The Writer Within

January 30, 2024January 30, 2024 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

This is an entry that delves into both making a brand, wandering off into video games, and then explaining why. It’s all of me. Skyrim in particular. Wanting to spend time alone, and wanting to be a writer. Writing and video games are more soothing to me than going out because of sensory overload…….. I feel like this might resonate with other ADHD/ASD/AuDHD people.

We need to talk about it. You and me. That’s because WordPress is also a community of authors who like to share in hopes of going viral. If you go viral on the Internet, there is a better chance you’ll get name recognition before you:

Ask for a book deal that includes an advance; the publisher can see with numbers how popular you are and that gives them a huge indication as to how well the book will sell beforehand. Dooce and The Bloggess both hit the New York Times because so many people were invested, less so after she became an influencer, but in her books, she was still just as raw and real as she ever was at the beginning of her blog.

Getting a book deal over someone else because you’re good at social media is very much like getting a role over someone else in a TV show or film because more people follow them, the younger the better.

In terms of age, I seem to have two markets locked up. These are the same people who like Martha Beck, Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Brené Brown. I cannot break down my analytics as far as I need because those are paid plugins if you don’t run your own server, my next move if I were to make one.

I don’t have to use WordPress, and I can add analytics and search optimization into my HTML documents for free instead of paying $99/year for the professional version of WordPress (that doesn’t include the plugins for analytics, those are paid separately), or a business account, which is $300/mo…. and the plugins you need for analytics are also paid separately even though you’re forking over way more money than these things actually cost.

There aren’t many more features that you get in the business account itself except the ability to basically do what you want with the code (leading to more monetization and they’ll let you keep the money… ads in the free tier make the money go to Automattic (in honor of Matt Mullenweg, also HSPVA. I don’t know him, and my relationship with him is still complicated. He made my job a lot harder once WordPress hit it big and started running almost 30% of the web at one point.).

I also know that with WordPress Business I would get enough subdomains and e-mail addresses; it’s more functionality like Google Education, making blogs with a lot of authors easier to manage.

That being said, I can find something open source and code it on my own. What I lose in that transaction is that I don’t know two things.

The first is whether WordPress is still available in its original form, where you install it on your own server without installing their ridiculous “app store.”

My perfect version got wiped out about 8-10 years ago and was replaced by a block system that lets you know nothing about HTML, and more specifically, layers and Cascading Style Sheets.

This is because WordPress used to have a feature where you could put a layer on top of the text and have it “float” so the text wrapped around it closely, except for the amount of padding you code into it.

I could also sort of “edit” the picture on the fly by making borders to separate the text from the image even more without having to add it in an image editor. CSS will do that on its own.

What I did do in an image editor was cut down the file size, because if you upload a 4 MB image and tell the web browser to scale it down, you could make a sandwich in the time it will take that image to load.

On a related topic, this is why I’m saying once and for all that camera phones are getting too intense for the average user. Apple and Android both require so much space for pictures and now there’s not really a way to turn down the quality so you have to edit it later, even if the shot was perfect in the beginning.

I wonder if absolutely any of this is tied to wanting to upload your pictures and then when it runs out, sell you server space……. because neither Apple nor Samsung nor Microsoft nor Amazon is uninterested in moving everything to the cloud because you’ll never lose it, and you’ll pay what the market will bear.

Those are your grandkids and the house might burn down (this is not fictional…. Lindsay and I lost most of our first family pictures to a house fire in 1990, because we gave some of them to our grandparents. The rest were smoke damaged and stuck together because they were wet.). It’s the reason I would buy server space if I didn’t have my own storage…. and even then, I have a 6TB backup drive I can use through USB.

I don’t have to keep anything on my boot drive except Skyrim, because an M.2 drive has the best loading time, but since I’ve added an SSD, the loading time is fast enough that I can store the large textures on my “scratch drive.”

