My sister and I had this Tyco blocks carrying case (you know, the highly textured suit-case shaped case, you sat it down flat to pull the lid open?)... that was full of broken and abused crayons. If I had to pick ONE thing from my childhood that I remember and want to reclaim... it's that box of misfit crayons. I loved it. I didn't realize then how much, of course.

But now, I'm finding it very difficult to re-create that thing. I don't have kids. I don't color much, and I am a bit too much of a spazz to go artificially breaking and abusing the crayons I do have.

There are a lot of movements on the internet where people talk about recycling broken crayons... but is there anywhere I can recycle them into what I feel they are meant to be? A massive pile of mystery colors and scraps of greatness meant to be used until they are tiny nubs no longer big enough for the human hand?

Yeah. How crazy is that?

"I want broken crayons for Christmas."

mood: quixotic

I wrote a story. Still only first draft (i'm afraid to touch it right now), and just over 2k words. But I wrote a story that isn't based on a character developed in/for/through a game (tabletop, video, otherwise).

Madness I say!

But I'm kind of excited.

Also, it apparently has made one person reconsider yogurt. (Though the story is not about yogurt.)

mood: bouncy

 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10320096-38.html

mood: 9_9

Dream, with some WoW Influence, but the bulk of the dream was in the real world. I was trying to curl up and sleep next to a female Titan. I think. There was one Titan I was sleeping next to anyway, but he kept getting up and moving, and having to do other things. Something happens in this weird factory/plant that I'm in. It is evacuated. It's like a puzzle, trying to escape. I get out and people are all trying to make me go one direction (which involves walking across an old railroad bridge), but I want to cross "the Third Bridge" which is a road bridge that no one uses. Ever.

Eventually I shake off the people trying to stop me.

In order to get up to the sleeping female Titan, there's a lot of bizarre (but made of mundane) 'obstacles'. Like climbing a wall of cushions and vhs tapes. I get up there. Some other girl does too. But while she's up there, she gets on her cell phone. Starts to wobble the wall. I shove her off. She climbs back up, mad at me, does it again. I shove her off. She does it -again-, bringing a friend. This time, I explain "You are going to topple the wall." and I shove her AND her friend off.

I don't move beyond this wall "physically" in the dream, sadly. The next part is a line across to a platform. You have to hand over hand your way across this line. The line is fed through a 30'ish foot section of... empty peanutbutter jars. As in, there are holes in the lid, and in the bottom. The cable goes through them, and you are intended to hold onto the jars.

There's some other part of the dream with an old woman trying to stop me. There's a baby involved that she just won't let go of. After a few conflicts with her, she wants to get into an all out fight with me. Short version, she is wearing a snuggie (you know the thing) and it catches on fire. She refuses to let the baby go, and they both burn to death.

There is a part where I'm not involved, but I get to see it. There are two other Titans up where the sleeping female is, and they cannot bring about the destruction they want to, without her. But they do try to scare people - and people are scared of them. One has purple eye beams. One has green. ...they look like they were drawn by the artists of Futurama. -_-

I don't finish the dream. I woke up about 2 hours later than I normally would. During the dream, there's a guy almost constantly following/watching my progress? Looks kind of like Bruce Willis. No idea on his motivation, but he wanted me to make it up to the sleeping Titan.

mood: groggy tags: dreams

My name is Jenna, and today I am 28 years old.
I am unemployed, and by most standards I am uneducated.
I weigh 240-246 pounds, depending on the day and time of day.
I play World of Warcraft, and write character stories. I don't do anything else with my talent for characterization, or my ability to "be in someone else's shoes".
I am in the awkward position of living in a friend's basement. His wife, though she has gotten better at pretending to be nice, hates me. So does at least one of his sisters.
I have friends all over the internet. I have none, aside from the one mentioned, nearby.
I have made a new friend who wants to 'help' me, and I like that. I'm also afraid of it.
I owe my aunt nearly $3000, for everything she's done to help me, while I was in NY.
I have $2500 in credit card debt.
I pay my credit cards by donating plasma.
I do not pay for my own game accounts. Other people do it, so that I may enjoy something.
I was molested for about 8 years by one of my step-fathers. Sometimes, I'm angry because I didn't deserve that. I was a child and deserved to be protected.
I also am angry, sometimes, that I have received less guidance in my life because I am "smart" and my "sisters need it more".
I am, most days, so depressed I don't want to wake up. This makes it difficult to get out of bed at all.
I don't go to sleep until I am exhausted, usually around 2am.
I stay in bed until 10am, when I force myself up and out of the house for ANYTHING.
I have submitted applications and resumes to every job, except those that require certifications I do not have, or hard physical labor. Not even Burger King will hire me, due to too much experience.
Office jobs just never seem to call me back. Some get angry when I call them.

I lie, through omission, about my life.
I do not often feel good about myself.

