Scrabbled!

Someone in multiplicity linked to this: "These conjoined twins live an incredibly normal life, regardless of how they look." Very interesting video!

This holiday/birthday season seems to be all about an influx of money for us, from generous relatives to an upcoming new job. I keep expecting something to come and take it all away before we can pay off our debts and do other necessary things with the money. But the logical portion of my mind tells me that we'll be okay, as long as we keep enough of a reserve and don't go splurging the birthday/holiday money on unnecessary things.

Speaking of our new job, we will be working at moonsail's place of work starting at 9:00AM Tuesday morning. Monday the fifteenth is our last day at Michaels and, hopefully, our last day in retail.

Everything's coming up roses, as they say. :)

Well. Time to turn in our two week notice. :)

As seen on tonberrygrrl.

( The Brutally Honest Personality Test. )

"Two plants can spring from a single root, two children from a single cell. Why not two (or more) selves from a single brain?" - from here. We like the term "branching off" to refer to how certain system members come to be.

I haven't been very good at writing here, like I said I would. And, because we're sick, thinking and communicating in a linear, coherent manner is a little difficult, so... For now, I have nothing else to say.

Right, somehow we managed to stay up until one thirty without doing a word of NaNo. We did, however, have some nice spontaneous RP on a new RP server, using alts we may not visit again for weeks. And we bankrupted a warlock on a different server, but as the night goes on she gets more and more of her money back. I've noticed that, from time to time, I do spontaneous investments in WoW, spending all a character's cash on tradeskill materials and then selling things, hoping to make money. Usually it works. I hope it does this time, because grimoires are expensive. ;)

We made a character named Reverie--a subtle reference to the Reverie system, and also because we thought it would be a neat name for (yet another) priest. I thought grey_reverie should know this.

And, because Ikeru did it:

You are the Hanged Man

Self-sacrifice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Bound.

With the Hanged man there is often a sense of fatalism, waiting for something to happen. Or a fear of
loss from a situation, rather than gain.

The Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.

The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. It signifies selflessness, sacrifice and prophecy. You make yourself vulnerable and in doing so, gain illumination. You see the world differently, with almost mystical insights.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

Once again, I'm to the point where I notice my LJ userinfo and interest list are outdated, but I can't bring myself to edit them appropriately.

We have over 34,000 words in our NaNo novel. I try not to think of the fact that others will read it, as I write, though I can never turn off the inner editor fully. Having Ikeru at the helm seems to help a lot with hesitation. It's a hard story to write, because it's dark. Writing about dark themes doesn't bother me, but the idea of someone I know reading it does. At least, for this one, I can say it was all Ikeru's idea. ;)

multiplicity is going to have moderated membership, due to a spammer.

We haven't been on our main in WoW in a week, favoring an alt on another server, and writing. It's about time to put the character aside; there isn't much joy in playing her. I think this is because our RP buddy has been oddly distant, honestly.

It has occured to me that I'm only really comfortable with myself when I'm in the act of writing. So, I'm going to try to update my journal more often, and hope that this will ease some of the edginess I've been experiencing for the past few weeks.

Speaking of writing, ikeru and I have discovered that a great way to write our NaNo novel is to participate in ten-minute word wars on the nanowrimo.org forums. People pick a starting time (:00, :10, :15, etc) and write from there for ten minutes. Then they post their results, and compare them to others'. The highest count we got last night was 389 words in ten minutes, but overall it's a hard scene to write, so it was usually much lower than that.

There are also fifteen-minute and thirty-minute word wars, but the ten-minute ones appeal more to our style of (or lack of) concentration.

Some things (recent news, particularly) make me relieved we don't have a television, so I can browse news sites at my leisure, when I'm mentally prepared to be disheartened. Other things (usually in the realm of fictional television) make me miss having a television handy. Overall, I'm glad there is no television in the apartment. If we ever got one, we might not even hook it up to the cable--just use it to watch videos on VHS.

I learned recently that it's not uncommon for people to have kinesthetic memory of something, as opposed to audio/video memory (and, er, olfactory memory?). I thought this was interesting. Meaning, there are times when the body remembers, even if the mind doesn't know what's going on.

Edit: I've known about muscle memory for some time--what I'm referring to is a different form of kinesthetic memory (please see comments).