As I was saying the other day, I have a new mod for Skyrim that will make your computer take it easy on your VRAM by unpacking all the textures beforehand to decrease loading time because of the extraction running on the CPU. If I had a media workstation, it would have enough dedicated RAM that I wouldn’t need it, but shared RAM is so much different that this is a game changer. I am now wondering if I buy a bigger SSD, it would work for other Bethesda games as well. Fallout 4 is just as huge an undertaking for my computer….. and yet, I still haven’t gone back to it because I don’t like the interface. The one time I went into town and got a decent weapon, and even remembered to pick up the ammo for it, it wouldn’t fire.

So, I did what any of us would. I toggled God Mode so I could take down a Deathclaw with a 10 MM pistol, and live to tell about it. I know people don’t appreciate it that I’ll actually admit I toggle God mode in tough situations, but I don’t care about winning and losing. I care about the writing. Besides, the story of a Deathclaw being taken down by a woman without any real armor and a pistol is much funnier than “I was so overpowered I killed it in one shot.” I did that in Fallout 3 already. Not as funny.

I just hated the interface, because it was made for console and adapted to PC. I couldn’t get the hang of it. If I’m ever interested in seeing what happens, I’ll catch it on YouTube. At least I can find out if a mod is interfering with that weapon firing or whether it’s not supposed to work and you’re supposed to find something else.

I’m still autistic when I’m playing a video game. I don’t do well with surprises at not being prepared. So, I don’t watch videos with any spoilers until I get what the best start is and a few of the high level weapons you can find easily before you find yourself shooting and pistol-whipping a Deathclaw.

In Skyrim, the best moment I’ve ever had was when I realized my magic had come up enough that I defeated one with conjuration spells and a bow that appeared when I cast it, I wasn’t carrying one on me.

This is because in the past, I’ve kind of played a weenie, what most people think of when they think of the stealth archer build. That’s because you’re so overpowered, even in the early game, because a sneak attack counts for more damage than shooting an arrow when the victim can see you.

However, since I’m so late in the game, I’m adept at any build. There are just the weapons I like carrying, and the ones I don’t. When I leave my player home (the one place you can store your stuff and know it will always be there when you get back), I am only carrying about 76 pounds of supplies. I carry a truly overpowered bow and sword, but no shield because I have a spell in my other hand, generally conjuration because that adds extra followers.

Speaking of followers, right now I have Lydia (with her dialogue extension) and Lucien (with a patch for Lucien to interact with Lydia). Lucien also interacts with other followers, but only the previous version of Kaiden supports those patches and Anniversary Edition won’t work with it. If I find out that Creation Club sucks, I’m downgrading.

Serana also has interactions with Lucien, Lydia, and Remiel, who is a Dwemer specialist and a ton of fun. We’re going to go and get her right after Serana becomes my follower.

I haven’t gone to get them yet, but I also have “Khajit Will Follow,” which comes with three in one, Inigo (who has interactions with all followers), Auri, and Hoth.

The reason for this is simple. My favorite mod in the whole game is “Legacy of the Dragonborn.” It comes with a Safehouse that can be modified so that your followers’ rooms are personalized to them with “Safehouse Plus” and its follower room patch. I can’t wait to see all of it, and I just got the key to the safehouse.

Plus, Remiel has a plugin for Legacy of the Dragonborn, so I can invite her to be a part of “The Explorer’s Guild.” She’ll freak because she’ll find more Dwemer shit than I will.

I’m also thinking about downgrading because some of the mods have not been updated and some have. This mostly affects dependencies, because one mod is looking for the old file name when it’s been renamed in the Anniversary Edition. So, you can’t really decide which mods you want to install. It matters so much what version you’re actually on.

I do not think that I am capable of live-streaming Skyrim unless it was a comedy show. I am so bad at this game, and yet I still play it because of the writing…. particularly Lucien’s, because I’ve just downloaded him and he’s hilarious. We’re supposed to warn the Jarl that a dragon is attacking, and Lucien’s voice is very posh. So, it makes you fall over with laughter when you walk into Dragonsreach and he says, “let’s chat to the man in the big fancy chair.”

