The Face May Not Be Perfect, But Still, That's Pretty Gorgeous.

Whoops

Forgot to post an update. Livejournal support was actually quite quick in responding to me, and very helpful. It ultimately involved me having to mess around with photobucket, to post something for them to use a verificaton, but I regained access of my LJ account Sep 4th, 2021. Considering it’s now Jan, 2022, just goes to show how infrequently I post stuff,

Has my brain stopped working?

I can’t find the ‘ilke’ button on many pages.... I can’t find it on my page. And when I look up how to add the like and reblog buttons, I get very technical answers that I don’t know how to put into practice.

Well it can’t be called an FAQ...

More a combination of OAQ, possibly RAQ and ANAQ...

Occasionally Asked Question, Rarely Asked Question and Almost Never Asked Question.

Rare/Occasional: Gnarynhar?

Well, my preferred handle of Thordis is usually taken. Most people then go for adding a number, but, I just don’t like that, I need something I can resonate to, and a number just doesn’t work for me. I have sometimes used AusThordis, but that feels like too much work.

And Gnarynhar is easier?!

Well, no. (It is one letter shorter though!) And it’s a couple of noises of frustration put together, slightly altered and put into letters, but it’s something I made myself, so the resonance I want is there. Usually shortened to Gnar or Gnary by others,,,, it is a bit of a mess to type, I know. The ‘G’ is, well sort of silent, it’s there to twist your mouth as you pronounce the ‘n’ to get the right sound. Nyarr-nn-haarr.

Not easy to spell, not easy to remember, not even my first choice. But it’s mine, and... at least it’s never taken.

Almost Never: Professional Crazy?

I am on a disability support pension, heck I qualified for it back when I was, frankly, better than I am right now. I reason it out thusly: I am crazy. I get money for being crazy. Therefore I am a professional crazy.

My psychiatrist has said I’m not crazy, and I’m not saying having OCD = being crazy. In the end, it’s how I choose to self identify. Read Mara Wilson's article on OCD on Cracked.com Point 2 is where this comes into play.

Looking back into my childhood before the OCD developed, I can see at least one thing I did and say “Yeah, that was OCD right there.” But beyond that, I was always that extra bit different from other kids my age. Hitting (and mostly finishing puberty in primary school rather than in high school like everyone else also contributed to some of my quirks.)

Also, I seem to approach some things differently than most people. I took psychology as an elective in high school, and when I left high school, in the adult ed classes I took as an alternative. I’d be saying something in class, and the teacher was always cutting me off, saying I was off topic.

As far as I was concerned I was on topic, she just never let me finish, so I could show what I was saying did tie into the discussion. I was just approaching things from such an oblique angle, no-one saw the connection I was trying to make.

Plus my social skills were never the best, and towards the end of primary school I was starting to isolate myself. Then in high school, well my friends all went to a different school, and I was left with a combination of people I knew from primary school and didn’t get along with, mixed with strangers that mostly wanted to pick on me. I didn’t have friends in high school, I had acquaintances that occasionally weren’t interested in making my life hell.

So what little social skills I had atrophied, and as I moved closer and closer to my current housebound state, they withered even further. I see myself not only as an introvert, but shy. And for many years I really was. My classmates in TAFE did not see things the same way. But that’s because if I do feel comfortable enough to start a conversation, I tend to verbally hold people down and talk at them until they run away or beg for mercy.

Social interaction is important, Terry Pratchett put it something like “people need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society”. I, barely even watch tv anymore.

Roping that tangent back to it’s origin of crazy. It’s also a shorthand I use with my family. Anything related back to my OCD, requests, restrictions, explanations, instead of a long, frustrating explanation they know they’ll never fully ‘get’, it’s easier to just say “It’s a crazy thing.” and move on.

Sometimes it’s more of a discussion, with them offering suggestions, most of the time, I’ve already considered what’s been brought up. Other times, they can add that little piece I’m missing.... for a problem that by all rights shouldn’t exist. -I feel ‘crazy’ is an apt term.

I start with a simple question, and I produce another stream-of-consciousness wall-of-text attack. At least I paragraph it? ....time to look up how to put this under a cut.

Argh.

And like a dumbass, I didn’t bookmark http://acetechnologist.tumblr.com and my brain can’t hold information well, so I had to spend a while finding it again. I was in the mood to re-read some of the reactioncaps, only to find I didn’t have it in my bookmarks. I like the reactioncaps, it actually got me motivated enough to finally watch through Kuuga- allthough it was something of an adventure finding the fansubs for it. Still, I’m glad it got me to finally watch it though. -Although ‘Odagiri effect’? Shouldn’t that be ‘Katsurayama effect’? Ichijo is where the real hotness is at. <3 As for lately, finally took a look at some Agito. Got through 12 episodes so far. Was thinking of looking at the reactioncaps for it to help put me in the mood to tackle some more eps, only to find out, no bookmark.