It is said that through repeated negative experiences, one produces interesting skills as a defense mechanism.

I do not think this is always the case, but I can't think of another way to describe what I jokingly refer to as my "spider sense". I'm terribly arachnaphobic but I tend to be the first person to notice a spider is nearby, and can sometimes guess where spiders are before I see them. This is easily explained, of course: Being terribly arachnaphobic makes me always on the lookout, and so if I catch sight of a spider in my peripheral vision, my consciousness might not notice it but my unconscious does and sends the message to my brain that Here Be Spiders.

Sometimes I will sit and point at a spider, describing its appearance and location, for a minute or two before the person whose attention I am trying to draw to it finally sees it.

One must wonder if I can make money off of this talent.

In the multiplicity community, someone posted an entry entitled Plural-envy? Multiple Pride? I don't get it. He talks about a girl he's involved with who has expressed envy at a multiple's ability to "go away" and let someone else takes over, and near the end he writes:

I just don't understand how people think that not having something as basic as your own body that you don't have to share is a GOOD thing. I can sort of see it from the perspective of the uneducated singlet or whatever, but many of you seem so proud to be part of a system that if you had the opportunity to have your own body by some miracle of science or divine intervention, you'd pass it up. I understand wanting to deal with this and have a healthy system with open communication - but why is multiplicity ever cast in as positive of a light as it is?.

I think the whole thread is worth reading, but if you'd rather just hear the Link system's take on it... here you go. :)

( My response. )

I took our phone to Verizon this afternoon to ask why it was unusable, and the customer service person there repaired it for us. (Without even asking if we had it insured, and free of charge!) Apparently it needed some sort of cleaning. In any case, it's in working order again, so we don't have to rely on AIM or expensive text messaging to communicate.

I am typing this from my own room, thanks to faelad. We have a temporary computer setup until the laptop is fixed.

To make a long story short, it seems the laptop is suffering from motherboard malfunction, and we will have to buy a new one--if we do, it will be from eBay, where they only cost $150-$400, instead of the $500 Dell is asking for. Maybe we'll get a tax refund this year.

In the meantime, any Internet we get will be borrowed and breif.

Our laptop has, to all appearances, given up the ghost. It is not powering on at all. The battery has been dead for months and has not been recharging, and now it will not start at all. It died in the middle of some WoW-playing, unprovoked, and with no warning.

The warrantee is long gone.

faelad and I have gone through all the troubleshooting steps Dell provided and it is still not powering on. We will be trying other things tomorrow, but we have no idea if it will work or not.

It goes without saying that we are distressed by this and that you will likely not be hearing from us often until the matter is resolved. We can only hope that the laptop is okay and it's just a power supply problem; and if the motherboard is fried, the hard drive and all its information and novels and pictures and music will be safe. It has been a few weeks since we backed up the system on the external drive.

Meh. :(

Time to roll a holy priest!

This is wonderful. Our main will still be shadow-spec, but holy spec is looking pretty nifty... And I never thought I'd say that. :) Blizzard has made priests happier than they've ever been.

I ought to be sleeping, but a sudden burst of energy from Ikeru has kept us up a bit later than intended. I decided to check my friends page, and re-read this. Fantastic. What America really needs is another Sybill movie. What impressionable young multiples need is another reason to believe they should feel helpless, confused, and victimized all the time--because heaven knows adolescents don't have enough self-image problems as it is.

Someone in the thread suggested we make a drinking game to go along with the new movie. If I had cable, I would gather a small group of friends to watch the premiere of this, booze on hand. We could take a shot for each time she loses time, or recovers a horrifying memory concerning flashlights and/or eating utensils, or when one of the Peggys becomes angry and Talks Like Her Mother. Two shots for referencing igloos, or anyone in the system actually talking to each other. Each appearance by the males of the Sybill Collective will be worthy of two shots, three if they're building a bookcase or being asked by Dr. Wilbur where their penises are. A shot for each Amazing New Breakthrough Dr. Wilbur has, two if the resident French ISH helps. A shot for each time Tammy/Sybill falls to pieces in public. We'll be suffering from alchohol poisoning by the end.

I'm quite sick of sensationalized history and the public's disturbingly large appetite for the pornography of the victim.

(Aside from this, life has been kind to me, and I'm sorry for not posting much lately.)