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megpie71: 9th Doctor resting head against TARDIS with repeated *thunk* text (Default)
megpie71

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megpie71: Cloud Strife says "Meep" (Excuse me sir)
Friday, January 29th, 2010 01:38 am
I've decided to get back into MMOs again, because I'm just that insane. I've decided to pick up one I used to play about three or four years back - Dark Age of Camelot. so, off I go to their website, and create myself an account. Then I start by downloading their installer, which is about 14MB in size.

One of the golden rules of MMOs I should know by now: the installer only installs the launcher. Once the launcher gets going, it starts installing everything else. So, since about 11am Wednesday, I've been downloading "patch" files (aka the full damn game client for DAOC). The download caused the graphics driver on my lapdog to crash about three times on Wednesday alone (my suspicion is the whole thing did the standard Windows "juggle more and more and more and more in Virtual Memory until you have to drop something" dance... and the bit which acted as the running chainsaw in the whole business was the graphics driver). First three times, it didn't get above about 12% complete. At present, it's at 85% complete, and I'm hoping this means I'll be able to get the silly thing finished overnight and maybe start up a character for the 7 day "free" trial tomorrow sometime.

Yes, it's a slow download. I suspect it's being throttled at least once along the line, if not more times. Yays.

I must be more insane than usual.

Of course, I'm also planning to head back to study this year, on the advice of my nice case manager from CRS. He's clearly decided the easiest way to get me off his case load is to shuffle me sideways into someone else's "too hard" basket, and given I'm intelligent, articulate, and clearly capable of stringing a sentence together without needing to stop and check a dictionary in the middle of things, the universities are probably the best people to deal with me. So of course I looked into university enrollment, and the first thing everyone gets pointed to here in Western Australia is the Tertiary Institutions Service Centre (TISC) who handle all the enrollment details for everyone who'd just bounced out of high school and into the tertiary education minefield. Problem is, TISC is set up to deal with high school students, rather than anyone returning to study (understandable; this is who they're going to see more of, after all). But this means they're asking questions about a person's high school education and wanting your high school results before they'll let you mention any other tertiary level study you might have undertaken. My high school records are somewhere in the filing cabinet (I think) and I can't get much more precise than that without essentially combing through about fifteen to twenty years worth of accumulated, salvaged, shuffled and re-shuffled paperwork which has been through at least five moves (two of them across the width of the continent). I've managed to find most of my other educational records (uni, TAFE, TAFE, uni) but without the high school records, I can't let TISC know about them.

It's rather like losing a chance at a job because you can't prove you've done high school English, even though you have a PhD in Literature.

What do I want to study? Well, having previously studied Politics, Education, and Professional Writing at BA level, and having done half a diploma in IT (user support), I'm thinking of heading back to pick up a BSc in IT (possibly with a double major in Games design/programming thrown in). Yes, I am a masochist, however did you guess?
megpie71: a phone, ringing. (anyone home?)
Monday, September 28th, 2009 07:22 pm
It's been about a week since I wrote the "I need help" post, and about a week since the breakdown which prompted it. Since then, I've had a few things happen. I've contacted the Silver Chain people about getting some assistance with ensuring I take my medication regularly. From what I've read on their website, they're probably the best people to provide the kind of help I need, which is someone dropping in on maybe an "every second day" basis, in order to ensure I'm taking my meds regularly and getting out of bed at a reasonable hour. They've returned my contact, and advised me to get a referral from a GP, which I did on Thursday last week. Now I have to wait for them to get back to me again, and let me know whether it's possible for this to happen or not.

I'm back to taking my medication, and I'm going to try and keep consistent with it, even though I know I have problems with this (see the above paragraph). So far I'm on day two, and I'm suffering the understandable side-effects of restarting psych medication after about two weeks without it. Or in other words, I'm dizzy, dopey, and a bit distracted at present. This too will pass, but at the moment I'm trying not to move too much too quickly.

More under the fold )
megpie71: a phone, ringing. (hard at work)
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 11:31 am
So for the last few days I have been mostly playing City of Heroes, or reading the stuff on [community profile] porn_battle on IJ, chasing down the FF7 anonymous kink meme on LJ or just generally futzing around the web a bit. I've also gone through my plot notes for one of my great big pieces of fic (the one that's at 24K words and counting) and re-organised them into some sort of structure, so I can actually find things. This involved a lot of copy & paste work, and as a result the whole business is now blown out to about 24K words as well. So I have an equal amount of pagespace spent on the plot notes and the actual factual plot. I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or not.

ISAGN:Spelling checkers with definitions available )

City of Heroes rambling )
megpie71: a phone, ringing. (BH2)
Saturday, September 12th, 2009 11:52 am
Well, for some reason getting out the two longish pieces I've been working away at on and off over the past year or so and doing some more of the epicyclical rewrites I'm prone to (I call it editing, because that sounds ever so much more purposeful) appeared to have worked to dispel the cranky mood. By the time midnight came around, I was able to kick off the download without wanting to bite the update program, and when I eventually went to bed at close on 3am this morning, I was just fine.

What was even better, I'd added some new content to both of the pieces I'd opened, which really helps. One of them's up to 24,000 words plus, while the other's only at 5,000 or so, but they're both going to be walloping great bastards when (if) they're eventually completed.

I'm still fine this morning, having created my first character on City of Heroes and completed the initial missions. It's an interesting little game, that one. I think I shall see about creating a second character, and see whether I can get any further. One of the only complaints I have is that if you're playing a trial account (as I am) there's a persistent little box in the dead centre of the screen telling you you're playing the trial, and asking whether you want to buy the full version. Mind you, I can live with that for a week or so, while I decide whether or not I want to keep playing. So far the answer is "yes", but that may alter.