One thing I have learned about myself doing this Accounting for Managers course is that I absolutely hate having to write from a pure "upper management" point of view to the point where my options are just "procrastinate indefinitely" or "write it as if I run some kind of employee-owned co-op" and so I'm opting for the latter most of the time.

The rest of this is just a thought dump, feel free to ignore.

Somewhere yesterday I realized that I've been tearing down all of my systems and guardrails instead of what I usually try to do, which is changing them one at a time or, ideally, not changing them at all.

My household routines are off and honestly have been since before my nibling got here. Laundry's just. Not moving. I can't seem to make any progress on packing. Nothing's getting out of the house. I've complained about this before, it's boring.

I got a new pair of jeans with a slightly smaller pocket so I decided to try a slightly smaller notebook and all hell has broken loose since then on the notebook front. I've tried and bounced hard off of two, I'm still sort of using a third but not very well, I've got a journal that's too large to be an EDC living next to my bed except when it isn't, and I bought the absolutely gorgeous PaperblanksxFourth Wing notebook and it's in this size they call "midi" which is like... 5x7? It's bigger than my jeans pockets but it's fall now and I'm wearing my jacket a lot and it has no problem fitting in my jacket pocket and I'm trying SO FUCKING HARD not to move into it just because it's SHINY NEW but at the same time it's like... distracting thinking about it so maybe I should just fucking do it, you know? If I like it, then I can try a paperblanks planner for next year in the Midi size too. And if I don't I'll just go back to the one that works.

Please somebody tell me this isn't worth the amount of overthinking I'm doing.

I had somebody suggest making a list of values in a way that hit me like a ton of bricks, where normally that would sound twee as hell. Because it occurred to me that I'm actually always looking for a single word or phrase that unites everything I care about and that's just... pretty much impossible. But if I make a list then I don't have to just pick one. (lolsob why does "you can be more than one thing" feel like a big deal)

Other things I've torn apart and now cannot commit to: - backups (I don't want to depend on google drive. Currently waffling between a nextcloud instance and protondrive.) - email providers (Currently waffling between fastmail and protondrive.) - digital notes/references/bookmarks (kind of half moved into Obsidian, tried xtiles but never settled into it, playing with moving back into Notion, there are some things Notion just makes really easy.) - website (one of the things Notion could make really easy is some variants on website maintenance. not all of them but... definitely some. currently have some sites on a regular ftp host, some still on nearlyfreespeech, and some still running on fastmail's web server option. not keeping up with anything. augh etc.)

Also other stuff I'm forgetting, I'm sure.

Remember when I said my nibling was getting here in four weekends?

Well, yeah, now it's this weekend.

I have not gotten remotely everything I wanted done, but there's a place for him to sleep and a mattress and we can figure everything else out I guess.

At some point I started clearing out the vanity in our room because Bug wants to get a tree frog and that seemed like the best surface to put a vivarium on, and then I also cleaned out the secretary dresser because we were considering moving it into the other room for Nibling to use, and a few months ago I switched to floor sitting so I had emptied out my desk and....

...well the takeaway is there's a lot of stuff in our bedroom, unsurprisingly, and I'm trying to actually sort/declutter it instead of just... popping it all away again.

I've been categorizing and binning things in useful ways but I just hit the realization that I need a bigger bin for notebooks unless I want to put the larger ones somewhere else, which I don't. And that I have painting stuff stored in multiple bins right now, and also I have sewing stuff in multiple bins. Both of those started because I had loose stuff wherever and I was trying to corral it, but I don't have enough space in the current storage to put it away, so those both also need to be re-sorted into different bins.

(And the ephemera/junk journal stuff is in a temporary box but I don't have a good larger category to put them in, and zines keep ending up in with it Because Paper and that's Not Correct, and then I realize my memory bin could probably stand to be switched out too, but if I'm doing that I should figure out how to solve the problem where Moth's memory box doesn't close correctly, and and and...)

And I know there are other things I should be spending my time on, and I also wish that I had a more "aesthetic" alternative to the sturdy, stackable plastic bins I end up using (they come in multiple sizes that work together, though!) except that more aesthetic ones are generally not clear and not matching and I don't have the space to properly store things aesthetically yet and I need to accecpt that.

But regardless my brain is stuck on "I cAN't PuT tHe ThInGS Aw4Y c0rREcTLy!!!11!" and it is profoundly unhelpful.

Hope y'all are doing better than I am in this department! And honestly I'm not that bad off, I promise. This is just the thing driving me crazy this morning.

Over on the 32-bit cafe board, Eladnarra linked to a recent post of hers about disability in the recent blog post thread, and two other community members chimed in about their wives' experiences as breast cancer survivors, and I started thinking. My thoughts got a little overgrown for a reply on a message board, so I thought I'd write a post instead.

( cw for medical discussion, unsurprisingly )

Over in smallweb it's smallweb September and so I've been trying to list out the stuff I've been meaning to do on my website and haven't gotten around to.

So far my list is:

• probably find a webhost that's not just uploading shit to my email provider?
• put my original universe stuff together literally at all
• reformat the character reference pages and get them up
• putting the art up would also be nice
• fanfic archive could use updating/incorporating
• so could some random other pages like my Flight Rising lore

Not sure how far I'll actually get in the list but it's nice to kind of lay out what I'm thinking, at least.

The end of September I'm going to be hosting Fourth Wing Femslash Week over on Tumblr again, which people seem to be excited about. It's not a fandom that sees a lot of femslash, so it's fun to drum up some interest.

This week I've been focused on writing for a different event week over there, but after that my plate's mostly clear between now and then so we'll see what happens, eh?

