It's been both a busy and slow couple of months for me since I last posted anything. I'd intended to maybe write up a couple of posts in the interim, but I couldn't find the energy sometimes and the time on other occasions. It's just felt like one demand after another, for the most part. There's also just been a lot of less than stellar moments in that period that haven't helped matters.
Probably the biggest thing to happen recently is the flash fiction exhibition. I'd known that another exhibition was around the corner but didn't have as much of an idea of what it might involve. Given the format, I suppose it wasn't that critical to know, but I was still a little taken by surprise. I'd wanted to try doing something short for a while, so it made a good excuse. The problem was figuring out what to even write. Figuring that out ended up taking a good half the month, and it was a fairly arduous process that stopped and started in fits. Making very basic decisions seemed impossible and attempts became immensely frustrating at times.
Those frustrations worsened matters when I voiced them in a public channel. Immediately, I was subjected to hackneyed and sometimes condescending advice or platitudes that accomplished nothing. When I voiced frustration with that, I received jeers, finger wagging, and general shitty behaviour in return. Few people involved even tried to understand what I was saying, and most of the concession I got was a load of nonsense about my interlocutors supposedly attempting to understand in spite of an impossibly wide 'divide' in understanding. Teru spoke on my behalf in trying to explain things to people, but it's clear that nobody was that willing to listen, much less actually comprehend what was being said. Needless to say, that put me in an extremely bad mood for a while, and I've little inclination to attempt discussing writing with most of THP outside of extremely limited cases. Recent attempts at doing so on the site have generally netted similar results, albeit slightly less irritating on a personal level.
About as discouraging, if not moreso, was a general conflict with the userbase later on, spurred in part by continuing nonsense over the dead Character Discussion Thread. In the midst of a bunch of hooplah about outer community moderation, one party in the original garbage fire of a debate over the thread brought it all back up and was aghast that the response was less than friendly, especially considering that their approach was irritatingly persistent and came off as weirdly combative, arrogant, and rude in varying turns, not to mention extremely hard-headed in their lack of understanding of the issue. I was against disabusing them of their notion that approval was needed for a new thread, but Teru ultimately told them to do what they wanted and warned them about ever bringing up the subject again. Alongside all this, there was unhelpful venting of grievances from malcontents, who were duely silenced, and sniping over moderation from neurotics. I might not have helped the situation in some regards by letting loose with venom at various parties, but the both of us were fed up. There could have been bans if things had gone just the slightest bit further.
I'd like to say for contrast that the exhibition was then a smashing success, but I wouldn't be telling the whole truth. The fact of the matter is that the most surprising thing about it was the volume of entries. Of course, that should be expected, considering the bar to entry was fairly low. Still, we did end up getting thirty-one entries in all, one of them being a bit late; one of those was even mine, despite the troubles I had. I'd say that entries were, on the whole, mediocre. Despite ample examples and definitions being given for flash fiction as a format, few seemed to truly get it, trying to force-fit narratives too large for a thousand words into a smaller box in ways that simply didn't work. Some outright admitted later that they simply 'cut out' snippets of some 'larger story' for the sake of an entry. There were also crossovers and even — of all things — fanfiction-of-fanfiction. Even though I could have been unnecessarily harsh, I largely opted to only spend my limited energy talking about the entries that were okay but flawed, leaving the lesser ones with general explanations as to their conceptual failings. It did take me a while as I simply didn't have the energy to quickly read through every entry at once, especially considering the thoroughly mediocre ones, much less the dreadful ones. At the very least, there were a couple of standouts, both from people I would expect to write generally interesting pieces.
