My second fifth LJ-versary is coming up, so I thought it was about time I re-posted my friending 'policy'.

I'm sort of a fannish collector. I built up my friends list by friending the authors of fic I like, and by reading the other comments to their fics and tracking back the people who sounded interesting. Some of them have drifted away from my main interests, but I keep them because I like having a wider perspective. If I don't want to read something, I just scroll on by.

Sometimes, yes, I friend people without saying hello, but if I've friended you it's because I've checked out the rest of your journal and I like what you have to say - real life or fannish. Feel free to do the same, or not, with my journal; I don't think it's a big deal if people don't friend me back, and there isn't a lot I post under flock.

And feel free to de-friend at whim.

ETA: my current DW/LJ policy is that I'm cross-posting to both sites, and reading my lists on both services (although Dreamwidth comes first, and I'll probably comment there first if there are duplicate posts).

Current fandoms as of 2012: The Avengers, Hawaii Five-0, Haven, Supernatural, Stargate Atlantis (and SG-1)

 I know the things I need to do to feel better. I just can't get past: why fucking bother? 

I know it's going to make a difference to whether or not I'm in pain from my shoulder, and that's going to help with depression. But I still can't make myself follow through with physiotherapy.

Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/112155.html, where it has comments</a>

 Wow, this year has been rough. Not for any reason in particular, but the same old stuff just seems to keep swirling. It feels like I spend all my energy on just being okay, and there's nothing much left for actual progress :-|

I pulled a muscle in my ribs in January, and holy crap it hurt. It's almost healed now... I think? 

( Cut for cancer talkCollapse ) My older sister is stepping up this time, taking three weeks off work to help out so that I don't have to fly into the country.

That's something positive I guess?

Also, I got a digital piano recently, so I can get back into playing music without aggravating my shoulder with violin or guitar.

*takes a deep breath* Once more unto the breach Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/111859.html, where it has comments</a>

Nabbed from somehowunbroken 

I've always been amazingly fortunate when it comes to co-writers - I've worked with some amazing people over the years, and it almost always seems to go ridiculously smoothly. Plus, I get someone to help me stay on track, and someone to help me out of writer's block/a story corner I've written myself into. somehowunbroken is really special, though, and I've lost count of how many fandoms we've been through together now - Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, DC comics, Marvel comics, MCU, Homestuck, and now Check Please! and Hockey RPF. And I'm sure there are glaring omissions to that list. We always seem to work together smoothly, and we've only gotten more proficient over the years.

 Fathers, Be Good is our ode to one of our favourite topics - Jason Todd as a parent, with the Batfamily as an actual extended family. And it contains our eternal headcanon that Ra's al Ghul is hopelessly sexist.

Trouble always comes in threes was a weird little thing I chatficced at somehowunbroken when I was trying to make sense of how I felt about Agents of SHIELD (before I dropped the show like a hot potato towards the end of season one, because HOLY RACISM). I give credit to somehowunbroken for all the best lines in that one.

And After the Storm . was kind of the last hurrah with the new 52 - at least for me. The reboot destroyed most of what I loved about DC comics,

2. Your oldest fanwork: This is a weird one for me to answer, because technically I've been writing fanfic since I was old enough to write. I was attuned to the fannish hivemind before I even knew such a thing existed, and wrote myself stories about my favourite books and cartoons from the age of about six or seven to around eighteen, when I burned all my old notebooks in a fit of paranoia.

My oldest fanworks posted on AO3 are re-posts from my livejournal, so they date to around 2009, but my first writing was more like 1989/1990. Holy crap that makes me feel old.

3. Your latest fanwork:

My brain has slowly been colonised and consume by hockey over the past two years, and again somehowunbroken is deeply involved. I got into reading Hockey RPF because of... reasons I can't remember, and I kept pimping them the awesome porn. Somehow this backfired horribly on me and they ended up falling in love with actual hockey, which I thought was hilarious... until the same thing happened to me.

Which is why my most recent fic is a Sidney Crosby WiP: Let our hearts like doors open wide. It's mostly gen right now, about him finding out he has a kid he didn't know about and struggling to fit his daughter into his life. 

Thing I'm also working on right now: an mpreg story with somehowunbroken, currently 60K and rapidly climbing.

4: Fanwork you are proudest of:

Gotham Identity Parade, always and forever. This is one of those stories that turned out exactly how I envisioned it, and said the things I'd wanted to say for a looooong time. Jason Todd as a young trans boy, with all the same sense of wonder as the canon/cis version.