That’s the downside of keeping everything open in tabs. Circumstances happen, and everything disappears, and you realize there were a lot of things you should have bookmarked, but didn’t. Anyway, at least I’ll have more context for the fanfics. Yes, I read fanfic for series I haven’t seen yet. Some things, I do backwards. ....and some things I do in such an out-of-order fashion it goes beyond comprehension.

Dan Kuroto after he’s dropped the good guy act and launches into the scenery chewing is one of the most glorious hamtastic performances out there, and you can feel how much fun Iwanaga-san is having. The only thing that could beat it is Shindo Gaku’s work as Killbus in the Build New World movie. There’s good chance that if they were close by, even sets he didn’t appear on had tooth-marks. One can only hope the stagehands were given proper guides to each actors tastes so they could properly season each set beforehand. “it’s a Dan Kuroto scene, salt? Chicken salt? Pepper? Soy or Barbeque sauce?! I NEED TO KNOW!”

I just learned that the actor who plays Kuroto Dan, Tetsuya Iwanaga, has a lot of talents. He’s pharmacist (I think making him the only Ex Aid cast member with a medical background), fluent in English, and an actual “genius” in real life. For instance, he got a “triple A rating” on the JAXA astronaut qualification test.

He’s also seems to be soft spoken:

(He’s like this in other interviews, not just the one here in English.)

I bring this last part up because I knew he was having fun playing Kuroto but wow, this drives home just how much he’s having a blast.

Wow, the tip? I can touch my nose with my tongue but I can’t manage the tip. Still, nice to know I share a skill with one of my favourite scenery-chewers.

I’ve stopped being surprised by finding out new insane things about Iwanaga EXCEPT this one time

Some background.

Okay, I can’t edit this how I want (leaving only the middle under a cut), so I’ll post my concluding paragraph before the cut.

Being as socially isolated as I am, I can't say for sure, but I'm guessing I have fairly odd behaviours when it comes to fandoms. I tend to jump from one to another as the mood strikes me, but eventually come back to most of them for a while, trawl my way through fanfic and art, and then completely ignore it as I move back to another old fandom.

Okay, that's probably not that odd, but when I cycle off a fandom I tend to ignore it completely and not even mentally count it as something I'm a fan of. Sometimes to the point of almost actively avoiding it, say, avoiding reading a crossover fic for something I'm currently into that's been crossed with one of my previous fandoms that I'm currently ignoring.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The upshot of all this being- sometimes I’ll effectively ‘drop’ a fandom entirely, only to wander back months or years later and pick back up where I left off. (And in the intervening period, never actively acknowledge it’s something I’ve like.)

The thing is, I don't really even know why I do that. As a kid, most of the time I was always in the process of reading anything from two to four novels at the same time.

Say, I'd have an Asimov short stories compilation lying around, be halfway through one Anne McCaffery, starting off another Anne McCaffery from a different series and had just finished re-reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader because it was a rainy day on the weekend and C.S. Lewis and large mugs of tea just seemed to be on the agendum, and then that evening, one of my Terry Pratchett novels is begging for another read.

And then I'd have trouble understanding why people felt that keeping track of the stories when reading two novels concurrently was such a difficult thing to do.

I didn't have the analogy then, but now that I think about it, isn't exactly the same as having more than one favourite tv show? I just went in as much for the written word as I did tv. ....plus never liking soap operas usually gave me some time free each evening.

When you're eight, a choice between Neighbours, the news or reruns of Yes Minister is enough to make flail in frustration in the lack of anything *good* on the tv, so you need some way to amuse yourself before primetime. I happened to have a large sci-fi/fantasy library on hand thanks to my parents, so I'd pick a book and start reading.

Or it was the weekend/holidays and I had to be *somewhere* so I'd go along to work with my mother, who was a cataloguing librarian. And back in the work areas of the library just happened to be a huge collection of sci-fi that someone had willed to the university, and there's only so many times you can wander around the lake, main square or cafeteria before you're bored out your mind.

And this degenerated into reminiscing about books and my childhood fairly quickly. Huh. Well, that's also a trait of mine, I can never keep on topic. (Or I'll have a long rambling story/theory/anecdote that seemingly everyone else considers off-topic, but dammit- you didn't let me finish and it all ties together!) My tangents never seems to match up with what the rest of the world considers 'understandable'.

The upshot of all this being- sometimes I'll effectively 'drop' a fandom entirely, only to wander back months or years later and pick back up where I left off. (And in the intervening period, never actively acknowledge it's something I've like.)

Circumstances.

So, back in…. May. The 17th or 18th thereof. The laptop I was using hit the loading screen singularity. It booted to an error message. I could restart, and get the same error message, or I could try to run recovery, watch it fail, then restart.

So geared up in my informal hazmat-lite disposable attire, I stepped out of the front door of my little Fortress of Crazitude, and went inside the house, where the functional human beings live, to use a laptop there.

Searching for something I liked was going to take a while. In that strange Before Time, when people went outside without being masked, Dad zipped out and kindly got for me the cheapest laptop he could find.

Now I could begin my search in earnest.

