Waking up can be rough sometimes…

So last night I had a dream where my PTSD had vanished, I was my old self again, and the really gorgeous goth girl who gets off the bus across the street from my house most days had asked me out; AND it gets better…

I had just bought an old 2 door cinema, and was converting the two theatres into a house for myself, with these insane multi-tiered mezzanine floors, and enclose spiral staircases between them, two walk in wardrobes, a 100 square foot artists studio, a command centre of my own with a custom dual motheboard, 4 graphics card, 32 gigabyte, liquid cooled gaming rig. Oh and a 16 foot projected screen with 7.1 surround sound for my 360…AND it got better.

The following morning I was travelling to ComicCon as a panellist, because not only had Acidgirl become huge, but it had been made in to a cartoon. The dream ended with my PiC and I having a pint with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

Then I woke up…rough morning man, rough morning.

So Summer has arrived, apparently. (Or the things I hate/love about Summer.)

So, in a purely calendar based way, we are now 12 days in to my least favourite of the seasons; though the birds drowning in the trees may disagree. I like Winter, Spring is cool, and Autumn is just frikkin’ awesome; but Summer…Summer mostly sucks. Mostly.

It’s too hot! – I don’t cope well with heat. It makes me sticky, smelly, and grumpy, while also making it feel like far too much work to do anything that might ease those issues. Being a Gothgirl, with a very healthy respect and fear of skin cancer, I find myself spending far too much time skipping from shadow to shadow.

But on the other hand – The pretty girls wear a lot less. Enough said.

I have to shave…parts – Because I too have to wear less, I find myself having to shave off a season’s leg hair growth. It’s awkward, messy, and my legs sting/itch like a son of a female dog for days after.

But on the other hand – The boys of the world are missing out on that moment when you get in to a freshly made bed, with freshly shaved legs. Oh Goddesses, the sheer sensuality of it all! As an added plus, my legs look great in shorts.

My dogs want to play out the back, not cuddle me on the couch – So I find myself abandoned, even on days where I feel like death warmed up. No, no fluffy cuddles, no hugely satisfied sigh from my Beagle when she finds just the right spot, and goes to sleep with her head on my lap. No hugely satisfied sigh from me when my…fuck knows what…stops trying to climb in to my ear, and instead settles on the back of the couch behind my head.

But on the other hand – I can play my Xbox with the littler of the two insisting on sitting between my legs, with her paws on my hands, growling at everything on the screen. Also no constant opening/closing of the back door as they insist on treating me like their own personal doorman.

No fires – I loved a good fire. I’d cheerful, comforting, warming, heartening, and many, many other words ending with “ing” which you can find in your thesaurus.

But on the other hand – No ashes to clean, no fuel to bring in, no getting up to stoke it.

Too many movies I want to see, but not enough money – Godzilla, or Guardians of the Galaxy. X-Men, or self-respect.

But on the other hand – Who am I kidding?! It’s going to be Guardians, I mean I’m completely hooked on a feeling.

Having to pretend to like going to the beach – I don’t. It’s gritty, smelly, crowded, filled with beer-gut possessing men who insist on pretending they have anything anyone wants to see. Oh, and the water in Ireland is always, always, ALWAYS fucking freezing cold!

But on the other hand – I got nothing…absolutely nothing.

I’ve got an idea. Oh crap, why won’t the ideas stop?

In the past week I’ve had the following major ideas, and a myriad of minor ones which I’m not going to list here, an airsoft gun built in to a pre-existing nerfish body, a design for my ideal drawing lap-board-thingy, how my ideal Siren would look, how Acidgirl’s ship should look and work, and a set-up for a review vlog that would be both doable, and enjoyable for me to make. I should point out that I am excited about all of these, and really want to make them happen.

But even so I’m starting to feel like “my” character in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is more and more becoming Leonard of Quirm, but without the healthy body. Seriously, this week wasn’t even a good week for inventive thinking. In a good week that list would be four or fives times as long, and I’d already have pages of research and working out done for all of them aside from the ones I had last night. And do you know what? It’s getting fucking old.

Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m alone in this, (Oh Gods I hope not.) but this hyper creativity is really fucking annoying. I have over 30 ideas for full length novels. I have maybe 3 times that number of ideas for short stories and novellas. I have multiple designs for airsoft guns each with it’s own innovation. Parts of five different pieces of music written (Only 1 finished, and that one is flamenco of all things). Graphic novels? Yup got 4 or maybe 5 of those planned out in immense detail. Ukulele designs, yeah…check. Video blogs, 5 different ones worked out and ready to go.

