the trick is to keep breathing

• Today is the first day I've worked in 2012 and not had a single meeting. The next after this? 05 March. What the hell.


• At 620 comments - and growing - I'm pretty sure this is the greatest FF Kissing Battle we've had yet. Even if you're not on a team, come on in and play!
  • I'm writing tons of Final Fantasy / Gundam Wing crossovers. SHOOT ME.


• So I've been diagnosed with arthritis in my big toe. The injury's a long story; the tl;dr version is that I'm off any kind of high-impact stress on it for 2-3 weeks and I maybe shouldn't run very much in my future also (depends on how it "heals" (since arthritis doesn't exactly, you know, fix itself: HEY CARTILAGE. GROW BACK ALREADY)). On one hand: OH DARN I DON'T LIKE RUNNING ANYWAY. On the other hand: I am a stubborn Taurus fuck and I don't like the idea of my body winning the war against me when I'm only 30 years old. CUE ANGST AND SPACEHEARTING.


• Oh, and I'm on goddamned prescription drugs again. AGAIN. (No drinking for 2-3 weeks? LIKE FUCK YOU SAY.)


• It's 20 February and I have yet to do a single goddamn thing for my graduate thesis. I hate school so much.


• Speaking of not working on grad school: !! My schedule for the next few weekends is like being PUNCHED IN THE FACE WITH AWESOME. It goes like this: DISTANT WORLDS --> BJORK (!!!!!!!!!!) --> possible trip to the plant which is shitty --> PITTSBURGHCON --> LESBIAN GARAGE SALE SHIT SHOW --> Acen --> MY GODDAMNED 30th BIRTHDAY --> Katy's graduation --> CABINCON PART I ("A HOT TUB IS NOT CAMPING"). I am really not leaving my 20s quietly.


• I cleaned up my tags on DW this afternoon. I'm finally back under 1000. I really need to do the same on LJ, but LJ lacks the AMAZEBALLS "tag merge" tool that Dreamwidth has, for when you type a tag in just a little bit wrong and end up with 3 variants on the tag, "I am a vain fuck." (This is a true story!).


• The word "amazeballs" was actually in TIME magazine BTW.


• Zero ships 3x4 is one of the most hilarious things I've read all day. I would easily say "the most hilarious" on any other day but as the other things going on in my email right now are (1) a serious discussion on which crossover troll fic idea is the lube for the other and (2) the creation of an Opera in at least 14 movements about The Shit Show Of Our Lives, there's some stiff competition in my Inbox today. Nevertheless, read that shit.


• I have not played more than a couple hours of FFXIII. Don't judge me. So far the PS3 has basically been a very expensive way to steam music and Netflix. Winning.


• Going to rewatch some Sherlock this week. Might have intelligent thoughts about it. Might just reblog more shite on Tumblr.

And that's the news.

So safety_caesars got me to watch Gundam Wing with her, when we first moved in together. I need to talk about this a little bit because it will sort of set the stage for all of the future flailing that's going to happen here. She and I rewatched Evangelion back in May/June-ish while I was caring for the Weasley Kittens, and it was really fun and interesting to just rewatch old animes and flail and talk about them. (For a mental image that should basically cover all of "us rewatching Eva", please picture the two of us drunk as fuck, buried under blankets (yes it was May), clinging to each other in a state of terrified and desperate cathartic mindfuck as we scream at the creepified disgustingness that is all of the Evas -- and then, three seconds later, engage in hilarious debate about how we hate every character a little, and breasts. The end.)

Anyway. We had rewatched all of Avatar: The Last Airbender, we had watched some other stuff, and Becky says to me, do you want to watch Gundam Wing? Sure, I said. I was just a tiny bit too old to catch it at the time it was out on Toonami -- and this will become very important: I missed the entire first incarnation of the fandom as a whole. I didn't really know a lot about it except that there were boys and robots and it was back from the 90s. Becky said she had liked it a lot and was interested in seeing how it stacked up now; I said, hey, it was popular and even if I don't get into it, I'll be glad that I watched it. So we started watching eps during dinner (and often after dinner, into the second bottle of wine, because we make really good life choices).

Here's how that rewatch went.

• First ~1/3 of the show: huh, this is alright… it's kind of confusing and complicated for a kids' show and I'm having trouble keeping track of who is where and what is which, but I like these cutefaced characters a lot. It's fun! More wine please.


• Second ~1/3 of the show: Okay, these characters are actually really awesome; I'm still not sure how much of the story I'm picking up here, and every time I think I have it under control somebody switches sides or changes positions or otherwise mindfucks me, but I'll keep watching for PRETTY, AMAZING BOYS IN ROBOTS. I can see why people liked this, I get it.