Starting with the gaming rigs. Hideous, hideous, awkard design (that was hideous). The closest to what I was looking for was an Alienware model… that was hideous, and came with something called Tobii eye-tracking. I don’t want my computer staring at me. Plus, this was a gimmick, I don’t play the kind of intense shooters where every picosecond counts.

I kept looking.

I found a laptop marketed as a ‘desktop replacement’. Just the sort of thing I wanted. Something with the power of a desktop, but without needing me to do a major cleaning job to find space for it, and/or rig up something to hold a monitor where I wanted it? Perfect.

So I looked around, a place in the US, it had them in stock, and they would even customize it. Great, a bigger hard-drive! Okay the thing needed two power-bricks to work, which would be a hassle, but I could live with that.

In the meantime, the budget laptop could just about run an older version of Minecraft… as long it was on the server my bff’s hurricane child had dragged me onto, I could make do.

I made my order. ……….

3 weeks passed. I heard nothing from them. Okay, the world is in chaos, I expected some delays. Still, I wanted at least some idea for how much longer I would be making ersatz icepacks to keep my new little laptop from overheating from the overworking I was currently giving it, even as I did my best to cut down on my usual habits to lessen strain on it’s CPU.

I sent in a request for an update. “Oh yeah, turns out we didn’t actually have one in stock”. So how long till they could get one? “Oh they’re discontinued. How about one of these?”

All the ‘these’ were ones I’d looked at and already discounted. Wait, here’s one on eBay, how I about I send it to you, and you upgrade that one? I’ll pay the extra shipping fees.

“Oh no, we wouldn’t be able to honor a warranty on that.”

My domain is the black hole of electronics. Once it’s in here, it won’t leave again. My OCD means I cant have something sent out to be repaired and have it sent back. Once it’s here, it’s here. I tried to explain this, and said I would waive any rights to a warranty. It would be the most expensive idiot tax I’d ever paid, but I was willing to pay it.

June passed and I heard nothing.

Time to look again. I had toyed with the idea of a custom rig from another place in the US, but, oh, the price tag. And the wait time. …Mainly the price tag. Okay, major purchase for me, and I was going to crack open my savings. But still, I’m on a pension.

Okay, another look, see if I can find anywhere in Australia. More cash could be spent on the laptop itself and not the insane international shipping tool.

I found a place. Custom configurations, in a shell that isn’t painful to look at.

Could it be?

I checked some reviews. Chunky…. I like a bit of heft to a device. Besides, it wasn’t going to be doing a lot of moving anyway. 1-2 metres on average at best. Fans can get loud…. that means they’re working. I can get a headset if I need it.

Ooh, and they have a sale on too. I consult with in-house tech support. I’m told I can get the hard-drives cheaper elsewhere, and another M2 memory stick, then put them in myself.

Sweet, more cash to spend on the graphics card and CPU. Not quite top-tier, but heck, I hadn’t been running any of my games on the old laptop at full graphics settings anyway. No dvd drive though, but every other maker seems to have dispensed with those as well. Oh well, it’s not like I used those much anyway, and I can always get an external one.

And it only needs the one power brick.!

Better specs than the discontinued model, I can max out on hard-drive space and have a second M2 drive just for my games, with plenty of room!

Before the end of June, I make my order.

I find a big hard-drive, a good sized M2 stick, and even an external usb enclosure for the hard drive I pulled out of the blue-screened purgatory.

July, that place in the US actually mails me back. Since I was willing to waive a warranty, they might be able to source a model off eBay. Ship has sailed, I’ve found me something nicer, and I’ve picked out the extra drives for it.

A few days later, the new place emails me. They’re having delays, but we have a new range out which will be coming in sooner, here are the stats, we can switch you over to one of those?

I forward the stats to tech support. Nope, the hard drive you got in anticipation won’t fit. New place “hmm, that’s true, we’ll do our best to keep you updated”.

They do, and and my order’s been put in priority for assemblage.

As August gets into gear, my new workhorse arrives, and the poor beleaguered budget laptop can retire to light browsing duty.

Only the big hard drive I got? Turns out it’s fat ass can’t fit in the drive bay. Oops. But with the help of tech support, I found an external enclosure that will fit it, so I have a roomy and easy to use backup device.

And then I stripped the head on the screw holding in the M2 memory. And the other slot, that requires a lot more work to get to. But I’m already wiped from the ordeal, the files on the now external drives run fine, and I still have plenty of room on the drive. I can wait for the sales, and pick up some (carefully dimension-checked) drives then. (This beast will hold 2 standard hard drives!) and get around to putting in the second M2 stick.

And that concludes this chapter of Crazy Shut-in Searches for Their Dream Laptop.

This is why my dream home always included a library room.

(With a nice big window to one side and big comfy chairs.)

I have too many books but also not enough books and I also have no space for books but I will make space for books

Biting the bullet.

Okay, my first tumblr. Whether this turns out to be a echoing wasteland or a den of endless reposts remains to be seen.