5. Your longeset fanwork:

Leave the battlefield, leave her hand. It's another DC comics story, exploring what canon would be like if Batman was a woman (and her younger brother, Bruce Wayne, grew up with less pressure on him).  somehowunbroken and I posted it for epic bigbang, so obviously it is long: it clocks in at 101,640. But the scariest thing is, before we got distracted by hockey things - tragic, I know, but we hope to get back to this 'verse some day - we actually plotted out a whole series, with a different POV character for each one to complete the arc. We have probably another 150k written.

I just have a lot of feelings about the Batfamily + Harvey Dent, okay?

6. Your 3 fanworks with the most bookmarks:

All DC comics fics, all co-written with somehowunbroken. After the Storm has 160+, Fathers Be Good has 160+ and Greenhouse Confessions has 85+

I'll be totally honest: a lot of those are riding on the coattails of somehowunbroken 's amazing solo writing and her tumblr presence.


Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/111532.html, where it has comments</a>

Hi all *waves*

Welcome to 2016. I'm not sure how many of you have stuck around/who's new but the last three years have been kinda awful and stressful.

( Cut for talk of cancer, miscarriage, severe strokeCollapse )I'm grateful for the people who have been there for me in the rough times - my parents, my sisters, my brother, my husband. Those of you online who stayed up with me and cried with me when I needed something to hang onto in the dark, someone to talk to who wasn't drowning in grief just as deeply as I was (like my wonderful husband). somehowunbroken I was lucky to have you share my joy and my sadness; your gift for our girls will be something we always treasure. lunabee34 words can't even express how grateful I was to have you there for me, in the middle of your day/the middle of my night, helping me keep myself together when the silence engulfed & overwhelmed me and I needed to be outside my head - your presence and your care kept me alive, literally.

I'm grateful for the friends I've made RL in the past four years, who were all wonderful and supportive - they allowed me to speak and be heard, they made themselves part of my healing journey, and they never minimised my pain or tried to push me to recover fast(er). I'm especially grateful for a special friend I made three years ago, just before things started piling up. When things were at the worst and my husband and I were lost, sad and broken, she dropped everything. She traveled 12 hours just to spend a week caring for us, and to give us a buffer so that my husband and I weren't alone in our shared pain.

And for now, the bad times are over. I'm hoping for a clean slate this year. I got the ball rolling with volunteer charity work over Christmas 2015, so that I could get out there and meet people, do things I enjoy, and freshen up my CV. Because after almost three years of unemployment I'm ready to do what it takes - try anything to make my life change for the better. It's not always cheery around here (I lean towards raw honesty) BUT this year I want to put more emphasis on the peaks of the rollercoaster, not just the valleys. Because I have so much fucking good in my life, y'all.

2016 will bring more volunteer charity work, more therapy & progress towards healing, more time in the moment since the future is up in the air, hopefully more writing, and best of all: MORE HOCKEY.

If you're new(ish) here, welcome aboard. I'm sorry if I haven't gotten to know you as well as I'd liked or as much as you hoped. The tl;dr above is part of the reason why.

The main fandoms I anticipate squeeing over in 2016: Check Please; Hockey in its many North American forms - CWHL, NWHL, NHL, OHL/QMJHL, SPHL (also RPF for my fav sports people) and Worlds/IIHF competitions for European hockey; The Force Awakens; DC comics (yes, still; mostly classic but some DCnu) and most of DC's productions on TV (Gotham and The Flash, to name a couple); and last but not least THE RIO OLYMPICS YAAASSS.

Check out my tumblr - I'm ariadne83 over there too. You may notice that it's mostly Hamiltion: The Musical. This is because despite the fact that I don't actually like most musicals THAT SHIT IS AMAZING.

/new year, shiny and chrome

 

Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/111295.html, where it has comments</a>

For me, one of the hardest things about being a survivor of childhood violence, and late-teens date rape and domestic abuse, is that it will never truly leave me. It's been fourteen years since I started the journey towards healing, and I've made so much progress... but it's still there.
( Cut for talk of violenceCollapse )

 

Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/110918.html, where it has comments</a>

 So, it turns out I'm kind of a sport nerd.