Also at the end of the month I start classes again. Ughhhhhh. Not terribly excited about that, but I guess I'll worry about it when we get there.

I'm maybe having a slow-motion meltdown.

I've left two-thirds of my discord servers, deleted my writing server, and tonight I'm clearing out my tumblr follows.

I'm ostensibly getting the condo ready to show so we can put it on the market but it feels like an utterly sisyphean task. Mostly because every time I turn around my kid is making a new mess, and it's summer so all of Moth's spoons and then some are going to managing the kid and her camps and stuff.

When I get anxiety flairs I want to declutter everything. Like, everything. This is not practical for a number of reasons, including the fact that I live with two other people. But in this particular case, it means I'm trying to actually declutter/pack/clean the house to show it whilst at the same time not get rid of anything I'll actually regret getting rid of, or do anything that will give my kid Hoarding Trauma, or... well, you get the idea.

Basically I'm trying to declutter but only a reasonable amount while my brain wants to declutter everything. I keep having nightmares where I discover I've thrown out Bug's stuff or Moth's stuff and I'm sure they'll hate me, or I'm supposed to be going abroad to live or study or something but I can't find my passport and I realize I'm going to be leaving my family and I can't remember why I thought I wanted to do this.

So I focus on what I can control. I clear out my files, or I leave most of my discord servers and mute the rest, or... well you get the idea. And I try not to have a full-on meltdown.

I hate it.

Here’s the post about scrupulosity!

OCD is best known for germaphobia and hoarding and religious scrupulosity, all of which I’ve dealt with in varying degrees, but I think it’s less well-known that religious scrupulosity is basically a form of moral scrupulosity, and that it can take other shapes as well.

Sidebar: scrupulosity as a word just means an obsessive, overwhelming anxiety/fear of being bad, for whatever bad means to you. You can probably guess why it often hijacks religious beliefs, and why it loves to square dance with intrusive thoughts.

In practice, this means constantly feeling like I’m not doing enough: for new people, for friends, for mutuals, for the fandom as a whole. I want to be welcoming and encouraging. I want to read and chat with new writers so they write more! I want to keep up with my friends’ fics! I want to read other fics just because they look interesting! And of course if I’m reading, I want to be commenting and live reacting and reccing on tumblr! I want to gift drabbles and fanart and reaction fics to people so they know how awesome they and their work are!

(also I want to write my own fics and draw my own art, and I’m really not good at pushing my own work because I’m always fighting the idea that it’s selfish to want people to read my work.)

There’s a reason Mr Rogers is so prominent on my ancestor altar, y'all, and it’s because I want to be a good person so fucking bad. It’s because in my heart and soul there’s a part of me that’s constantly certain that I’m a fucked up, horrible monster and if people like me it’s only because I’m fooling them.

I know I maybe over-identify with Xaden, okay? He knows he’s going to be the bad guy for a lot of people no matter what he does, and he still does everything he can, and he gets shit on for it. I think about his comments in Samara, about how people are fuckheads to him but he doesn’t mind because they go easier on Garrick.

One of the things that’s come up when I write Xaden more than once is projecting my own insecurities onto him. The certainty that he can never do enough. The fear that he really is the monster people see when they look at him, and no amount of… well, no amount of anything is going to fix that.

There’s a reason he’s fascinated by Violet telling him he’s a good person.

I really, really struggle when people talk about how Xaden is a terrible person and an awful friend and everyone else would be better off without him because I feel like that’s true of me too.

Disclaimer: I know that’s not the same thing, and people are entitled to their interpretations of the characters! This is just me talking about what goes on in my head. The ways my brain lies to me ultimately have nothing to do with the way people write fic. If it doesn’t latch on to this, it would (and does) latch onto something else.

I still don’t have a point. I’m just finding it helpful to write this stuff out and work through it, and some people seem to have found the first post helpful to read so! Let’s be vulnerable.

(Reposting from my Tumblr because this is more personal than I usually get over there.)

I'm not putting this on my fandom blog because ultimately it's not fandom specific... but since we're talking about mental health as fic writers and fandom people, I asked myself, should I insert myself into this conversation?

Because if I'm not on Tumblr, I would not have an excuse to avoid doing my accounting homework and while I do find figuring depreciation to be calming I don't want to do it before today. ( Read more... )

In case it helps, here are some sources I'm using to make sure I'm at least aware of the major stuff going on without feeling like I have to actually scour the news hourly (because I know awful things are happening pretty much hourly).

Matt Kiser posts: What The Fuck Just Happened Today?

A political newsletter for normal people, WTF Just Happened Today? is a sane, once-a-day newsletter helping normal people make sense of the news. Curated daily and delivered to 200,000+ people every afternoon around 3 pm Pacific.

Violet Blue posts: Threat Model

Two inclusive, curated weekly newsletters: A cybersecurity and digital privacy news roundup on Tuesdays at 8:30am PST, and a roundup dedicated to the week's news and information on Covid-19 prevention, risks, discoveries, global and local snapshots, risk-assessment tools, and more (every Thursday, 8:30am PST). These are research-intensive, fact-checked, labor-intensive, and require an around the clock work cycle.

Tis the season where I am making a post for Yuletide.

( Request 1: the Empyrean )

Explaining to people (dentists, MRI techs, tattoo artists) that you generally "just space out" when doing something painful so please don't worry if you don't respond/aren't chatty.

Because our normal response to pain is to just not have anyone front if we don't have to have someone dealing with it!

This post is brought to you by: It's been weeks since I scheduled the appointment for my first tattoo and I'm still occasionally overthinking the things I said on the call with the artist.