My name is Jenna, and today I'm 28 years old.
Today, I'm going walking after lunch.
Today, I'm going to read these writing workshops I've had bookmarked on my desktop for over six months. And DO something with them.

Today, I want to change.

PS: Thank you for the Virtual Gift, Anonymous (sent Saturday). I smiled this morning.

mood: sad

Blizzard is going to make Battle.net mandatory. To make the change less "painful", they are trying to lure people into going willingly by offering a Battle-Bot, in league with Mountain Dew.

You use your email address to make a Battle.net account. You merge your WoW account into the Battle.net account - this uses your email address/pword from Battle.net for your WoW account at that point. Then you can claim the Battle-Bot. A key is mailed to your characters - all of them - from Jepetto in Dalaran. If you make a new character, they get a key too.

This, I suspect, is to set Blizzard up to host other online games. Can we say Starcraft or Diablo?

Anyway... You can also gain tokens to put into drawings for "l33t" gear.

I'm disappointed in how very -unsecure- the Blizzard account management system is. I don't mean their person-to-person customer support and the like. I mean, the ease at which someone can get a temporary password to your account. Without needing any personal information whatsoever. Go ahead. Check out the process to "retrieve password" if you've "lost access to your registered email account".

Clue for Blizzard: Captchas are good. Secret questions are good. But only if you use them. There are a million games out there that have key generators for them. If it can be done to those games, it can be done to yours.

In short, my (only) guildmate's account got hacked last Thursday. They reset his pword to a temporary one via the Blizzard page, and in roughly half an hour... left his paladin naked and bereft of anything in Ratchet. They also cleaned my guild bank (to which my guildmate had full access - we used it for craft storage/sharing) of nearly everything valuable. Some of the stuff that got left behind was weird. (Example, they took all of the Marks of Saergas and Kil'jaeden, but did not touch the stack of Fel Armaments, nor Arcane Tomes. Which are both worth more.)

Inside 24 hours, to Blizzard's credit, their investigation team responded that they had determined the account WAS violated (that's the best word to describe how it feels), and included a list of all the things that are "eligible for" replacement, or some word similar. I don't know if "replacement" was the word. Of course, with the Armory features, I can take that list and verify each and every item taken out of my guild bank.

I think I'll do that later. We spot checked the list and it seems like all the character's tanking gear is also being replaced. I'm most thankful they are replacing a few particular and personal items for that character. Her Blood Knight styled shield - a quest reward from SMV, and the mace she's using now (Hammer of Quiet Mourning) from a ZD quest. There would be no way for me to replace either of those, not even with 10 or 20 thousand gold.

So, on one hand I'm really not happy with the lack of prevention that Blizzard has in place to protect accounts... (What good is a great account password, and protective software, when someone with a keygen program can eventually just reset my pword and have it sent to their own email address?)... and on the other I'm pretty pleased with how quickly they responded. And, of course, that they responded how I -expected- the matter to be handled. I was VERY ready to contact a GM after the whole thing to bitch about my guild bank items, if they didn't opt to replace them.

Hopefully they will track down wherever all those things were sent. (I'm pretty sure, with the amount of backups and things they can trace in the game that they can track down at least one or two steps of transferred items. At the LEAST, whether the character mailed all the items or traded them by hand, and to whom between 7am and 8am Thursday morning.)

mood: awake tags: warcraft

241

tags: weight

Two days ago, it was down to 235. I'm on my cycle, so it's 238 today. I count that pretty decent since I feel like my lower abdomen is an overstuffed ...thing.

tags: weight

I know most of you don't really give a crap about World of Warcraft, and that's okay.

I WAS excited about 3.1. WAS. I mean... Ulduar. Wooo! I'm a fiend for the Creator/Titan stuff, honestly. Especially with the way Ulduman and that other place... just sort of left us hanging.

Then I started looking at class changes.

I have four characters above level 60. A rogue, a hunter, a paladin (ret since birth), and a warlock. DPS whore? Maybe so. I just don't like the pressure/responsibility of being a tank or healer. They are largely thankless jobs if anything goes wrong, even if it isn't their fault. Anyway...

Amongst those, I have pretty much every money-eating crafting skill known to man. Engineering being the biggest money muncher (but fun for me). So!

How many ways does thou fuck me, Blizzard, let me count them!

I'm still not sure what they are doing with hunter ammunition. They are getting rid of quivers/ammo pouches. This is all part of the homogenizing process. (Hey, if I wanted to be homogenized, I'd go play a game that only has two or three classes, thx!) They say they will replace the container buffs in some other way... but I'm not clear whether the hunter is going to have to continue to purchase ammo, or what. If not... well, happy day, I guess... for my hunter.