Kaiden is the one I’ve spent the least time with, but I’m liking him more and more. His dialogue is sometimes clever, and I think it will get better once the main storyline with him starts. I know this because I sort of got a spoiler, an overhaul for his house…. so I know he eventually finds something.

When I get to Skyrim, the first thing I buy is a player home. I don’t do any quests, I start crafting potions and weapons. That’s because there are potions for smithing that give the weapon more damage, and then you can enchant them with very strong magic effects to decrease the time it takes to get through anything.

I’ve added a mod called “Summermyst,” which comes with all new enchantments without changing the current spell or enchantment perk trees (my problem with Ordinator, etc.). I’m excited because I just got my second favorite. It’s called “Death Shroud,” and when people get within 25 feet of you, their lifeblood starts draining. It is, unsurprisingly, found on vampire armor.

There is already a “fire damage” enchantment, but the one from Summermyst is much better. It’s called “Fire Damage Lingering.” When you hit them with that, they start burning at the rate of X per second (depending on strength of enchantment). If they aren’t dead when you shot them, they will be shortly.

I have something similar on my bow right now, shock damage and shock damage lingering. It will hit everyone in the vicinity with shock damage at X per second.

I also have armor enchantments that my followers cannot go without. I will not let Lydia within 25 feet of me if she doesn’t have a “muffle” enchantment on her boots. I make sure they all have it, because it keeps them from setting off traps…… on Lydia’s, I also fortify “sneak” instead of one-handed attacks.

Lydia is the only one I make all the weapons for because I’ve seen her use everything she picks up on her own except magic. So, depending on what armor I make for her, I make her every weapon that line offers. If they don’t do enough damage, they will when I’m done with them.

The other thing I do is that in addition to armor enchantments, I make them all jewelry… necklace, right and left hand rings, earrings, capes, and hoods. This is because you can wear all of that if you’re not wearing a helmet and each item can be enchanted. A ranger hood makes a very good head armor when the circlet is just worn for the enchantment.

I do all of this beforehand so that they’re armored for the late game as well. I do not know if they’re marked essential or not, because they’re all incompatible with a follower manager because they run their own scripts.

Speaking of which, I found the coolest one (to me) because my second favorite Marvel hero after Black Panther is Dr. Strange. I think it’s funny that my first and second favorites are my personality. The first is fighting for social justice, the second is the humor of watching Dr. Strange in the hospital and having known a thousand doctors just like him.

Anyway, I found this mod called “Strange Runes.” When you cast a spell, it takes a second. The original animation is still there, but when the spell is ready to cast, it throws out a bright rune in the color of your spell.

Also, I have to admit that it’s a lot of fun going to Apocrypha and collecting all the black soul gems because who hasn’t thought of putting Nazeem in one and using him to enchant something as cheap and worthless as his personality.

For instance, after I am the Thane of Whiterun because I killed a dragon and absorbed its soul, and the whole city supposedly knows who I am, and I am in and out of the palace almost every day for a while, that dick still says, “do you get to the Cloud District often? What am I saying? Of course you don’t.”

When I’ve defeated the boss dragon and saved the world, then beat the Dragonborn before me, even then everyone treats you like crap unless you overhaul all the dialogue.

I have single-handedly built two towns, and have hired guards. However, because the guards don’t have any different dialogue after all that happens, even in my own house, where I am basically the laird, I still hear “speak, Elf.”

But this time I’ve added a whole bunch of mods that overhaul dialogue, from Interesting NPCs to AI overhaul as well. Plus, I’ve added “Settlements Expanded” and a whole bunch of things that make the cities bigger, thus more people to talk to as I’m walking along.

I’ve also added a new quest mod I didn’t have before called “Project AHO.” I haven’t started it, again, not much time. But I found out that one of my favorite characters is in it (Neloth) and I couldn’t resist, even though people were talking so much shit about it on reddit. I don’t use reddit for opinions, ever.

However, Neloth is coded as a bitchy queen, and treats his assistants like he’s Murphy Brown and Christina Yang all rolled into one. I need more dialogue from him, and it will be worth it in the end, I think.

