Finished my first pass at Estelline's fic! This is particularly good, since I wasn't able to write for seven days and it was driving me a bit stir crazy. I cut about 5k words, so now it's 55k in total. I need to go through it again for final checks but it's in a state where it can soon be posted, which is deliberately timed with me finishing Heavensward; I've been getting Sorbet through the initial push of levelling a first DOW job through 80/90, plus her DOH/DOL and it's going reasonably well, she got lucky with some GC handins so one DOH is at dwarves already, WHM is 77, she should get picto over the weekend which opens up the arksadora dailies and hunts sprint - but back to Estelline, the focus on Sorbet was a result of not having the capability, physically or mentally, to really focus on MSQ, so I took a small break (and played Caravan SandWitch on the side. I liked it! Not sure if I'll ramble about it yet, I might). I'm hoping to do 3.4 and 3.5 over the weekend and have her set up for Stormblood.

Stormblood will be a mixture... I left off with Ai following the liberation of Doma, so I'm going to do the initial Ala Mhigo part with Estelline, get her to Kugane with doing Sirensong, and then swap over to Ai to play out the other half. As I have the opportunity to see the plot hooks back to back without several weeks of Doma in the middle and time for my brain to forget, this feels like a good chance to take it.

This week has been very noisy. My upstairs neighbours are having work done on their bathroom, which I found out at 8:15am on Monday when the hammering and drilling and buzzsawing started. Sometimes over my head, because the connecting wall is the wall I sleep against. The workmen have been here every day since through about 2-3pm - except for yesterday, when they were here until 6pm. :') this was Bad as my desire for No Noise Time had to take precedence over sleeping so I got like. An hour and a half of actual sleep before the morning chorus. I did drown it out a bit with a fan today to try to get a little more, but unfortunately that means I have to listen to the fan, which as we already know, is not a real solution... being housebound is awful sometimes.

Thing is I know the size of their bathroom. It's the same as mine. It's miniscule. I'm hoping it's a week and done, I don't want to imagine this next week with groceries PEM, it's bad enough as is. My weekly things, aside from noise, are done after next Tuesday, so I can have a bit of a break and go back to trying to tackle the folate problem and also the GP-do-your-job problem, and maybe, just maybe, have the energy to look at a several thousand page catalogue of what I want for my bathroom renovation, lmao. rip.

It's maintenance, it's been a week, figuratively and literally. The post groceries PEM only really started to lift yesterday (Sunday) and I still feel sluggish and as though I'm moving through wet cement, and that's with all my precautions. I should not leave the house on Wednesday for a blood test, but given they've made me wait six weeks for it, I don't really have a choice...

Food wise, I am mostly back to pre-November levels of paradoxical diarrhoea and constipation, by heavily restricting my diet, upping the fybogel, and taking gaviscon during the day with omeprazole at night. Some foods I don't fucking get. There is nothing in them ingredients wise that I have an aversion to, but they keep causing problems. Others are like, okay, is there too much fat content in this meal overall, and if there isn't, having cheese with it will be fine. What's really pissing me off though is that I was eating well before I started having these aversions. Now I can eat a fraction of that. I can eat like, four whole vegetable types, everything else is off the table, possibly permanently. There isn't much more of any food to get rid of, and that's what troubles me. It's done this once. Twice, if you count gallstones. What happens if it does it again?

And really, it's same old same old, as it has been since early 2022. I wake up physically and mentally languished. I have zero energy. Food will get me energy. But eating means I have to suffer the consequences of having eaten, but I have to do it, or else my head will not stop hurting. It takes a significant amount of mental fortitude to do this day in day out, especially when it is the only thing you do. Like. I don't think health care gets this. I would have stopped eating a long time ago if I could. The most I can hope for and have again achieved is to get to a point where my paradoxical diarrhoea is "manageable", where it happens regularly at the same time every day, but it's still there. It's nice not to have constant pain and nausea from the gallstones, but the trade-off has been a heavily lowered baseline to the point where I still can't see people and have to be more conservative with my energy than ever.

And it quite frankly sucks. Add in the fact my body is trying, and failing, to have a period, and is fighting the PMDD related brain gremlins... I don't have the energy for facing this. I fully expect my blood tests to come back as "you're fine" because they always do. Yeah, sure. I'm fine but you checking this has me paralysed in bed. Sure. Sounds fantastically fine.

I'm still working on Estelline's fic, on and off, to keep my mind watered, have been trying to play Heavensward when I can recall the last line of dialogue that was just on screen, poor levels of success. It's funny because fic is mostly just Sad. No one is having a good time. There's three sex scenes and they are all Sad, the two aftermath scenes following them are Sad, everyone is miserable. Until the end, when it becomes a bit more bittersweet. Classic Heavensward tbh.

