Grub Street

What is this horsehockey.

Series 2 of Misfits starts on the 11th!

In a weird way I ship Simon and Kelly. C'mon, the horribly twee portmanteau ship name could be 'Smelly'.

This is meant to be a fandom journal, but what the hell, I'm going to discuss mental health stuff and rec Coming Out In A Dangerous World at FWD Forward.

Particularly this comment:

One of the things which is so toxic about depression, from the inside and from my own experience, is it can hit you good and hard with an awareness of exactly what you have to be happy about – everything from breathing right the way up – and then scolds you with an awareness of precisely how happy you aren’t, and how dare you feel that way? This is why “counting your blessings” isn’t always the best advice for someone who’s depressed – believe me, they’re intimately acquainted with their blessings, and they *know* they should be feeling better, and the knowledge is only making them feel *worse*.

Yeah, exactly.

Depression is a Catch 22 situation. You feel bad, and you're told that you're a bad person for feeling bad. You feel like you're a massive burden on society, but suicide would be proof of your own moral failing. The only way out of it is to get better, but that's incredibly difficult given that mental health isn't an exact science, and the stigma surrounding mental illness just re-affirms your own guilt. You're constantly being told mixed messages: that you should take responsibility for your illness, but seeking help and making allowances for yourself is a sign of weakness. After a while, it gets recursive to the point of absurdity; you feel guilty for feeling guilty.

It's incredibly difficult to break the feedback loop by yourself. Depression is... well, okay, I was going to say that I imagine it's a bit like being possessed, but I don't like using analogies when I try to explain a mental illness, so I'll just say this instead: it's like there's this thing inside your head, and sometimes it seems like an alien entity all by itself, while other times, you can't tell where the thing ends and your 'real' personality begins. Sometimes, it seems like the most normal thing in the world. You fight it, of course, but it's exhausting, and you rarely feel like you're winning. So having people standing on the sidelines muttering about how you're just lazy/weak/ungrateful really doesn't help.

It's a fucked up situation all round.

God, reading really crappy books makes me want to send boxes of chocolate to my favorite authors.

I've had to admit defeat with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. For all I know, it has an elaborate storyline of murder and corporate intrigue, but I just couldn't bring myself to give a fuck. God damn Blomkvist was boring. He didn't seem to have any sort of interesting internal life. I felt as if I was reading about an android that had been produced by IKEA.

I got about half way through, and then gave up and skipped ahead to the sordid bits, because I'm a ghoul. Most of the stuff that dealt with rape and abuse had more in common with an exploitation flick than reality, and I agree with this review in that the book implied some really fucked up things about victimhood. (If someone rapes you, all you have to do is get revenge to prove that you're a badass and not a wimpy victim!)

I'd like to comment on Lisbeth Salander and psychiatric disability - hell, that was a major reason why I decided to try the book in the first place, after seeing sandoz_iscariot's comments about it - but I just don't have the patience to read the rest of it.

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On a completely unrelated note, while I was sorting through some cash that I was going to deposit, I found a £10 note with my first name written on it twice. I don't recognize the handwriting, and my first name is fairly uncommon. I work in a shop and I receive my wages in cash from the shop's takings, so the only explanation I can think of is that a regular customer wrote my name on the note to remind themselves that they needed to buy something, and I ended up with the note when I took my wages. I don't know - it's still a bit perplexing. /coolstorybro

1. Hnrrrgh Misfits S2 is going to be broadcast in November. I can't wait that long.

2. I started to read Dexter in the Dark. Then I checked the series on Wikipedia and saw that
the Dark Passenger had a supernatural explanation,
so I ragequit. It's a good job that I didn't have the book in my hand, or I would've thrown it at the wall. One day I'm going to write my own amoral vigilante serial killer, with blackjack and hookers.

3. I've borrowed a copy of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Let's see how far I'll get before I ragequit on that as well.

1. London's Olympic mascot is called Wenlock and he has a camera for an eye. What the fuck. ('When you live! When you die! Here comes Mickey Eye!')

2. When I try to write porn, my superego is like, 'this is so silly,' while my id is like, 'GOD SUPEREGO SHUT UP YOU RUIN EVERYTHING.' My poor id. She has it rough.

3. On that note, I've figured out why my writer's block has been so bad recently: I've got into a rut with writing Watchmen fic, and I'm having another routine wanky crisis of confidence about my writing ability. Originally, when I started writing fanfic, I didn't really care if it was any good or not, because the act of writing was fun by itself. For the past few weeks, though, I haven't really been finding anything fun, so I've been trying to write purely for the sake of improvement. As a consequence, I've become so self-critical, I can barely stand the sight of my own prose. /dramaqueen

Plus, whenever I read the awesome on the kinkmeme, I'm like, 'oh fuck, I have nothing to contribute. I'm going down the garden to eat worms.'

I'm not trolling for compliments, here - I'm just reflecting on the fact that I can be insecure to the point of absurdity sometimes. I would like to grab myself by the shoulders, give myself a good shake, and shout, 'CHRIST, SCARLET, IT'S JUST FANFIC. THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO LIKE YOUR STUFF. STOP BEING SILLY.'

4. You know how I mentioned mpreg a few posts ago? Well, now I have an urge to write it. As a personal challenge. What.

I have writer's block, so here's a picture of Idris Elba in a viking helmet.



Luther is on tomorrow. I think I'll give it a go - although for some reason, British crime dramas usually leave me cold. I tend to find them a bit too po-faced and hyperbolic. But! Idris Elba!

Does my overuse of semicolons drive you batshit? Do you want to beat me to death with The Elements of Style? Have I acted like a twat towards you on a comm sometime? DO I CREEP YOU OUT?

The "What I've always wanted to tell you" Meme

So, in other news...

While writing Rorschach/63!Dan fic that basically consists of talking and weird Oedipal sex, I stumbled across The Genius Wranglers: a rant and belatedly realized that Rorschach and 63!Dan could sort've fit the Genius Wrangler relationship.

Although 63!Dan isn't really very sensible or 'by the book', she just seems sensible relative to Rorschach. And Rorschach isn't smarter than Dan, he just needs Dan to pull his nuts out the fire for him sometimes.

Also, I have a list of fanfic that I want to catch up on reading. Hmm.

1. I AM GOING TO FINISH MY REMAINING DARK_FIC STORY. I DON'T CARE IF I HAVE WRITER'S BLOCK. I DON'T CARE IF IT TURNS OUT TO BE COMPLETELY NONSENSICAL. I DON'T CARE IF THE CONCEPT IS SILLY. I AM GOING TO FINISH IT.

2. If 63 Adrian Veidt = Lady Gaga, then 63 Comedian = Peaches. I don't know why I didn't see this sooner. Also, Just Dance, Poker Face, Bad Romance and Monster have been made available for Rock Band 2. This pleases me.

3. Thanks to this f!s thread, I've started watching Misfits, and I'm really enjoying it. Synopsis: a group of young offenders are given superpowers during a freak storm. Dysfunction ensues. The episodes can be found online here, and one of the characters, Simon, has a horribly adorable Youtube channel.

Now I need to upload a load of Kelly icons, just to piss in people's cornflakes.