• Final 1/3 of the show: JESUS IN A BARREL OF FUCKS WHEN THE HELL DID THIS SHOW GET SO AWESOME AND HOW DID IT CREEP UP ON ME AND WHY DO I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED. WHAT IS HAPPENING. I AM NOT EVEN PREPARED. WHEN DID ALL OF THE CHARACTERS BECOME MASSIVE BAMFS AND WHY AM I GAY FOR ALL OF THEM OH MY GOD MY HEART, IT'S EVERYWHERE JESUS CHRIST PLEASE TELL ME THERE IS MORE


• after the last episode: *Becky and I just staring at each other and repeating, "Oh my fucking god," for about twenty minutes*

So of course I wanted to dive right into the fandom – never mind that it hasn't existed for like 10 years, jerks – but I realized the very first time I sat down to write shameporn anything that I definitely hadn't caught enough of the details of the backstories to really feel great writing anything more than, I don't know, clown blowjobs really dumb stuff. And I was finding other people who were all about a tiny little fandom revival – not just safety_caesars but katmillia, and then I met notraffic and it all went downhill towards the SHAME TRAIN – but I was like, oh god oh god what the fuck happened in Luxembourg? Where the fuck was that in the show. I don't even know. And I knew that Becky didn't want to rewatch it again, right away (and duh, she knows what happened), which was cool, so originally I thought maybe I'd just read up on stuff online, get episode recaps or read the GW wiki or something like that.

Then I remembered that

1. I run a lot every week, and it's on a treadmill now because it's cold
2. I have an iPad
3. Running is boring
4. Running to Gundam Wing would be less boring
5. I could watch the episodes with the English voices and learn something about the dub, too

So I now have the series on my iPad, and I watch 1-2 episodes every time I run, depending on the length of the run. :D The English dub is pretty different than what's in my head, and it's also easier to run with headphones and English – it can be hard to read subtitles when I'm doing sprint intervals – and I don't really give any fucks that I'm watching a kid's cartoon in a public gym, whooooops.

So anyway, let's talk about my feelings on episodes 01-05.

( GW Rewatch 01-05: Go! )

I'm running tomorrow and probably Friday, so I'll share my thoughts as I go.

ALSO: need to obtain some GD Gundam Wing icons omg

As we continue...

( Katy and Sev Gundam Wing drunk wine gay BONERS what other tags can I add to this )

1) My DW is in the midst of a big spam attack right now, everyone. I'm doing what I can to keep on top of the 'Delete As Spam' so that DW gets notified and gets to banhammer away, but since I'm not always around a computer capable of doing so immediately, there's only so much I can do. My apologies if you get a comment notification from something on my DW that's spam. If it doesn't improve in a day or two I am going to turn off anonymous comments for a little while.

(According to denise this is one of those attacks during which a spambot leaves a unique google-able code - hence the string of garbage subject lines and the cutely misspelled sentences underneath - and then searches for those phrases in a week or two to test a site's anti-spam measures.)

2) THANKS for all of the useful phone comments! I still... have no idea what to do, haha. Actually I think what I'll do first and foremost is see what Verizon's return policy is -- I wouldn't mind giving a new phone a trial period first. (I'm on Verizon pretty much for good. Not only do I get a discount on Verizon through work, making smartphones much more affordable, but it's the only mobile service that can somewhat consistently allow me to call my parents' house in Buffalo - apparently Sevmom and Sevdad live in a cell phone black hole.)

3) Had some much-needed and much-appreciated down time this weekend, all by myself with nothing to do. It was glorious. Of course I then filled it with a bottle of wine and some awful Gundam Wing porn. DONT JUDGE MY LIFE

4) I'm tired!

I have been having the weirdest sleep lately, on weeknights. I think it's because my sleep schedule's all up in the wonk zone -- my stupid body deals best when I'm sleeping a lot, and it deals best with that when actually being on some kind of sleep schedule (between a rigid sleep schedule and my sleeping drugs, I can manage to beat my insomnia 6 out of 7 nights of a given week). So I need to fix that.

But it's like... there are nights I go to bed and I wake up feeling like I've only gotten 4 hours of sleep... and it's been 7 hours and it's time for work; that feeling sucks. And then there are nights where I go to bed and wake up feeling like I've gotten 4 hours of sleep... and it's only been like 2. That's what happened last night - I rolled over all groggy and covered in cats, thinking "great goddamn, I do not feel like I got 7 hours of sleep at all" - and it was 2 am. It was a beautiful thing, rolling right the fuck back over and burrowing up in my blankets and knowing I had another 4 hours to sleep. Naturally the great feeling didn't translate into me feeling any more awake this morning but there you go.

I also had a fabulous dream last night that I was making Thanksgiving dinner with all 5 Gundam Wing pilots. (Heero really is a dick.) Which is a good lead into saying safety_caesars and I finished watching Gundam Wing!! More detailed thoughts later, but if you have seen it now is the time to pour your thoughts into a comment and amuse me.