And I am so sick of having all these things ready to go, but not being healthy enough to run with any of them. Seriously, today I can write (a little), tomorrow I may be lucky if I can manage the climb the stairs to the toilet and still have enough concentration left to remember to wipe afterwards.

So I’m left with a deep sense of frustration, and a theory that it’s a demon, a dancing demon, no, something isn’t right there. Damn it Giles is right, it’s a Muse. I’ve obviously pissed off some member of the Greek Pantheon, and so they’ve inflicted a Muse with verbal diarrhoea to speak in my ear. To, not so slowly, drip so many ideas into my fevered brain that eventually it will collapse under it’s own sane insanity. Yeah, that’s it.

AHA! I’m on to you, you sons of…Gods!

Incidentally, Acidgirl is coming along, whose of you on my Facebook can expect some new pictures of my rapidly developing character models, and the story is much, much better.

Oh and this is stuck in my head now. Have a good weekend, I may be saner by Tuesday.

So I had this idea over the weekend.

In Ireland we have a big problem. We have all these “experts” who advise our political masters. Nothing unusual about that, every democratic nation has those. And there’s also nothing unusual about those advisers having their own political axe to grind.

No one half of the big problem we have is that not so long ago (5-ish years) a group of financial leaders knowingly lied through their teeth about how deep the financial hole they’d just walked in to actually was. We now know they knew precisely how bad it was, and that they played the government of the time like a cheap fiddle. Though that’s not to say that the government of the time weren’t just as bad in their own ways.

The other half of the big problem is that those fraudsters are most likely going to get away scot-free from this. They’ve stolen the futures of probably the next two generations of Irish people, and then in some cases walked away to a very comfortable early retirement and lovingly provided with nice golden parachutes to help keep them in their dotage. The poor dears. After all there’s nothing will make you more tired than knowingly defrauding an entire nation of dozens of billions of Euro’s of taxpayers money.

So my idea. Well, there I sat on the toilet, noisily evacuating my bowels when it suddenly hit me. Maybe it was the proximity to a large quantity of shite, maybe it was the rank smell of that same shite wafting gently on the breeze. I don’t really know. But one second I was thinking about how nice it would be to not have to spend most of every day on the toilet, the next second one word went running through my mind, screaming at the top of it’s lungs, while waving sparklers. That word?

Perjury.

Now this won’t work for falsehoods spoken in the past, but in the future it could maybe, just maybe, make our own shower of self-serving, lying scum-bags (certain political advisers, politicians, civic leaders of various stripes, senior bankers) think twice before they lie with utter blatancy. Lying knowing full-well that those lies will never come back to haunt them, beyond a little embarrassment here or there.

How about laying out a law that requires an oath of truthfulness of any adviser to any member of the government who is Cabinet level or higher? The same would go for anyone, anyone at all, speaking before either of the House of the Dáil.

That way if it is later proven that they have knowingly misled the State, or officers of the State well we can immediately put them somewhere secure. Where we can always find them if we need to ask them any probing questions while the reason for those lies are investigated by the police, NOT the government itself.

Sure it’ll mean having someone in Dáil Éireann, pretty much all the time, who can actually legally witness and record an Oath to the State. But hey, surely some civil servant in there has enough free-time to add that to their résumé.

Who knows maybe “National Officer of Oaths to the State.” could be a nice little feather in the cap in the future.

The very worst part of being chronically ill, is the guilt.

No really, I’m not kidding. Worse than; in no particular order,

the pain,

the tiredness,

the diarrhoea,

the bleeding,

the constant low-grade headache,

the skin lesions,

or even having to deal with tin-god junior doctors.

Seriously, worse than any of that is living with the guilt. But what do I mean by “the guilt”? Well that’s going to take a bit of explaining.

The average person can do pretty much what they want to do. Want to see a movie with a friend? No problem, “Which movie, and what time?”

Tell their partner not to worry about the housework, that it’ll all be done when they get home; yup, got that covered.

Or how about wanting to go to bed with a lover, going all out with the flirtation, the foreplay, the making them feel like they’re standing at the centre of a sexual whirlwind; then having to stop because you’ve run completely out of energy, or because your body has decided that this is exactly the right moment to need to throw up?