There are also so many dwemer mods in which Remiel has dialogue that I’ve gotten those, too. The few hours I’ve played with her are priceless because she’s a bookworm like me.

And that brings us completely back around. My “brand” is bookworm. I am really lost as to how to take myself to the next level, but also know I’m ready for it…. both the collaboration and the dedication to my writing time.

The reason I write about Skyrim is that it makes me stand out to Skyrim fans. The reason I write about any media and include lots of media references is that my fans aren’t just American. That’s why I say things like, “if you aren’t familiar.” It’s not because I’m trying to speak down to any of you. It’s because there are going to be many, many readers who don’t give a shit about installing Skyrim but like hearing the way I talk about it.

The gamers will get all the inside jokes, and we all win.

But in order to be able to do all that, I need help. Share me on Facebook when you find something you’re comfortable sharing. I know not everything is comfortable or easy. But to the extent that you’re able, it would really help me for you to subscribe to “Stories That Are All True” on Facebook, because that’s where I put my author page content, and the way I’ll eventually get paid- through blog posts and memes and being a Facebook “rising creator.”

I get more shares and followers on WordPress than I do anywhere else, because that’s an audience that already likes to read. It helps me when you’ve read something you liked because people are more likely to take the time to read something if you’ve vetted it first.

I’m also not the friend you don’t want to warn someone about, because you might bring them in on an entry about history, but who knows what you’ll find the longer you dig into mine.

The brand that comes from the writer within.

And this is what I took down with a 10mm pistol.

Sleep tight. 😛

Staying Up

September 26, 2023 ~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

What could you do more of?

I am slowly starting to stay up later and sleep in. Not by much. Just one or two hours. I’m starting this entry at 7:48, after I’ve done the things I need to do to get going. I have taken my medication, and gotten myself something to drink, and settled in. Therefore, I woke up at 0700 instead of 0500 for love.

That’s because the person that most represents safety to me and vice versa is in Portland, Oregon. That’s three hours into the past from here. I’ve done it with other friends, had this asynchronous life because I’ve had friends in Portland since 1996 or something like that and moved to DC in May of 2001. The events of September 11th did not drive me away. Kathleen did. It was the best mistake I’ve ever made. When I went to Portland, I found everything I have ever needed to know myself. It affects me every day, and I’m grateful to my time there for it, no matter how low my Vitamin D was when I got home (six).

I don’t stay up for me. I stay up for Bryn. I want her as a real part of my life rather than a fake one, and video calling is easier for both of us in the evening. It’s just that her evening is generally my bedtime when I’m getting up at 0500. When I get up at 0500, sometimes it’s so early for her that she hasn’t gone to bed yet. We make it work, and yet we don’t. It’s not a matter of how much we love and adore each other, just that our relationship isn’t as full of practical love as it would be if we lived in the same neighborhood. Maybe we will eventually, but I don’t want either of us to do the hard sell on each other. Our lives will unfold as they should. The difference between this relationship and most of my other virtual ones is that I don’t video call with them, ever. I barely even do audio. I can do that with Bryn because we’ve had so much face time over the years that we call each other no matter what we’re doing or how we look because the video call is more important than fixing up for it. Video calls are so much easier when you don’t give a shit how you look on camera. It’s not that we look bad, it’s that we’re going to love each other no matter how we look, so why waste time on something so frivolous?

I like our back and forth, the way we’re both on the “think it, say it” plan because we can be. It’s a trust that’s implicit and makes it easy to breathe. She’s made the commitment to learn my attachment style and love language, but she doesn’t really have to do research because they’re the same as mine. She understands something in me because she wears it on her skin, not because she’s lost in a book…. or if she is, it’s the one I’m writing for us.