Sad, sad day for my engineer. The only thing I've been able to make any decent money off of (and even then, I'm only making a few gold above material costs) in WotLK has been the Saronite Arrow Maker. I don't mark them up, like I probably could. I literally make maybe 3g above the value of the saronite used to make them. ...yeah, that's profitable. Whatever.

Then, there's warlock woes. Shards. Yes, we all love shards. The reagent that warlocks need for big spells, or for summoning, or rituals. But! Imagine you're a mage, and none of your reagents are stackable. Wouldn't that be _great_? No, it wouldn't. And so, it has never been awesome that soul shards don't stack. They SHOULD stack. Even fucking CLAMS stack now. Clams, that technically have their own little loot table to be randomly rolled on when you open them (I recall something in UO being unstackable and the programmers telling us it was because of the unique contents of each individual item, and their coding wouldn't allow it to stack, etc.)... but no. Soul Shards, not unique in ANY way... can't stack.

Blizzard says "We'll take a look at it." Their solution? "Hey, so, we looked at it and we decided we are going to limit the number of shards you can carry, how's that?"

What?!

How the crap does that make ANY sense? I can limit how many I carry well enough on my own, thanks!

Grr. Then! They take one of my destruction talents, and are moving it to the demonology tree... onto TIER 8. That means there's no way in Hades I can get it. Period. What talent? What does it do?

Molten Core - Rank 3
Your Shadow spells and damage over time effects have a 15% chance to increase the damage of your Fire spells by 10% for 12 sec.

So, why is this going into the Demonology talent tree? Why are you taking this away from my Destruction (thus fire, with a little smattering of shadow bolts and curses) warlock?





Grrr! Just grr! This is the first time Blizzard has released a patch that just really annoyed the crap out of me. See, this change with hunter ammo? This opens the doors to removing other bag-space using items for classes... which leads to the money-making tailoring item (bags, and a little less so their specialist counterparts)... just grr! Stupid "let's make everything fair and even and balanced and easy". If I wanted easy, I would stick to FF games, and single player games I can use cheat codes in, or follow walk throughs. What I want is things that make sense.

I haven't been exercising, though I have tried to keep moving a little more during the days. I'm also considering getting one of those balance/exercise balls to sit on when I'm at my computer (which is much of the time). It'll help my posture (which is awful), and give my core muscles some badly needed working.

Here's an idea of how much my weight fluxes daily. One day it can be 242. The next 235. Today it is 235. I'll take it.

tags: weight

Dear Mr. President,

I know it's not your fault, the insanely protective treatment you receive... but where can I send a bill for the $30 I'm losing this week because someone decided that the entire length of 6th Avenue had to be blocked off for your visit to Denver?

You really didn't do anyone any favors today, and I experienced a moment of "glad I'm not employed", because I'd have been hard pressed to explain to my boss why I was so late getting back from lunch. That's right, Mr. President. Your little trip blocked off a major thoroughfare (or, for some of us, just kept us from getting to the other part of Aurora) during lunch hour.

That's super. I'm sure this stimulus package will be worth it. For someone. Since I only made about $2500 last year before I was fired, I doubt I'll be seeing any of it. So I'm hard pressed to feel awed or thankful for your visit to my living area today, or for the reasons you're here.


Dear Aurora/Denver officials,

Thanks for announcing that the road would be closed off. Had I known, I would have been able to plan ahead. Instead, I get to a light and have to figure out why. Thanks, douches.


Edit: You may not think $30 is a big deal, but it is when it's half of the total money I have the potential to earn in a week.

mood: annoyed

I forget how I got to the blog... I think it was Gaiman's > A Knitting Blog with Coraline Gloves > This Blog, which I've liked very much, and where I found this neat little "Thankfulness Tea Party" idea.

I like reasons for dressing up. And having tea. And scones. ...and there's the added benefit of "positive things to do".

One thing to say: Classical Zombie Literature. That's right. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

The scarier part? Hollywood is already pondering making it into a movie, and it hasn't even been released as a book yet! ...frickin awesome.

I am home from my draining session (I donate plasma - the money is the main motivation and I freely admit it, that it helps people is a very very pleasant side effect).

The past few weeks have been an experiment of the physical sort. One day, about 3 weeks ago, I hit 246 pounds on the scale at the donation center. That's horrifying. Doesn't matter if I just ate a huge lunch (to make sure the anti-coagulant doesn't make me sick/pass out)... that's only four pounds shy of 250 pounds, which is half of 500 pounds.

I'm not the kind of female who stared in a mirror at 135 and said "I'm so fat and ugly." I didn't do it at 155. I didn't do it at 185. I didn't even allow myself to call ...me fat at 195. 200 was my limit. It wasn't a matter of denial. It was a matter of positive self image. I didn't think I was thin, by any stretch of the imagination. I just wasn't disgustingly fat (fuck you, you vanity stricken people who think any girl over 120 is 'disgustingly fat', just fuck you, okay?). I've got a medium to large body frame, and I carried it well. Even now, I'm still decently proportioned. My stomach doesn't stick out further than my breasts, and my breasts don't vacation on my stomach.

