wherein Liz waves hello to the internet before vanishing again

[edenfalling]

Incidentally, I am not dead. I've just been overdosing on the endless backlog of fic on old Homestuck kink meme posts. I have also been sleeping unrestfully -- I keep having bad dreams that wake me at odd hours -- but I don't think that's related to the reading.

...

I don't tend to have nightmares. One or two a year is my standard rate. When I say I have bad dreams, I almost always mean frustration dreams.

For example, last night I dreamed I was spending an afternoon with my mother and I suddenly realized that she was going to be taken through a portal to Narnia where she would inevitably be killed. (It's a dream; roll with it.) So I had to stop her from walking through specific doorways or up specific staircases, but she kept being all, "But I need to refill my coffee and there's coffee in there/up there/around that corner!" and I would be all, "No! You can't go there, let's go somewhere else!" and wake up all wound up and tense and deeply annoyed at the general perversity of the universe. Not a nightmare, but intensely frustrating, especially since it looped in variations all night long. One time we'd be in a slightly run-down mansion, another time we'd be out shopping on a city street, another time we'd be in a mall, another time we'd be in my old hometown church, etcetera ad infinitum.

I hate frustration dreams much more than I hate nightmares. Nighmares are at least interesting, and also generally one-off experiences. Frustration dreams are existential futility over and over and freaking OVER until I want to scream, and every time I fall back to sleep they just reset and play again from the top.

Comments

[cherokee1.livejournal.com]

yeah, i feel you.
That sounds rough and unrestful.
Have you tried meletonin?
Also, exercise can help your mind work out what your sub is trying to tell you.
Natural chemicals and endorphins are good for you!
C

[edenfalling]

I don't usually need help falling asleep -- I did sometimes when I was younger, but that was mostly because I couldn't get my brain to shut up and stop thinking, and I have some cobbled-together relaxation/meditation techniques to deal with that now -- so I've never used melatonin.

Mostly I figure my occasional frustration dreams are a sign that I am very wound up about something (or moderately wound up about several things, which is the case this time) in waking life, and once I have resolved those issues, the dreams will go away. They only come every two or three months and don't usually last more than a few days. :-)

[askerian]

*huggles* ;_;

also, ahaha, you've reached that stage too. Woo anonmemes. Have you gone through the entire AO3 yet? Because when you search by fandom it only returns the most recent Xnumber, so I am HURTING at the thought of all those fics that exist and that I cannot reach. T^T

[edenfalling]

*hugs back*

It's very stupid for an archive to only show 1,000 results maximum, whatever search terms you use! You can get around some of the problem by making it arrange its display backwards in time (so you start with the oldest stories at the top), and you can force some lost stories to surface by searching for particular pairings or other tags, but if you're trying to find, say, a medium-length character study about John (no pairing) that is currently sitting around halfway through the archive by date, you are shit out of luck because searching for just "John" as a tag will get you every story with John in it, inlcuding all the pairings that include John, and all the stories where he's just a random extra but got listed in the header tags anyway, so the archive will hit its 1,000 story maximum long before it reaches the story you were trying to find.

People have complained about this before. I have never heard that there is any intention of fixing it, which is bizarre, because I think it is the single biggest flaw in the archive as currently coded. :-(

[askerian]

... no intention to fix it? what, seriously? what the fucking fuckity fuck. What happens to all those stories back there, then, no one can find them unless they get a secret code by the author themselves? decoder ring? guesstimating the right url? STUPID STUPID DUMB.

and I seem to remember when you search in reverse timeline order it just gives you the last of those 1,000s it can get at first, and doesn't really go any farther. :/

[edenfalling]

What I heard, from somebody who had filed an official complaint/request/whatever about the issue, was that the response she got boiled down to, "You can find what you're looking for if you just refine your search terms enough!" Which, way to completely miss the point. I can't refine search terms if the stories don't HAVE distint terms to search for, and when I jump into a fandom, I like to at least glance at EVERYTHING. It helps me figure out what I like!

As that incident was several months ago, it's theoretically possible the AO3 staff have decided to do something about the issue eventually. I have not seen any mention of it on a casual glance down the admin posts feed, though, so I don't have a lot of hope. :-(

[acechan.livejournal.com]

Oh god, someone else who gets frustration dreams. -___-
I hate those so, so much.

[edenfalling]

They suck.