My own life is a huge list of cancelled plans, lost connections, and missed opportunities. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve gotten ready to go somewhere, only to have to cancel at literally the last-minute. Or how many times I’ve missed events that I was really excited about attending; many burlesque events, artistic events, movies. Hell not that long ago I had to miss one of my favourite singers, Voltaire, because my body decided that it really needed 4 straight days of bleeding from my bowel.

In essence, I am an involuntary flake. Totally unreliable where any social life outside of my own home is concerned. To be able to do something as minor as go do the weekly grocery shop I rely on medicating my body to a point where I will “probably” get a few hours of not needing to be within ten feet of a toilet. Note the “probably”, the quotation marks are there because about 1 time in 10 it doesn’t work, with sometimes rather cataclysmic results for my underwear.

Now, you’re probably thinking that this should all lead to my feeling sorry for myself. But it doesn’t, or at least it only does very rarely. I’m used to not being able to plan with any certainty. The best I can ever promise is “maybe”, or very occasionally, “probably”; I’m used to being like that. I’m used to never being able to even think “definitely”. Definitely simply doesn’t exist in my life, and I’m used to it, I’ve had to grow used to it.

But what I’ve never grown used to is the guilt that goes with constantly letting other people down. For example, I quite simply can not remember the last time I went out for a night with my Partner-in-Crime. No memory at all, it’s been that long. And I feel terrible about it. I know she loves a good night out. I know she would love to have one with me, but…

See, there’s always that but. Even if we manage to make it out the door, odds are I’ll need to come home very early when my bowel starts to voice its disinterest in staying away from its porcelain best friend.

The same goes with friends. Over and over I arrange things with friends, only to have to cancel at the 11th hour because I simply can’t leave the house any longer.

So, boom, guilt for letting them down. For cancelling plans and leaving them in the lurch.

Then of course there’s the other sides to the guilt. The the side triggered by the worry you cause people you love. Or the aspect of it caused by not being able to pull your own weight. Or the guilt that strikes when you realise that you’re just a bad girlfriend, a bad friend, a bad lover, daughter…the list goes on and on.

And all this means that you say “I’m sorry” waaaaaay too much. So you find yourself feeling guilty for being sorry.

Yeah, being ill is rotten, but feeling unending waves of guilt is worse. Now if you’ll excuse me, the toilet is calling my haemorrhoids, by name.

Off to Cork for the weekend.

Yup, it’s Mommy time,  so I’m going to leave you all with the funniest YouTube clip I’ve seen in years.

And the entire of my favourite childhood animated movie. Click the link and enjoy. (Admittedly the picture quality isn’t all that good, but for a an old VHS scan it’s not terrible, and the show really is worth a watch.)

Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All.

Anyway have a good weekend, and see you all on Tuesday.

Am I old now?

This morning while listening to the 80’s radio station on Spotify I actually came out and said the following to my Partner in Crime.

“80’s music was just better.”

Then I was called old.

I’m 35 years old.

Strictly speaking Amanda, is still less than a decade old.

But if I am totally honest I do feel old. Some days very, very old.

As any of my readers by now knows, I have a lot of physical problems. And one of the more troublesome aspects of those problems is that most mornings I wake up feeling as though I’d been beaten in my sleep. Hard. With a cricket bat. This manifests in my barely being able to walk the 15 feet to the toilet, and usually having to collapse back on to my bed for a little while afterwards.

Even 5 years ago I used to jump out of bed, and immediately be able to move gracefully. Now, I sort of half stumble everywhere for the first ten minutes out of bed.

Emotionally, I don’t fall for people like I used to. In fact in the past 12 months I’ve only had one crush. And even there I find myself not having any hope in my heart at all. It kind of feels like I found wisdom in loving, and that wisdom sucked the joy of adventure from my heart.

I can’t stay up late anymore. I want to be in bed with a mug of hot milk by 10pm every, single, night. And if I do stay up late it takes me days to stop feeling tired.

I can’t drink anymore. It just makes me feel, yuck.

I find myself watching old movies, and preferring them to modern remakes. I actually realized last week that I prefer The Thing From Another World (1951) to The Thing (1982).

I find myself wishing that gaming companies would stop making new games, and start updating the graphics on old games. I’d love to play a version of the Breath Of Fire series, where nothing has been changed aside from the music and graphics.

Do all of these mean that I am now old?

I’d rather sit in with a DVD than go out to a bar.

Actually I’d rather sit in with a parasitic worm infection than go out to a bar.

Am I setting in my ways.

Are carpet slippers, and 30 cats my next port of call?