What I didn't expect was the level of hard-headed arguing with me from people over my own piece. What started as an attempt to correct some strange misconceptions about my work, born of very surface-level reading, turned into others attempting to dictate my own intent to me. More than that, at least one of the posters was rather a pest about the whole thing, and I did eventually give a rather tart reply that wasn't entirely charitable out of annoyance. I'm sure they believed somehow that they were being helpful, but you have to realise that it was coming from an entrant who posted five(!) rather low-interest entries, including the aforementioned crossovers. I simply didn't feel that they had much that they could tell me about writing, and I wanted them to cease trying to give me advice. Could I have been a little more graceful about it? Maybe. However, combined with the bizarre and stubborn arguing with me over the piece, rejecting wholesale my word on it as the author, I'd simply had enough. Why on earth my relatively uncontroversial piece could have attracted such attention is beyond me; there was also some degree of criticism that I was somehow 'twisting canon' in my portrayal of Youmu, but I chose to not engage those, as they came from people who demonstrated no real understanding of canon themselves, besides the fact that I simply don't care if things are a one-to-one reproduction of canon or not. In the end, whatever others thought, I'm happy for once with what I accomplished, a rare victory considering past troubles.
Beyond these general flashpoints, what have things been like? I'd say mildly trying with little interludes of brief distraction. I mentioned in my last post that I had issues with my kitchen sink. Those issues hung heavy on me for a while, considering the quoted costs to fix them, but I'm glad to say that we were able to re-plumb the sink with a bit of unexpected help, restoring it to full order. There's also been on-and-off struggles with water-bugs and cockroaches due in some part to the weather, though I'm not so certain sink issues didn't also factor into matters. Spraying that we'd had done to deal with a much longer ant issue had been meant to deal with that scourge as well, but we still ended up having nightly visitors at times. I believe that particular issue has quieted down a little now, though I won't celebrate a total victory anytime soon. Slightly less urgent but still a tad coarse on my nerves was my longtime USB headset finally giving up the ghost. A timely purchase through Amazon got a replacement to me in reasonable time, if nothing else. Other than that, there's been degrees of other personal matters I won't speak of that won't likely be resolved very quickly and have worn on me in continual way for a while. There is at least some degree of movement on some of it set to happen soon, but I'm not letting myself get complacent yet. This does mean that my focus and ability to do much will still be impacted.
That impact has translated into things like the site not having any real PHP work done, of course. I had every intention to start, but trying to define my goals took more precedence, and even that's been difficult. I was spending a regular amount of time regularly jotting notes and reviewing them in Quillpad on my phone in the early mornings and late evenings, but that's had to slow down a little to meet the demands of life. At the same time, I've taken up Quillpad on another device for work on some writing projects that have demanded a little more of my attention than other things. One of those intended projects has dictated that I read Plantation Boy by José Lins do Rêgo and São Bernardo by Graciliano Ramos, the former of which I've finished. The other of those projects has moved a bit further along and produced some notes that are helping me arrange thoughts. Unlike with the exhibition, I don't have set limitations, so I don't know how long either might take me. All I know is that I would like to realise both. Because of all that, I've been watching far fewer shows and films. I did at some point manage to finish Kusuriya no Hitorigoto and SPY x FAMILY and watch both Nausicaa of the Valley Wind and The Wind Rises at some point. I also spent a few nights watching the entirety of the Star Wars films, spin-offs excluded, in episodic order. There's much I could say on that, but I'll leave it short here by saying that I think the sequel trilogy is dreadful, soulless, and will be forgotten years from now. Besides that, I haven't had much time or energy to cook recently, but a fantastic haul of meat earlier on allowed me to make my first attempts at reverse searing with a wonderful tri-tip, obtained at an amazing discount. I'm gathering my energies to hopefully do something on-par sooner rather than later.
What does the future hold from here? It's hard to make too many projections, but my intentions are to continue quietly working on my current writing projects, mostly. Some topics brought up here could go into site posts, though I'm not going to make any promises as yet. Should I find the time and energy, I'd like to resume my work on the site as well. My goals aren't exceedingly well-defined yet, so that alone needs a bit of work, to say nothing of the long journey to actual code and design. For the most part, it's probably going to be more coasting until further notice. That's not even getting into the eventuality of seeking a job again at some point, something I'm deeply dreading. More farfetched dreams of starting a business in an overseas market and using that as an opportunity to move countries seem more appealing than such humdrum disappointments. At least there's always hope, right?