You're afraid to be corny, but I was born on the cob

Is anybody else having trouble clearing their inbox? Whether done individually or by "Mark All Read", I've been unable to mark my inbox notifications as read for a few days now. I tested on both my laptop and my phone, but the issue persists.

Any information anyone could offer with regards to this would be appreciated!

Path: Moonlight Trail
My goal: 20,000
Current word count: 20,402

Wordcount goal: GET!!

I'm super proud of myself!! It's not like the first time I passed a revised goal -- I feel like I worked for it, and succeeded at a challenge. As-of now, I'm also 4th on the Moonlight Trail leaderboard out of 24!

For my last few projects, I finalized my suicidism article, wrote the text for a small zine I'm making about my favorite fanfic tropes, wrote a template for one of those DeviantArt-style "journal memes" for Sheezy.Art (a website I might dedicate a whole blog post to someday soon), and outlined a fic!

Said fic is extremely self-indulgent. I've been rewatching Shugo Chara with my partner lately, because it's extremely nostalgic for me, and it reminded me, in part, how much I love Tadase, but also... God! The Shugo Chara fandom was just so weirdly homophobic towards him! (The first time I ever heard or read the f-slur was actually by a Shugo Chara fan, directed towards Tadase. True story!) So, of course, I've taken to headcanoning him as queer in earnestness, to reclaim All That Shit that I had to see as a latent queer child. Which is basically what the fic is about -- Tadase being queer, treated genuinely, in a "5+1 things" format!

I don't know if I'll ever finish it. The Shugo Chara fandom is, like, super-mega-dead at this point, and Shugo Chara feels a little bit... embarrassing to write for? Especially this kind of fic, where the point is (not to be cheesy) trying to heal my inner child. Although, maybe that's a reason why I should write it. The only reason why I'm embarrassed about it is because it's a really old fandom, mostly for young girls, and the subject is that of queerness. None of that should be considered embarrassing! Maybe considering writing for my elementary school interests is bringing out the "elementary schooler bullied for his interests" in me again...

Writing it all out like this... yeah, I think I am going to finish it! But definitely not right now. I need a break from writing for a while, as I do after every writing challenge. Especially since I went from one writing challenge (drabblefest) right into another (Rough Draft Month)! But I feel like I've earned my break. I'm happy with myself.

Path: Moonlight Trail
My goal: 25,000
Minimum words to hit each day: 834
Current word count: 11,837
Current average words per day: 789

My motivation was temporarily boosted by writing "An Excerpt From the Biography of the Devourer of All Things Horrible" (under the temp title "History Hates Lovers"), and I've gotten more comments on it in just a few days than I have on all of my works combined for the past few months. People are very sweet, and that makes me happy.

But, immediately after that, my mental got bad again. I've been struggling really hard to write. I literally only got out of bed at 6pm today; I spent the rest of the day sleeping. I wrote precisely 33 words yesterday, and that was a bullet point list of low-effort things I could write today. Today, this blog is probably all I'll write, but I might make a small attempt at writing a review of the game Cold Front.

Again, I feel the urge to quit the challenge entirely. But I'm trying to compromise with myself first, see if that's a possible way to go about things. Even if I don't meet my goal, that's okay, right...? I didn't make my goal last year, and that was fine. Or maybe I could adjust my goal to 20k, or maybe even just 15k.

I think what's really killing me is this idea of an "average daily word count". Missing even one day messes with the average so bad, and I feel like I've failed massively every time I fuck up and can't do my 834. Which isn't great when you're currently fighting with everything you have to just keep staying alive.

I dunno. I'm tired, even though I slept in as much as I did... I think I'll consider changing my word count goal the most heavily. I need a win right now.

Path: Moonlight Trail
My goal: 25,000
Minimum words to hit each day: 834
Current word count: 1,647
Current average words per day: 549

Feeling super hyped for RDMO!! The community is super kind and supportive, and the leaderboard does a hell of a lot for my motivation. (I've been in 4th place this whole time, and I wanna break top 3 so bad...!)