You’ll just have to put up with romantic and flowery language from me about her because I am Anne Shirley crazy for her. She knows that she is my Diana Barry…. so much lighter than I am in some ways, darker in others. We complete, not compete. I am the friend that would get her drunk on purpose, though, and she wouldn’t complain because I’m an excellent bartender and it doesn’t take much for either of us. 😉

I am sort of in a relationship in terms of having a companion but not a possible husband, and she definitely is in a relationship with promise. It fits us to a T to have other partners, while also making space for each other; our history is too long for us not to put each other first in some ways. I might have to be around for the next boyfriend, and Dave will be excused for cause. I have no reason to believe this will be the case, it’s just a sitrep. We’re a package deal, get used to it. 😉

Being with our respective guys gives us more to talk about, not less. I don’t feel jealous and neither does she. It’s nice to have a place to unload about everything, because neither of us blink when the other has a problem. We’re on it like a team. Later I have to call Multnomah County on some business of my own, so I’m going to do hers as well. It’s no thing because if I have to do something over the phone, I know she’d be my proxy if something needed to be done in person. It’s a give and take now that I have someone on the ground that I can trust to have my back in a city where I used to live and still need to bat cleanup.

I’m not divorced yet, or at least, I have been unwilling to check. Dana told me she would take care of it, but I haven’t been sent anything to sign and I don’t think people have the capability to divorce someone without their knowledge. I could be wrong, but I can’t assume Dana is more likely than me to fill out paperwork, either, even though she said she would. I am not being catty. Paperwork causes anxiety for both of us sometimes because of the emotional attachment it represents. We’re both ADHD. If it fell off her radar, it won’t come back.

I can have empathy because in some ways, we’re the same person and that will never change.

Now my mother lion has kicked in, because I should have done it long ago for Dana and followed up on the paperwork myself, because I know it was difficult for two reasons. The first is that the way our relationship ended is shameful to both of us given the connection we threw away. We should have been able to deal with the Supergrover issue because I shouldn’t have gotten so high on her. Dana would know exactly how being married and being lost in new relationship energy would feel, because she was married during most of the time she was dealing with her feelings for me……………. yet another reason I didn’t want to get involved in the first place.

I struggled with the idea of having an affair because she was using her wife as a safety net if I said no and I knew it. That’s because her wife knew what Dana was doing, too, and was never blind to it. She saw how Dana reacted to me and thought her days were numbered, then stuck around watching Dana be lovesick over me for years and putting up with that shit. By the time she broke up with her wife, even our girlfriends were convinced we should be together instead of with them because we couldn’t stop talking about each other. Being friends was easy. Taking the leap was hard……………. right up until it wasn’t. By the time we were ready to leap, we had years of emotional closeness feeding our fire. We loved each other because of what we’d been to each other as friends, not because we each thought the other was perfect. We knew what contract we were signing, and we were better for it.

For a while.

She could not accept that the same thing was not happening to her. That my feelings were supposed to have been light and flirty wordplay to give me some dopamine after Dana and me going through a really rough time. Supergrover wasn’t threatened, and she was so cute about flirting with me one time that I knew I’d opened the door to something I could dish, but I could not take. I thought I was a silver-penned devil.

I was, in fact, mistaken.

I laid the golden fiddle at her feet because I had gone down to Georgia and knew that I’d been beat. It was a mistake. It called my bluff. I felt things I never had because it was attention from someone who really deserved mine.

It was all a mistake. It was not a happy compromise, It jumped me further into something she was rightfully afraid would happen. It jumped me into something the relationship couldn’t sustain, but it wasn’t her fault because I pretended to be so cool. it was the beginning of the end with both of them. It just will never be a new beginning with Dana because I can forgive her punching me, but it’s not worth a chance it would happen again and the statistics are against us.

I fucked up asking for more patience from both of them and then not actually doing anything to move myself forward. It was my own choice to feel heat for someone that would never feel that way about me, but that’s based on all the other relationships I’ve had, the mark my emotional abuser left on me. That I couldn’t really know someone until I’d slept with them. I know that because if someone opens me up emotionally, I tend to want all of them. I don’t tie people’s worth to it, though.