So, I started things. For about two weeks, 4-5 days of the week... I did an hour of exercise in the mornings. Jenna-fied Pilates (from a Beginners DVD from the Australian Institute blah blah blah) - so named because there's no such thing as "Pilates for Fat Chicks", and there's NO way on this earth or any other that I could possibly do their thigh stretch, putting almost 250 pounds of pressure straight down on my knee, regardless of how much padding is underneath it. Those were about half an hour, then I put in my Callanetics DVD (which I think is "Callanetics: 10 Years Younger In 10 Hours" or some such, as a dvd), and did most of those. I skipped the leg/pelvic exercises. My legs just aren't up for that. I did extra stretching for them instead.

I also ordered a few supplements from a pharmacy that does online shipping: Swansons. I purchased three things: Acai, 1000mg (my pee is the color of mountain dew, thanks to all the extra vC), Thyroid Essentials (mostly for the trace metals and iodine I'm sure I'm short of, all manner of vBs, and other goodies for thyroid health), and Detoxilean (a system detoxifier, but not "cleansing system" - there are no purgative/laxatives traditional in many of the rougher cleansers - their names escape me but two are rather harsh purgatives common to most of the systems. this has things like dandelion root, psyllium husk, flaxseed powder, ginger root, milk thistle extract, aloe vera (yes, I'm aware some are diuretics, etc, but mostly are mild))...

The cleanser I don't take all the time. I'm doing one every other day, just to make sure the combination of herbs in it REMAINS a mild effect. The other two I do once or twice a day (they recommend 1 tablet 2x/day anyway).

So. 246. I forgot to make notes about changes since, but last Thursday I was at 240. Today I didn't get to see their scale, but I weighed myself here before going to lunch. I was at 238.8.

Of course, two days ago, I had severe stomach cramping and then poopsoup. (Do you really need details on that?) so I am probably still a little dehydrated (beyond my usual). I was fine for donating, and finished in my standard 45 minutes, so I really can't be THAT dehydrated. There are people who donate less plasma than me who take longer because they are less hydrated. But not dehydrated enough to be deferred for the day. Go figure.

mood: woooooo

...a mallard, I think.

Mostly I think it's time to redo-something to my journal. Not that I'm much of a presence here anymore (or that I ever was), but I think it's time for something new. Maybe a "state of the union" address, too. Because who really knows what's going on with me? No one, actually. Not even me. And even if I did post a "here is everything about me right now", it wouldn't be everything. There's things you never commit to text. Things you don't want other people to know, so you never write it down, even if one day it could be a best seller or get you on Oprah for stupid reasons. "You're so strong, so brave. Did you feel guilty?" Blah blah blah.

That is all.

mood: blah

Fuzzy brain. Lots more dreaming (how I have missed it, really) and this time about a flooded mountain village? with a train station and a train that goes through Milwaukee (forgive me if I spelled that wrong)...and now the name of the train escapes me. It was something weird/creepy.

Then the village is attacked by things. Ghouls? There's kids hiding all over, and a vampire in a house with a lady. Sexy scene there, the details of which I will keep to myself. Involved dream physics, where a lady could be set on the edge of a table and the person she's with can move around and STAND behind her. (Small table? not really.)

The flood bit is blended with all this. A man on a llama can't get up the hill to the train station. There's a part with me using his laptop to try to help him find another place he can catch the aforementioned train. Then my character Phoebe is in it, policing the weird village. Then I'm in... Burger King? and someone is giving me a stack of pregnancy tests. I take one and it comes up with a pink matching line, which I GUESS means "positive, yep, sure are", but I honestly have no idea. It just had one pink line, one blue line that could show up and a little circle with a pink line in it that never went away. *shrug*

I need to get my Ian McKellen/Professor Moriarity dream bits posted sometime.

Yesterday, I think it was, I didn't like my dreams. Mostly they involved being tortured. (Me being tortured by no one, someone, who knows.) And that involving the top of my skull being removed. Highly uncomfortable, let me tell you.

tags: dreams

I hate network television. I hate it, I hate it.

Fuck you, NBC. Just fuck you. Fuck you, fuck Fox, fuck Sci-Fi.

Yes, I'm a few months slow in finding out that My Own Worst Enemy was canceled. You know, had to free up that slot for Mamma's Boys. Or whatever the fuck that retarded Oedipus reality show is called.

GRRR.

Nielsen ratings are only accurate if the majority of people are reporting their watching to you. Guess what? No one I know does that, so how can those things be accurate? They can't. And hey! Great idea, putting a new show on opposite of CSI on Monday nights. STELLAR!

It would at LEAST be nice if you'd finish a fucking season, and not end in a cliff hanger. Douches.

mood: grumpy