I'm spending all my free time right now working on building up some stock and putting up a storefront to try and sell some perfume to help me pay for the cost of the insane hospital bill I got dumped on me today.
It's really the only thing I can think of to do that I can make any kind of extra income from. I'm really nervous and paranoid about trying to sell things I've _made_, though. I can't shake the feeling that I'm going to do a terrible job and people are going to be unhappy with it.
You know, going through reviews and looking at negative (generally one star) reviews of books on Audible and Amazon just reminds me how unbelievably stupid and clueless people are in general.
I am super beat from organizing a birthday party for my sister this weekend, but it turned out really well.
In addition to that, I recently picked up a book on a whim and found that I really, really loved the author, so I've been plowing through her books. Laura Kinsale is a romance novelist (formerly a geologist, interesting career change) and I normally really really really do not like romance novels but her stories really come across as complex, character-driven relationship stories that happen to be romance. And the biggest pleasant surprise was that I've liked almost all of her female characters.
I really just lucked out, I'd never heard of her before, but three of her books were on Audible, narrated by someone I really liked, and I was looking for ways to burn my credits. Her books were also ridiculously cheap on Amazon for the Kindle. Most of them were $2.99, I think. For people who care about the particulars, I think the ~love scene~ payout is maybe about 1 per 100 pages or so, (though I think some have less) and they're neither overly graphic nor terribly flowery and delicate, and generally relevant to plot and character development. I kind of rolled my eyes at the fact that the majority of complaints that I read about the books were that they were 'boring' (read: not enough porn) or that the female characters were 'bitchy' or 'mean' (read: actually had personalities and didn't let others walk all over them, imagine that). Soyeah.
Since Wednesday, I listened to three books on audio and read two others on my Kindle. In five days I read five books and planned a gigantic party and housed my sister and her husband and their two kids and my mom. I also finally fired up Assassin's Creed 3 for the first time since like November and downloaded the George Washington DLC and did the annoying post-game Pivot sidequests for completion's sake. I have like 87% synchronization on the game missions, there's a handful of levels I need to go back and do obnoxious optional objectives for, including like three naval missions. When I get fed up with that, I'll probably finally toss in The Last of Us.
Last year I went and bought all three Mass Effect games on the PC, after I had already gotten ME2 on the PS3, because I didn't realize that there was no PS3 release of Mass Effect 1 at the time.
Right after I spent all that money, they put ME1 out on the PS3 because they developed the Trilogy bundle.
It turns out that I'm absolute suck at the PC controls and have a hard as fuck time with shooters, and I've had medical problems preventing me from sitting at the computer for long periods of time, plus my PC got sort of fried by my former 'roommate' so playing it on the PC has kind of gone bust. I even paid for Mass Effect 1 TWICE on the PC, because the budget disc copy didn't work and I had to buy it again through Origin as a digital download.
... and now I'm going to go pick it up on the PS3. At least I already have ME2 on the console, and I have like 5$ in credit to use on the PSN store sitting in my account. And I have a few days off work coming up where I'll have the time to actually sit down long enough to get into it. I've tried starting games a few times but didn't have enough time to really get hoooked, and ended up having to start over.
I did get through the demo of ME3 on the PS3 (it was to unlock some items in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning) so hopefully that's a good sign.
I wish I hadn't redeemed all the codes on the PC games, or I'd give them away.
Last year I played the first Assassin's Creed game to start the series from the beginning. The first game was great, even despite its flaws, and after playing it for a little while I made up this silly mock review of initial impressions and posted it on my tumblr. I didn't save any of this stuff when I deleted my tumblr account, but I've found a few things I wish I'd saved still intact through the magic of reblogs and Google and web caches, so I'm going to dump the bit of silliness here so I don't lose it again.
Our apartment complex has a pay-to-park garage that tenants can pay a monthly fee to gain access to. If you pay for parking, you get a swipe card that you must swipe to both enter and exit the garage.
Today I went to swipe out to leave for work... and nothing happened.
I tried the alternate exit, thinking maybe one was on the fritz. Nothing happened.
I had to call the emergency maintenance number and a maintenance guy on-call had to drive all the way to my apartment and card me out so that I could get out to go to work.
I was an hour late to work.
And the reason for all this bullshit? They disabled my card.
They had problems with the parking garage swipers all day, and had to manually disable and re-enable everyone's cards. They didn't re-enable mine. Or at least that's the explanation I got. So I lost an hour of night shift pay and have to use an hour of vacation/sick time which gets paid at a much lower rate. I lose money and I get in trouble. \0/
GOG is having a pretty big sale right now, so I got myself digital copies of Myst and Heroes of Might & Magic III. I have old disc copies of the games but they don't work on newer OSes most of the time, and GOG reformats/tweaks them to work on Vista / Win7 / Win8.
Coincidentally I was getting really frustrated a few weeks ago trying to get Heroes III to run. I got a sort of crippled version running but it wasn't working very well. This one should work better.
I only just found out about this website and it's like a treasure trove of old PC games, including a lot that Steam doesn't have, probably because they're so old. Steam has Heroes V or VI, but not anything earlier, and THOSE are the ones I liked playing. Once it started going 3D I just tuned out.
Also, DRM free and unlimited installs for your own personal use.
Good news is that my medication being stolen was probably from the car, not from work.
Bad news is that a refill will cost me 200$ and I can't afford that.
What seems to have happened is that I set my purse down on the backseat in the garage at work, and fished for my keys. I couldn't find them, they were at the bottom, so I took out the stuff on top and put it on the seat, and then got my keys, put the stuff back in, and zipped it up.
I missed a few items, including my pills, which had been right on top. I didn't notice this until I went to take the medication that night and it was gone, and I went to my car and saw the few pens and pieces of paper and stuff sitting on the seat, still.