I am, I think, mostly done with gpose... I lowered the amount for Prih, because actually, the moment I want you to see her for the first time is when Estelline really sees her for the first time, when she saves her life. It's visually poetic. The only thing I need is more Artoirel, but, patches. He moves around in patches. Please uncross your arms at least once, sir. I beg.

What else... I returned to Stadium in Overwatch, which I still don't really like. ( i am enjoying it more now that I figured out what to do with it but it's not really what I'm here for... )

I've not really stopped picking up figures, but the last time I added to my collection in any way was in 2023 - an Aloy nendoroid, which I preordered in 2022. And before that, some other P/O's and ebay scouting for Ashe's nendoroid (she was expensive in the aftermarket, but I got her).

The thing is is like. I have such a hard time taking care of myself with all my health problems I have not been able to dust my flat in three years. I tried, last summer; insert wisdom teeth issues. I should try again, but I am once again in a state of if I move my abdomen too much in any direction, I feel cripplingly nauseous and sick. If I can't clean what I already have, and most of my figures are still in boxes, it follows I shouldn't get more. I have the money to do so, I just. Feel like I shouldn't. A no cleaning Rems does not deserve visual closure enrichment. But I really would like to at last get a display cabinet set up somewhere, and there are still some...

( Kotobukiyas )

( Nendoroids and figmas )

( Pop Up Parade )

( Statues )

Game: Lost Records: Bloom & Rage [Tape 2]
Dates played: 23/04/25 - 27/04/25



( spoilers for the second tape below )

( Afterthoughts )

It's time for Competitive Drives again in Overwatch, which is an end of season chance to pick up bonus comp points. OW started doing this three seasons ago - at the time, I was very much out of comp as a mode, had not played in it for over three years due to the format being too stressful for me (number matter), and OW2 had removed all end of season comp rewards for rank so equally all incentive. Drives are the effective replacement for end of season rewards, and it's a "you get enough for a weapon skin" across all ranks for everyone if you play a reasonable number of games/win those games so. They successfully lured me back in.

When OW2 came out there was a lot of. How shall we say. Bugs due to account merging across platforms. ( unrelated to comp bugs ) I also experienced a bug where my comp points I had at the time were times'd by ten. So I went from 900 to 9000, or, three gold guns. (Some people got like. 35k points. WILDIN.) I spent those points on Junkerqueen, Lifeweaver, and Juno weapons, and those from the previous drives on Echo and Winston. I have 3k left, which I'm planning to spend on Freja sometime after she launches, and then I'm kind of set on golds for my characters I play often and well.

The first drive I only got 500 comp points as I hadn't done placements and decided like, second to last day I wanted in. Next season I was prepared and placed in everything, partly to satisfy my curiosity of what the game thought my rank now was. It was roughly as expected: Platinum 3 for support, and Platinum 4 for tank and dps. I played a bunch of games to get the 3000 points, won maybe 60%, and went up the tiniest amount to Plat 2. Where I stayed for the last set of drives - placements are biannually - because they had 6k points up for grabs but I didn't have the time due to PEM to do more than the basic 3k, and fortunately I only had to do less than half a dozen games for it as the drive score was generously low.

I don't really dig the galactic weapon designs - it removes all texture from a weapon on console and doesn't look great - but I like them more than the jades, and I have a few maybes, and we do seem to maybe be getting a wolf themed Italian robot lady at the end of the year (I'm in so much danger), so I was just, yeah I'll do drives again. Did my placements. Not in dps because that was a one time deal; I find it extra stressful and I unfortunately care too much about my Ashe winrate. Placed Plat 1 in support, Plat 2 in tank. Waited for drives. Played through the first two thresholds yesterday as tank and then the third and fourth today, in support queue.

tl;dr




(I still need to do the fifth threshold (me and duo tried but went on a losing streak due to some very questionable teammates), but my goal was to hit the fourth one today so being ahead was like, that's fine, I can do less tomorrow and if it doesn't work out I do more on Sunday.)

Unrelated to drives, I am sleeping a bit better (actually a number of hours) and had to give in with trying to contact the GP about food and digestion stuff, but I still have to wait another week for one to examine me before anything gets remotely rolling. Heaven forbid the NHS does anything quickly. I've had a bit of success with upping my omeprazole to see if it was stomach acid/bile making it worse and the answer was "yes" and "it does help and means I can eat and the swelling on the left side of my body went down because my body isn't screaming every time I put anything into it", but I'm not sure if I'm now getting headaches off it from the higher dose... or it's just my body's new pre-period thing. Because that showed up too, which. Explains a lot as to why it got worse, again. As usual all my abdomen issues vanished for a few hours as soon as I started bleeding. Absolutely an angle I'm going to force them on when I ask for allergy tests/blood tests/an ultrasound because I have very strong suspicions as to what the real cause of all of this is.

Fashionably late to the party due to the ever mounting list of health problems I have, today I did patch 7.1 in FFXIV.

( the S9 headache persists unfortunately )