I'm not an athlete in any sense of the word (LOLno), but it turns out I fucking love watching sports. I've been on holidays for three days and in that time I have:

- watched a whooooole lot of NHL (North American men's ice hockey for the uninitiated) and formed enough opinions about players that I'm now following nine teams? Plus the Columbus Cottonmouths in the SPHL? And also drooling over the fact that the NWHL is going to stream all their games for free?

- stayed up to watch the China Open tennis comp two nights in a row, despite the fact that both the semi-final and the final have *started* at midnight

- watched rugby with my Dad (he only follows Ireland, and got unholy glee out of England being knocked out of the competition early when they're the ones hosting)

- watched soccer with my Dad (he follows Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and I've lost count of the number of times he's watched the replays)

So. Once Nadal and Djokovic finish their tennis match, I'm waking my Dad up so he can watch rugby (at 4am) and soccer (at 7am). And then I'll catch a nap before the whole hockey cycle starts over again at noon.

My mother keeps asking me if I want to leave the house and go for a walk. But... I'm hockeying?

And when my husband gets here after visiting *his* Dad, he'll probably add cricket to the mix.

It feels identical to drowning in fandoms and plotbunnies. I regret nothing.

Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/110609.html, where it has comments</a>

It only took my mother 14 hours to drive me to incandescent rage. It's not quite a record - I'm pretty sure she's managed it in just two hours before - but still. ( Discussion of domestic abuse behind the cutCollapse )It's almost 4pm; time to break out the whiskey. Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/110535.html, where it has comments</a>

 I'm sitting here nursing my damaged shoulder and managing the pain with a glass of wine, because it's better than constantly taking diclofenac (and ending up with a ruined stomach lining) and codeine (and risking addiction). The damage snuck up on me, my shoulder gradually getting stiffer and stiffer. I stopped playing the violin. I stopped lifting anything moderately heavy. I stopped sleeping on my right side, so I didn't crush the joint. I never finished painting my parents' house, and blamed it on my depression.

The reality is that eight years of manual labour ruined my body in ways that I'm paying for now. I quit when I dislocated my hip at age twenty-five, but the damage had already been done. Now I'm praying that the money I save by *not* going to my psychologist - she gave me the all clear; I didn't just decide to quit therapy - will be enough to get adequate physical therapy. I struggle to figure out what jobs I would be eligible for, because my blue-collar job doesn't mean shit to modern employers even though it involved stocktake, ordering, people management skills, maintaining time sheets - a whole range of shit that theoretically makes me perfect for admin jobs. Shelf stacking? Not an option. Retail? I can't be on my feet all day with my unstable hip.

And it's not just me. Thrashing our bodies to provide society will all the modern conveniences and then being "rewarded" with contempt, as if we're stupid for doing our jobs well and trying to make a living, happens to so many people every damn day. And then we get to our 20s or 30s or 40s, and we physically cannot do it anymore... but there's no other option but to keep on thrashing our bodies, because the skills we employed aren't "good enough" even though they're exactly the same as any other office job - except we can multitask on top of it, because we employ "office" skills in the field.

That doesn't even begin to touch the surface of the additional crap piled on when you take into account race, gender, sexuality, culture - any conceivable "excuse" for prejudice. It's a cut-throat system that puts a boot on the neck of anyone who tries to improve their own quality of life. 

I'm so unbelievably lucky that I have a great partner who supports me. I don't have to choose between food and SSRIs. But I do have to choose between food and painkillers. Between codeine or alcohol - which one will do the job more effectively for what monetary price, and weighing up the effects each one will have on my body. Because it's so thrashed I want to limit how much I ruin it further.

I come from a (white) immigrant family. My parents spent their entire life working hard so we'd have a better life. And... it hasn't happened. We're all alive and coping; thriving is arguable.

I'm probably preaching to the converted, but please. Think twice before you make jokes about millennials.

Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/110097.html, where it has comments</a>

 A thing I realised today: so many people I know struggle to find time in their lives, both for what they want to and what they need to do. Moving to Australia, and moving house after four years, has made my husband and I so much more financially stable. And that's come with a whole lot of benefits, the biggest one being that I can afford decent mental health care and medication, but another big one is that there's no *pressure* for me to get a job.

I want one, and I think I'd be better off working, but the fact that it hasn't happened yet... is okay. We're not going to drown in debt like we did in New Zealand. The budget is tight but it's manageable. And I have the time to take care of myself on bad pain days (from my shoulder injury) which is an incredible blessing.

Tl;dr my light bulb moment of the week: I can do this.

Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/110051.html, where it has comments</a>