And then noticed stuff pulled out of the glovebox and strewn around.
So someone probably saw the pill bottle lying on the seat, went in the car, and then checked to see if I had anything else. I didn't, so they just left the shit where they threw it, and left.
I had to fill out a police report this morning, and sent an email to the office to ask about cameras, because I think we have them in the garage where I parked my car. I haven't gotten a response back yet.
I could get a refill from my doctor, but insurance won't touch it, and I don't have 200$ to pay for 12 pills.
I can't remember if I mentioned this when I 'came back' to LJ, but I turned my old roommates's room into a work/crafting room. I started learning to make a lot of different things at home, primarily perfume as an interest, but also hand lotion, shampoo, various other bath products, and soap.
So I have a giant work room full of ingredients and packaging and shipping material and equipment. I spent this year's tax return on getting it set up (about $2,000, sigh) and really want to try at least making a tiny bit of income from it. It got put off because I got really sick and burned out since kicking out my roommate but I'm trying to put work into it again.
I had sent out sample products to some people and got great feedback, but since I bowed out of tumblr and fandom and the few friends I still have contact with are overseas I'm kind of back at square one with nobody to test things out for me again.
I haven't been posting because... I haven't done anything worth posting about :D;;
Actually I had a bunch of doctor's appointments. In the last couple of years while I haven't been around much, I've been going to the doctor regularly for really the first time in my adult life. Probably because I have a doctor that doesn't treat me like crap and is actually concerned with HELPING ME NOT FEEL LIKE GARBAGE.
Sometimes I get tired of all the elitism and dickmeasuring on the GameFAQs forums. It's a cesspit of misogyny and homophobia, to boot. A lot of insults and things are against the TOS but apparently bashing women and gay people is fair game. I wish there was a good alternative community for Dragon's Dogma stuff.
I don't know if anybody remembers, but several years ago back when I was taking care of my grandmother before she died, we rented an apartment. Our landlord was really sketchy and his daughter handled everything because he barely spoke any English. Then he was living in our basement and using our electricity and we moved out. His daughter was in Peru when our lease was up and gave us a hard time about getting our deposit back.
Well, the landlord's daughter? She's a Spanish teacher at the high school, and was recently arrested for allegedly repeatedly having sex with one of her students. Then she was put on leave and allowed to go home, and told to stay away from him, and they caught her violating the order not to contact the student again.
I spend most of my 'free' time these days playing video games. I actually got very very involved in the Assassin's Creed series, and have finished several of the games and am working on the rest. I still have a passing interest in Dragon Age, but the game I've been spending almost all my time on lately is Dragon's Dogma.
I wouldn't be surprised if most people haven't heard of it, but I am damned addicted to this game. It's an open-world RPG released by CAPCOM last year, and they recently put out a new expansion and some updates to the original game, so I've been playing it a lot again.
One of the biggest draws of the game is the character creator. It's the best I've ever seen in terms of sheer amount of options available. I'm not going to try to explain the story because I'd probably ramble on and not do a great job, but you get to design your own PC and one NPC companion character. There's also lots of equipment options and nine classes to pick from.
It's kind of hard to get good screenshots sometimes because of the in-game lighting, but I wanted to post a picture of my most recent characters, because I think my main character is the most adorable thing ;;
Elisse and Mia
Mia is too cute for words ;o;
The two ladies I had before these were Rosa and Avana. I had some male characters in previous playthroughs but I've been doing females for my last few runs.
This week has really not been a good week. Work has been pretty terrible and I was in the emergency room one day and had to go back to the doctor yesterday for a whole bunch more bloodwork and medication, but I have today and tomorrow off so I've been trying to rest.
And everything was going pretty okay until my cat peed into my swiffer.
It's been like four months since I posted my 'hey, I'm probably jumping ship' post. I'm not really sure if I'm 'back' or not, but I really didn't have anywhere else to put this and I felt the need to put it *somewhere*.
I'm sort of back to having alienated myself from almost everyone I've ever known.
The last year and a half have been really rough. So rough that I'm not sure I could even explain if I wanted to. I'm really, really burnt out.
In February of 2012, I had a friend come move in with me. Supposedly she was getting kicked out of her house, and needed a place to stay, and I was in need of a roommate since my previous one had moved out.
Over the course of a year, she basically ruined my life. She lied, she leeched, she sabotaged her job applications and interviews, and lived off me for a year. This girl owes me $6,000 in back rent, and that's not including anything else.
The worst part is that while she was living with me, she befriended most of my (then) current group of friends, alienated me from them, and lied to many of them about me repeatedly. I managed to kick her out mid-January, right before I posted my last entry. At that point I just cut myself off from the internet entirely, rather than try to deal with the drama of sorting everything out because of her. So, I jumped ship here, too. I just didn't want anything of mine online, period.
But I'm exhausted and ill both physically and mentally and I've been kicked into the ground more times than I can handle, so I'm in a pretty abysmally pathetic state right now. I cut myself out of almost all my friendships and fandoms and deleted years and years worth of writing, blog entries, and other such things. I tried to come back a month or so ago and pick back up where I left off, but it didn't work.
I feel really lost and tired.
I'm trying to refriend some people, but weeding through inactive accounts is slow going, so if you don't see me add you back then feel free to poke me to speed up the process.
chasing_ivy: impressioniste: it'd be hilarious if they went and found seigaku all hanging from the rafters of the clubhouse impressioniste: ritual suicide impressioniste: with YUUDAN SEZU NI IKOU in blood on the walls chasing_ivy: I'm sure Tezuka's on watch-- FFFFFFFFFFFFFF I LOL'D
chasing_ivy and I were having fun with Gakuensai no Oujisama and Doki Doki Survival screencaps last night, so I figured I would post the highlights for the enjoyment of everyone.