Dear Google,

I love your Gmail service, I’ve had my main email account with you for what seems like forever. I also have several others, for various reasons. But I’m afraid to say that I now have a bone to pick with you.

Last Sunday someone in South Africa tried to break in to my old professional account. No biggie, I haven’t used it in a few years, but I had been holding on to it, rather than shutting it down, just in case. Google, you were wonderful, you stopped them accessing it, and you even emailed me to let me know that they had tried. But then you screwed up all my good will with your pedantry.

There I was, trying to use my connected email address to reset my password, but you turned around and told me that I had to wait four days before I could use it.

Why?

Get this. Because my email account had had an unauthorized access attempt.

Yes, I know, you caught it and then told me about it.

So what you’re trying to tell  me Google is that I’m not allowed to change my password, because someone 5800 odd miles away already tried to? You’d kind of think that  would be the time that you, Google, would want to make it easier for me to change my password, and reestablish my control over my own email account. Or am I wrong?

But hey, I’ll wait four days, get back into my account, and then shut it down. It’s just not worth this hassle to keep.

So thanks Google, I’m genuinely impressed with your insanity.

Yours in irritation,
Amanda Harper.

I love a challenge. The Skyrim Edition Part 2 – Bored of the Ring.

Yeah I know, I’m posting a lot about Skyrim at the moment. But right now while my body and mind are doing their very best to shred what’s left of my sanity, I’ve found SKyrim to be a surprisingly healing experience. So much to see, so much to do, so many creatures to hunt down and kill. It’s just so relaxing. And as I play it suddenly hit me that you can play a version of basically every major character from the Lord of the Rings if you really want to.

So if you really want to, here is how you can play what I think of as The Fellowship of The “By Talos! Is that a dragon?!” (For the record, because all of the Fellowship let loose a decent war-cry at one stage or another over the course of the three movies, they can all use shouts.)

1: “They’re taking the Hobbits to Isengard!”

Yes, you too can play a character named Legolas. He won’t be as pretty. But he can be just as bad-ass. For this character you are limited to two bows over the course of the game, an a pair of elven daggers. You can only wear cloth (or if you’re some sort of wimpy girlie-elf leather) armor. Oh and no magic that affects other creatures, self buffing only thank you!

2: “I don’t want to be king…but sure why not.”

Who doesn’t want to Aragorn? So bad-ass he can kill orcs with just his scruffy boy beard. Aragorn gets a long-bow, any one or two handed sword (since in the movies he’s seen using both swords with whatever number of hands he feels like), an elven dagger, and leather armor. Oh, and a horse too. Has to marry an elf-maiden. But can not own a house. The last one is a huge handicap in playing Skyrim. Can use no magic of any kind, smithing, or enchanting, but feel free to use all the sneaking, and alchemy you can get your hands on.

3: “Do you think my beard is flowing enough?”

Everyone who doesn’t want to be Aragorn, wants to be Gandalf. And who can blame you when as Gandalf you get any staff, any one handed or two handed sword (for the same reason as Aragorn.) But Gandalf can only wear cloth armor…so you know, clothes. Nor can he own a house. That said he can use any magic, alchemy, and enchanting. And he gets an awesome black horse to emote at.

4: “Never mind me, I die at the end of the first movie, and you’ve never read the book…” *gasp, thud*

Would anyone really want to play Boromir? Well actually, yes. Of all the Fellowship characters he is one of only two who actually fits the Nord of Skyrim template. Give him a one handed sword, a good one. Give him a shield, and the best frikkin armor you can find; any heavy armor for pre-Fellowship days, any light armor for Rivendale up to riddled with arrows. No bows though, and definitely no magic. But perhaps, seeing as he was the student of Gandalf in brighter days, a good grounding in alchemy. But not too much sneaking about, it is after all an act beneath the contempt of this Son of Go…Whiterun. But he can have a horse, and even have as many houses as he likes.

5: “No-one tosses a Dwarf, the armor weighs way to fuckin’ much laddie.”

Gimli would be the other character who fits in to the inhabitant of Skyrim template particularly well. He can obviously wear any heavy armor, and wield any axe. Hell he can even ride a horse, badly; no charging at all for you mister Dwarf. He can also smith absolutely anything, while proudly owning a house. But that’s pretty much it. No bows, no magic, not even any alchemy. Better brush up on those cooking skills.

6-9: “They’re taking us all to Isengard…well two of us anyway.”

