Daibhid's Journal

(Blows metaphorical dust off the journal)

Hello? Is this thing still working? Goodness it's been a while. Didn't even do a Fringe post (which would have been about 30% "the shows I saw were great" to 70% complaining about the booking site). So, what's been happening more recently?

1. I enjoyed the first two episodes of The War Between Land and Sea, but I don't have the energy to actually review them. Maybe an overview of the whole thing in two weeks.

2. I also enjoyed Zootopia 2, which, after some agonising, I actually went to see at the cinema despite a lack of small children I could take as cover. (I took my nephew to the first one but, of course, that was a decade ago.) Despite my anxiety, this did not seem to attract any attention.

I don't know why my brain turned this into A Thing: no problem with Spider-Verse, possibly because that's superheroes not talking animals; but also no problem with the Muppets, possibly because that's live action not a cartoon. But for some reason, the combo triggered something in my head. But I got past it, and now that I've broken that barrier, I notice there's a Looney Tunes movie out in February...

3. It's December already, and I've just remembered Yuletide is a thing that exists. Ah, well, next year, hopefully. (As I say every year.)

4. Talking of fanfic, I've just realised I don't know how different pseuds work on AO3, but it's possible people following me as Daibhid might not know I've taken to writing Wold-Newton nonsense (or rather, cleaning up and publishing the Wold-Newton nonsense I've already written, although the most recent article is actually new) under the name DM Kennedy WNS. If you're interested in someone taking questions like "What if literally every fictional character named Tyler was actually related?" way too seriously, well, that's what I'm doing.

5. For some reason I was looking at my old posts, going back to the LJ days, and I found a questionaire meme where I was asked "Do you like drama?" and replied "Sometimes". And I stared at it in disbelief wondering what I was thinking, because I hate drama. 

And then I realised that, in 2009, I didn't really know what "drama" meant on the internet. I thought I liked drama sometimes, but mostly I preferred comedy...

For various reasons, I never wrote this up in 2022, the first year I was there on my own, and also the first one I'd been to since we lost Terry. So I'm trying to get back into the habit now. (I may even go back and do a "Things I Learned at the Science Festival" post, if I can remember anything I learned at the Science Festival this year. Anyway.)
( Getting there )

( Friday )

( Saturday )


( Sunday )


( Monday )

I'm not signed up for Yuletide this year. However, I came much closer to signing up for Yuletide than I ever have before!

Admittedly, this is a very low bar to clear, and would be adequetely covered by "remembering I was going to". But I also finally got round to looking up how it actually works, looked through the list of fandoms, chose three I'd like fic of and four I thought I could write, and even filled in most of the form.

...unfortunately, I did all of this yesterday, having immediately discovered that the closing date was today (9:00 UST), and in between a lot of other stressy stuff. So when I went to finish the form by writing what I liked about the fandoms and the kind of fic I liked, my brain broke. I'm not great at specifying stuff or asking for things in the first place, and I just couldn't think. But I certainly wasn't going to send it off blank, so I didn't send it at all.

(Yes, if I was here more often, I'd have seen my friends talking about it before now. But I wasn't.)

Anyway, now that I know the system, I'm probably going to have a look at pinch-hitting and treats, and I know what I'm doing for next year, so here's hoping.

It was over a week ago, but I was there, and it was brilliant!
( Read more... )

So today I finally got round to looking at about a week's worth of messages. There were about 70 of them.

And one of them said I had come to the top of the reserve membership list for DiscCon, and could I let them know if I was still interested ... before 31 May.  Oops!

On reflection, I think suddenly going to the convention after all at this late stage would be a bit of a palaver, but still.

This was ages ago, haven't I written it up yet? Okay, here we go.

It was a good Fringe. I was only down for three days, but I saw The Reduced Shakespeare Company's Shakespeare's Long Lost First Play (abridged), Mort by the group who did Faust Eric last year, and stand-up by Mitch Benn, Robert Newman and Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden. And they were all excellent.
( Saturday: RSC and Mort )

( Sunday: Mitch Benn and Robert Newman )

( Monday: Barry Cryer and Ronnie Golden )

It looks like, what with one thing or another, we definitely aren't going. To everyone who is, have a good one, and hope to see you in 2018.

Instead, I'll probably be making another trip to Edinburgh, so look for rambling Fringe reviews instead...

Well, we got a new computer. And we've finally set it up. And I've run into a problem almost immediately.
( Read more... )
ETA: Never mind, clearing all cookies did the trick. Of course, by that point I was so far from thinking straight that I was immediately baffled as to why I wasn't still logged into LJ to add this...

ETA: Apparently this has made it into the LJ top 25 posts. I should give up on this fanfic and review lark, and just post technical problems that I then resolve before anyone has time to suggest anything.,..

So last December I had my usual Christmas job with the Royal Mail. Well, not quite my usual job. I was on the bay loading and unloading vans instead of inside sorting letters. Except I couldn't do that without boots, so while they tried to get me some I was assigned to sorting packages in the other sorting office. Except the hours that I was working there were different.

This is the point where I usually get confused and start turning up to the wrong place at the wrong time, unless I remember to put everything in my electronic organiser. Luckily, I now have a smartphone with a calendar function instead of my organiser, which was not only easier to use and showed me exactly what I was doing over the course of a week, it even gave me a map to other sorting office. (Which didn't stop me being lost, because the industrial area of Inverness is a maze of twisty little streets, all alike, but it certainly helped.)

The only downside to the smartphone, in fact, was using it as a phone. On several occasions I had to contact Mum (aka "my lift") when plans changed, and found that if I sent her a text and got a reply, the phone wouldn't make the alert sound. Or she'd tell me she tried to phone me, but it went straight to voicemail. And, I mean, my phone plays the McCoy theme as a ringtone, and TARDIS noises as a text alert. It's hard to miss.

So today, I was just entering my next Jobcentre appointment in the calendar, when I suddenly thought "What does 'Show me as busy during this event' actually mean?"

Oops...

A few days ago I thought "I'm sick of lugging my laptop around when I want to show photos to Gran, so she doesn't have to squint at the tiny screen on my camera. But I'd rather take pics with the camera than my phone. What I need is one of those SD-adapters, so I can load a micro-SD onto my camera, take pictures, then show the pictures to Gran on my phone." So I ordered a micro-SD card and an adapter.

The micro-SD arrived yesterday, and I experimented with it by plugging it into my phone. The adapter arrived today (actually, it turned out to be a pack of three adapters), and that's where the problem started.
( Read more... )