If they just want to be friends and I love them that much, I’ll sit in that pain until it goes away. I certainly have done enough of that to feel secure. It’ll never happen again, like women who do fall in love and realize later that it was never the sex that mattered and they’re better off as roommates and friends. But it’s because I’ve felt those feelings that I’m a real and genuine friend and also never less protective and possessive of her than her husband- and not because I want to “keep her safe from him” by acting like a jealous fool. It’s not him that matters. It’s the the rest of the world.

I’m not here to fight her battles for her, just with her. But I won’t if she acts like I don’t matter, gets angry when I tell her that, and treats me like an annoyance a good bit of the time. I’m not here for that, but I am for the relationship in which we do the work to be strong and comfortable at 20 years, like we predicted we would be in the beginning. I can live with boundaries, but not when I don’t know what they are. I will fuck up, and I have. I was out of control, then lost and finding my way back.

I can’t be lost anymore, because I’m tired of feeling insecure. I can’t make up fantasies to ignore the reality of the situation because they feed me. She avoids me in a way she shouldn’t, and that’s not my call. But because she says that she’s enormously impressed with me as a person, everything I’ve said tracks. There is room for all our feelings by now because nothing happens quickly anymore. There’s not an exhilarated rush of trying to know each other as fast as we can.

Our feelings are extreme on both ends. The lovebombing is absolutely genuine, and so is our conflict. The reality is that I would have left Dana no matter what because of two hard outs, not just one……… and now need Supergrover in my life despite her not needing me because of the first hard out’s upper limits, not because I am “trying to get her back.” I was damned if I did, damned if I didn’t at that time. Life was full of hard choices, and I did the best I could with the information I had. It didn’t matter what Supergrover thought. It matters what I thought would happen to me in the future. Supergrover didn’t think about that and I know she didn’t because I didn’t, either. We both got lost in new relationship energy and told each other things that would have consequences long into the future without knowing how stable we were or weren’t. Without knowing how stable I was with Dana, because even I didn’t recognize the toll her DUI would take on me and how that was more of a threat to me than anything Supergrover said that enticed me. I never want to have to bail anyone else out of jail, because it was traumatic. My friend Volfe drove me downtown to pick her up, and she had already left on the bus. I was racing to get to her only to have my hopes dashed. I did get to see her later, but she knew we were coming to get her and she left, anyway. It made me crazy to the point I couldn’t think, and then Dana lost her license. The entire legal process wore me down, and Supergrover was the gift I needed at a time when I was really open to receiving it.

I fucked up by loving her so completely I couldn’t see anything else, and not because it was wrong. Some of my actions were crazy, but I’m not. It was all painful and could have been avoided. But I’d already run from her several times, saying that I couldn’t be friends with a woman who excited me this much, and because we couldn’t separate, we didn’t. The swings just became bigger as my emotions grew. It was embarrassing to tell her I had to back off and why so she didn’t feel like I was dumping her because I wanted to. I had to. Dana could compete with romantic love, but platonic trumped it because it had to, not because I wanted it to, for two reasons. I felt like I couldn’t have reactions in front of Dana anymore, because it drove her crazy for me to have a woman in my life that was just as important as she was for very different reasons. She could not accept that Supergrover and I needed a relationship that was separate from her out of necessity, not malice. I knew that every one of my actions would be up for discussion with someone. As Sam Seaborn would say, “oh, this is bad on so many levels.”

Having a relationship with someone who runs hot and cold is not my jam when they’re as close to me as Supergrover is. If we hadn’t already been so close, running hot and cold wouldn’t be a thing because I wouldn’t notice or care.

I reached out for Bryn because our attachment is secure. I don’t have to worry because there are no swings too big. We know that the other’s style is anxious, so we take care of it up front rather than letting the other believe we’re pulling back, or let the other know when we need some space, but we’ll talk about what was said later; we need time to reflect. It is not time to choose what kind of life we want together, we just know it’s there if we want it. I cannot be on thin ice. I cannot run from her love because it’s just too big. I can’t jump into something the relationship can’t sustain. We are there for every regeneration, making it a good story in the end.

I could do, need to do more of staying up…………… to read the chapters she has written on her own.