Tuesday 25 March 2014

Geekery is the song of my people

I really do have awesome friends. I've been a little bit too sedentary and apt to eat for the sake of it recently, and it's starting to have an impact. So I figured I'd try to get back to something that actually helped and was fun; dancing. Sadly the specific sci-fi conventions I used to go to and dance till I dropped three nights in row have now stopped running, so I need a more local alternative.

By the power of friendship (which is magic, don't you know) I've now acquired a spare... well, everything, required to get Dance Central on the XBox 360 running in the living room. Circumstances have led to my lovely friends having even a spare console sitting quietly gathering dust, so I don't feel like I'm inconveniencing anyone or imposing too much (aside from the enforced trip to a storage unit today, wherein I pretty much appeared, grabbed one of them, and kidnapped him for the afternoon. Next time, remind me, I will simply arrive on the doorstep and intone, "Come with me if you want to live").

Hopefully, therefore, there'll be a bit more activity shortly, as soon as we've (me and Daisy, who's both kind enough to let me stay at hers, and also keen to get the dancing going) cleared space for the Kinect to work. I did enjoy the Kinect games a lot when I lived with said briefly-kidnapped-friend and we had space. I used to be quite good at them... We'll soon see if I've lost my touch completely.

Before I dashed round to their place to steal all their tech and run away laughing, I also made it back in to the charity bookshop where I worked up until last September. One of my friends who's still there had essentially summoned me via the arcane email ritual of "We've had a ton of Dragonlance donated, help", so I appeared to perform the solemn rites of "Here, they go in this order and you should put these ones out on the shelf first; they're the rarest, and oh, I'm just going to borrow this one for the moment and let you have it back later..."

So I've acquired another book to read. But it's all about Raistlin, and he's cut from the same cloth as Loki, Dryden, all the wicked, dangerous characters I like so much. So that pleases me a great deal.

Not that I have a type in fiction, or anything like that, oh no.

Also there was much flailing and geeking out, which always happens every time I see that friend. Her enthusiasm for everything is wonderful, if occasionally a little like being flattened under a landslide of excitement. It doesn't leave you room to be annoyed or upset by anything, because the only way to survive such wild delight is to go with it. It pushes you into the frame of mind where you want to give back the same level of glee, so suddenly you're focusing on all the. best. possible. things, and the happy spiral twists into the most excitable snake eating its own tail you've ever seen, and everything is a reminder of something else wonderful that must be shared right now until your face starts to hurt from grinning and you remember the parking's about to run out on the car and have to leave... on the third attempt, because each time there's just one more thing either of you absolutely must mention before you go.

It is exhausting, when I'm so out of practice at sustained excitement, but very, very entertaining. And has a tendency to gear me up to go and achieve something, hence the unexpected and most useful trip round to the others', with the bonus of lots of hugs and chat with my lovely people.

Anyway, when I got back in I settled down and beta-read a friend's 8000 word fic and returned it, as I promised I would. I seem to recall, actually, promising I'd do it yesterday, but yesterday ended up being weird and almost-migraine and I got practically nothing done, so we're all counting today as a success and not too late.

I've even got another short story from the writing group to read and critique tomorrow, so that'll be fun.

When I type it all out like that, it seems like a very productive day. Which is, after all, the point of these blog posts.

Now I'm going to go and write more Hanith, because Hanith is fun.

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