I'm a little worried about the upcoming days, though. As much as November has been codified as THE writing challenge month, it's such an inconvenient time... Exams are coming up for me!! I have a midterm this week, and I'm worried that I'm gonna be burnt out from it. I've purposefully been trying to cut myself off relatively early each day, to pace myself, but with the way things are lining up, I may have to end up taking days off anyway. Sigh... I wish these events took place in any month except for November...

Nonetheless, I'm full of motivation and not feeling even a little bit tired, which is awesome! I'll do my best to address the test when I get to it, and not let it stress me out.

Below are the graphics that I've made with the official affiliated templates! Open them in a new tab to get a closer look! (Since I'm not working on one project, but multiple, I just used a project I'm particularly excited about for the blueprint graphic!)

I'm seeing people taking this scene as Till "choosing Mizi" over Ivan, symbolically, but frankly, they need to stop looking at it through a lens of shipping, and Till "choosing" someone.

Till has always idolized Mizi. During hardships, she was his beacon of light; she is, quite literally, a savior figure.

Vivinos describes Till's relationship with Ivan as love and hatred; difficult, complicated, messy. And he's being continuously reminded of the trauma of Ivan's death while it's still fresh on his mind. So, when he sees Mizi, he's of course going to be excited and reach out to her; she's someone he views as perfect. His comfort. And he, in this moment, is so, so hurt.

And we see what the narrative does in response to his attempted escapism.

I've been getting into desktop personalization lately, so I thought I'd share my current desktop and FireFox set-up! I'll also be linking the guides I followed, in case anyone reading wants to use them, too.

I'll explain my FireFox setup first! (My write-up on why I use FireFox, and a long list of extension recs, can be found here.)

Firstly, I use Tabliss in order to make a custom "new tab" page. I have some cute pictures I like for the tab backgrounds to rotate between, and I have the current time, a greeting, and a set of icons which link to sites I visit often. (In order, these are tumblr, Neocities, YouTube, toyhou.se, AO3, archive.org, Twitch, my email inbox, and Photopea, the in-browser and free recreation of Photoshop. I need to add a few more links to this, come to think of it, but I'll get around to that later!)


I used this tutorial (archive) to do all of this. My personal taste leans more towards the pink and cozy, but you can use it to fit your personal tastes.

The extensions I have pinned to my FireFox taskbar for easy access include Tree-Style Tab (part of what I use for the setup), Reading List (a "read later" feature), Feedbro (an RSS reader), uBlock Origin (needs no introduction), and the Wayback Machine extension (great for easy page archive-saving and checking).


As you can see, everything is themed around one of my favorite games, Needy Streamer Overload! The whole game basically takes place on the computer, and has a strong visual aesthetic, so I'm super happy with it.

It features a media player, which I have configured to be able to play and pause YouTube videos I'm watching in-browser. All of the software icons are in a small cluster, ordered loosely by color; we have my video games folder, FireFox, Itch, Streamlabs, Spotify (*slips this to you subtly*), Audacity, Discord (*slips this to you also*), Steam, Clip Studio Paint and OBS Studio. I also have a quick notes widget, which I use for only the most important things, as you can see, along with a calendar widget which shows the current date and time.

You can't see it, or hear it, but I've also customized all sounds to be sounds from the game, and have changed the cursor to be the one from the game, as well!

I followed this tutorial to get this look, doing everything but changing the system's default font. I chose not to take this step because, unlike all other parts of this customization, it is not easily reversible.

In terms of my taskbar, I have a lot of the same things I have on my desktop, with a few additions. We have the file manager, FireFox, LibreOffice Writer (a free and open-source alternative to Microsoft Word), Discord, Clip Studio Paint, Wordpad (for quick notes), Itch, FreeTube (an ad-free, customizable, free and open-source YouTube client), and VLC media player!

And that's just about everything! I'm very pleased with all of it, hehe.