Make your character look short. No swords, daggers only. No magic at all. No missile weapons, no horses, no shoes. But, let’s face it, since you’re probably going to play Pretty-Boy…I mean Frodo anyway, your Hobbit can wear enchanted armor. Just no shoes. Oh and he can definitely own a house. One house. But to make up for all the suckage why not max out that sneaky, lock-picking, and pickpocketing type stuff? And you better carry lots of food, seeing as they’re too naive to bother to learn alchemy that doesn’t involve getting high.

And that is probably it for my Skyrim posts for a while. You know, unless I want to write another. But in the mean time I will leave you with possibly the cruelest earwig of the present age. After all they really are…

I love a challenge. The Skyrim Edition.

You’ve heard of Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, the insanely huge open world role playing game? A game where you save all of Tamriel from the onslaught of the reawakened dragons? How about the game that has allowed potential psychopaths, sociopaths, and kleptomaniacs to express those repressed feelings in a way that won’t lead to deaths in the real world, but still manage to creep us, semi-normal gamers, the frik out?

But leaving the dark underbelly of Skyrim players alone, for now at least, yesterday I sat in my recliner, hot chocolate in one hand, controller in the other, stalking a deer when I started to wonder just how challenging Skyrim can be made. Hence the list below. Enjoy.

1: What you win, you keep.

There are shops in Skyrim. There are also furnaces, blacksmiths, and alchemical laboratories. You can build and buy your way through this game. But what if your character is an idiot? No-one would ever trust her not to laminate an anvil with her thumbs. What if every time she tries to make a healing potion she instead blew up his house, the neighbour’s house, and most of the town surrounding them? And what if she mostly uses her hard-won coins as weights on fishing lines? Oh and needless to say she’s too ham-fisted to actually pick a lock, or a pocket.

Why then you’re stuck with only using what she finds on the many, many, MANY corpses she creates.

So challenge 1 is no crafting, purchasing or theft of any kind…aside from corpse looting.

2: The undisputed light/middle/heavy weight champion of the world!

Put on the Rocky theme. A sweatband on your forehead. A squeeze bottle of Jack Daniels. Because dear reader for this challenge you are to get as far in the game as you can with no weapons. None. You see your character seems to have forgotten that unlike in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, there is no bare hand combat skill (Or at least none I can find). But she still wants to wander the fields, hills, valleys, and goblin filled dungeons of Tamriel with nothing to aid her but the armor on her back. She’s just that gods damned badass.

In fact she’s so badass that when the previous character blows up half of Whiterun in a badly advised experiment, she doesn’t turn around as she walks away.

(As I am a benevolent girlie I will allow Khajiit characters with their +15 claw damage. But apart from that…nadda.)

3: But I love Mister Pointy.

In most fantasy stories the hero has a weapon he, or she, that is a part of their signature. Druss has his axe, Legolas his bow, Gimli his ax…I may not have though out that sequence properly. Still your characters legend, dear reader, is inextricably bound with only one weapon. Their first weapon. Wander Tamriel bare handed until you stumble upon your legendary weapon. And ONLY use that weapon as you write rest of your story in the blood of your enemies.

For added bonus gaming badass points limit yourself to non-magical weapons only.

4: Unlimited Powah!

Something went wrong when you were born. You were supposed to be born on Naboo, become a senator, and eventually hand Yoda his ass in the Senate building. But instead you were born to peasants, tried to sneak into Skyrim from a bordering region, and nearly wound up being executed. But even so you’re still all Sith.

Only cloth armor. Only one single handed blade (though you can change blades, and enhance and enchant them to your hearts content as long as the enchantment makes it glow red, or not at all.). And only one spell…Spark. Oh and every time you dual wield Spark you have to scream at the enemy on the screen “Unlimited Powah!” It’s a rule.

5: Do your boys/girls hang low?

Skyrim has a deliciously cold, bracing climate. And as is traditional in such climates some people just insist on doing everything naked. You are one such person. Though to protect the children you do at least wear your filthy, ragged undies.

Wander Tamriel in naught but your skivvies. But armed to the teeth. You might allow yourself boots, helmets and gloves, if you’re some sort of wuss, along with any weapon, or spell you like. Because Sonny-Jim if it was good enough for the blue painted warriors of some backwoods dimension, well then wearing nothin’ is good enough for you.

And that good friends is it for now. If you have other challenge modes for Skyrim share them below. Feel free to like, repost, share this. Oh and if you have five minutes to spare, and feel that my blog deserves it please follow the link below and give me a nomination in the “Best Personal Blog” category. Thank you.

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