoke prompt. ...Okay, some of you are going to clutch your heads in trauma, maybe, but most of you are going to sing praises to her name. XD

...And now I am going to sit here and stare at my paper and go "OSHI - what have I gotten myself into" a lot. And maybe chew on my socks and gibber a little.

eta: Ahahahah, someone auctioned off their soul. HOW AWESOME IS THAT.

OKAY WHAT THE FUCK, B&N. JUST. WHAT THE FUCK.

Steam has slowly been building up inside me over this for a V. LONG TIME and I think today has pushed me very near the point of exploding and throwing a temper tantrum right there in the store. I picked about eight books out of all the recs that I thought I might like to read right now, figuring they'd have to have at least one of them. Do you want to guess how many of them were there?

NONE. NADA. ZIP. ZERO.

This is getting ridiculous. This happens to me every single time I want anything. I think the last time I went in there looking for something in particular (and I do it often!) and it was actually there was about 8 months ago. There are piles and piles of utter crap up there on those shelves and every single time I find something online that looks interesting and that critics gave good reviews, it is not there. For god's sake, do they have some policy where they won't carry a book that got good reviews or something?! How did people even find out about good books before the internet?!

To illustrate my case, here's a selection of authors they carry nothing by:

Jeff Vandermeer (with the exception of two of his and his wife's anthologies, but that doesn't really count since his work's not actually in them)
Jeffery Ford
Kelly Link
KJ Bishop (they used to have TEC, but not in the past, like, year)
Catherynne Valente (Although they briefly had Orphan's Tales vol. 2 - not vol. 1, mind, just vol. 2)

And they have one book by Micheal Moorcock - MICHEAL MOORCOCK. THEY ONLY HAVE ONE BOOK. FOR CHRISSAKE, MICHEAL. FREAKING. MOORCOCK.

I can't afford to buy from freaking amazon all the time, because I can usually only afford a book or maybe two at any one time, and I can't afford the small-order shipping costs. Besides that, it usually takes me a couple of chapters or so before I even know if I really want to read the whole book. I don't think it is too much to ask for my local mainstream bookstore to carry at least a few of the authors I'm looking for. Most of them are not obscure authors! A good number of them are even rather well-known and well-loved! And I have a really hard time believing some of the crap up there on those shelves actually sells better than what they aren't carrying!

UGH. UGH UGH UGH.

p.s. they had no Tom Disch either! Which is really mysterious because I think I saw Word of God in there a week or two ago!

Tags: fiction, rants

Oh, I was going to say when I posted earlier and forgot, THANKS TO EVERYONE for all your book recs the other day! I now have a list as long as my freaking arm. I'm going to look for some of them this evening. (I can hear the booksellers shouting and scrambling to pull the books I want off the shelves and hide them as I type. Hopefully they'll miss a couple...)

Last chance on that fairy tales porn (or anything else at livelongnmarry you might have wanted), guys! Bidding ends tonight.

After years and years of sneezing/congestion fits every fucking time I shower, no matter where I shower, no matter how much I have or haven't cleaned to make sure the shower is mildew-free, it finally occurs to me to wonder... Maybe mildew isn't the problem! Maybe I'm actually allergic to the tap water itself. Maybe chlorine irritates my nose, or I'm actually allergic to it? Or some other substance commonly found in tap water? Or multiple ones?

Last time I showered at my parent's house, it irritated me, though not as badly as my own shower or hotel showers. They're on a deep well, so their water has no chemical additives like chlorine. (However, there is a crapload of sulfur and other minerals in their water, to the point you can actually see minerals floating around in a glass of it. It's very tasty but stinks like rotten eggs.)

If I am sensitive to tap water, what the hell do I do about it? Do they even make water filters for shower-heads? If so, where on earth would I find one? I've never seen tap-filters made for anything but a kitchen sink.

Tags: life, what the shit

Recommend me something totally amazing to read! Like, totally blew-you-away amazing!

I like fantasy best, especially really weird shit, but I'll also read sci-fi and occasionally I'll read realist fiction. Bonus points if I can read at least part of it over the ol' intarwebs before committing to buying it. Extra bonus points if there's something stylistically unusual about the prose or narrative.

Oh, and you don't have to tell me why it's amazing, but if you want to that'd be helpful. ♥

Tags: fiction

I'm still wondering why no one's ever made the obvious joke with bunny-boys on SSBB before. I wonder if I should do that.

...the bunny would be the seme. Def. the seme.

Tags: ssbb

Dear Weather:

What the hell? No, seriously, are you on drugs?

Mystified in NC,
Me