This is my card for the People With Disabilities Drabble Fest over in allbingo! I'm going to try to get a blackout, so I can get some practice in for writing shorter-form fanfic.

I don't know if all of them will be drabbles exactly, but I'm going to try to go for a quintuple-drabble (500 words) at most, and to land on an exact multiple of 100. Which is to say, I'll making my fics either 100, 200, 300, 400 or 500 words exactly! (Or will be trying to, anyways.) Also, all of them will probably be about Kabru because I am, as they say, very Not Normal about Dungeon Meshi at the moment. In fact, the perfection of the suggested prompt "stop treating me like a child" for Kabru is what made me want to try this in the first place.

My first ever writing bingo challenge! Let's get to it!

Masking	"Doesn't Everybody Do That?"
Stop Treating Me Like a Child	Two Disabled Characters' Relationship

You may have noticed, but I started uploading my backlog of Misc Things! Namely, I've made myself a community for me to upload my icon edits to. The iconing community on this site seems pretty lively, and I saw a few different communities just for one person. The community is pastelveil, and I've managed to upload almost all of my icon backlog there. There are, of course, many older icons that I decided not to upload there, but I went as far back as I could stomach, haha.

In the meantime, since I've been hoping Dreamwidth would replace my Twitter, I decided to go back to my old, abandoned Twitter accounts, download them to Iris (my 1TB external drive; I like to name my electronic possessions), and then delete them. While I was at it, I also updated my archive of my boyfriend and I's tumblr accounts, and I finally got around to archiving my boyfriend and I's personal Discord server as well. I don't know how often I'll update it, but I at least wanted to archive it in its entirety now, as we made it very early on in our friendship and it basically contains the history of our entire relationship. So, of course, the archive is taking a while. It's still happening right now, actually! But it's gotten through the entire general channel, so the rest of the channels should be a breeze in comparison.

I've linked all of the things I've used to do this! Iris was a pass-me-down from my father, who never used her after buying her. But I think she's a decent price. Also, the extensive step-by-step guide for the tumblr downloader, and the user-friendly frontend for the Discord downloader, basically makes them idiot-proof. (I did it, so you can too!)

I'm probably going to finish uploading my icon backlog today or tomorrow. I also plan to make an alt Dreamwidth account, to crosspost my fanfics to. Communities are great and all, but the inability to crosspost to both a community and a journal is suuuch a pain. I'm probably just gonna copy-paste the HTML of the icon community posts, but still.

Oh, before I forget: here's a list of my named possessions, since I mentioned it here!

• Misty: my laptop and drawing tablet! She's a Windows Surface Pro 6. I would NOT recommend her to anyone, she's AWFUL. As I always say to my friends: "She's just a little piece of shit, and she's trying her best." But I love her!
• Lillie: my 3DS! She's not an N3DS; she's an old purple model, and the same one I've had since I was a child! Within the past few years I hacked her (they were right; it WAS surprisingly easy to do!), so she's been seeing a ton more use lately. Check out the custom 3DS themes I've made!
• Iris: my previously-mentioned external drive! I linked to what she is; she's a black MyPassport Ultra, and I use her to archive personal stuff I don't want to get lost! This includes all of my digital art, my boyfriend and I's tumblrs and Discord server, my 3D model of my persona, my old Twitter accounts, my commissions (still working on getting all of those together!), my edits and digital zines I've downloaded!
• Dawn: my Nintendo Switch! It's a Pikachu and Eevee model, and it had the WORST JoyCon drift for AGES. Within just a couple of months of getting her, too! Thankfully, I pre-ordered the pastel pink Joycons that came with Princess Peach: Showtime (predictable bitch I am), so I've been enjoying playing on her a lot more lately.

Yes, I do name all of them after female Pokemon companions! It started with Misty when I got my first computer at the age of around 11 (my first computer was Misty, and every computer after her was also Misty), and I've just continued the trend from there. I'm still deciding on what to name my Quest headset, but I'm thinking maybe Bianca.