Automated messages can be a good thing!

There is a special sort of small happiness that comes from turning on GTalk and seeing the mail notifies of the night go through, when there is both a) a tag on one of your favourite current slowtimes and b) an update notify from AO3 that your very favourite fanfic of the moment has finally updated.

Tag shall be replied to momentarily; the chapter of fic I will read after going to the gym with the Nazgul, to enjoy it properly.


What Maru loves at the moment, or, can there be recs? Yes. RP: Teja finally discovers that women are a thing; fanfic: an Avengers college AU that, with characters completely spot-on, would work as a original novel with a simple search-and-replace. Especially in the probably most done-to-death genre of AU fanfic. They're that good.


ETA: Ahh, and my tumblr dashboard greets me with random Loki. Ahh, yes, good morning, Loki. And now I'll go and do stuff IRL.-

Had my friend Stephan over for dinner, basically the 'Draper' in the 'Sterling Cooper Draper Priyce' sized agency I'm going to start working for in September?

He'd brought me DVDs, and suggested I might like to watch that one on Sunday with the Nazgul.

"Nope," I said, "we're going to watch Iron Man 1 and 2, and Thor."

"Oh dear," he says, not really convinced.

"Well, we watched The Avengers last weekend, and" -- Joss Whedon yadda yadda yadda -- "now I'm hooked!"

"Yep I know about that stuff," he says. "We work for Marvel, occasionally."

I SQUEEED all through the staircase for a moment.

We work for Marvel, occasionally.

The we includes me now.

... sorta, because I have a new job: - I'll be starting in the little agency (Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce sized, not Sterling Cooper sized) where my old, old friend japanologist is a partner in September (officially and salaried-ly), but will do jobs for them before, which is very doable, as I only work part-time at my present slavery.

I'll be doing everything I can there: - managing servers, databases, CMSes, filling and building web sites (Stephan will teach me Drupal programming, too), editing graphics, typesetting, copywriting, translating, anything that needs doing. They do mostly online stuff and promotions, not classic print media (which is dead, anyway), but basically,yes,  I'll be joining a modern day version of one of my favourite TV shows.

I'll bet you anything that before the year is out, I'll have used Finnish for them, and taken pictures with my beloved Pentax (which I will now be able to buy off Thomas the Metropolitan) in some bland but professional capacity as well. Everybody does anything they can and that is needed, just as they tend to do at SCDP.

It'll be part time (20 hours, which I work now as well, but for a better salary and an option for 30 hours when I've learned the ropes, found me feet and do projects on my own), and that's what I wanted so I can still RP into the night and write for-pay articles for those book magazines. Oh, and if my present slavery wants me to carry on with my biweekly column in their new e-law newsletter, I'll do so as well for the usual fee, no problem. I'm definitely not ragequitting. Ragequitting is unprofessional and only causes more stress than it relieves. Much as I will be happy to never, ever see Madame Main-Stressor again, ever.

I'll sign the contract next Friday (25th), so that's why I am keeping this flocked for the moment, but I'm already in their system, have an email address and a Google drive account there, will be making my 'official' realname Google+ account for work (so if some Martina circles you in the next few weeks or so, that'll be me) so I can do official tech and promo communication there, etc., and have generally hit the ground with my feet already running -- I did the first work with the CMS for them today, putting an article online and fiddling with the illustrations, of which there were far too many to let the text flow around comfortably...

And I won't have to hide who and what I am -- nothing of it! Not the RPing, the fannishness, the geekery, the sports, the HAES, nothing! Stephan knows my blogs, I showed the lady who had the idea to hire me around collected_fudz ('That fish chowder -- best thing EVER EVER EVER!!') because they have cooking related projects, there is no need to hide either Yakalskovich or Sethos or Xarminta there, on the contrary, it's an advantage that I've been blogging since 2003 and have been writing text with a wild variety of disparate people in different time zones over the internet as a matter of course for years and years. Stephan even holds similar political views and knows I've joined the Pirate Party recently. I can use everything that I know and enjoy and am good at, and they're even going to pay me money for it!

And I'm going to be in an RL version of Mad Men. Sorta...


**squees incoherently and skips off**

As of today, there is a new Beth Ditto collection at Evans, and I went right ahead and ordered what I wanted. Things are sold out far too soon anyway, or at least were, last year.

The fat ladies on my flist who've been thinking about sprucing up their wardrobe recently? Go there and get something, the stuff is made well and fits nicely, on top of being really bleeding-edge, fashion-wise. They deliver internationally.

The two serious appointments/things to go to this month (apart from my vacation, of course!) all had to happen on the same day.

Today.

First, I went to a course about an email marketing tool for my slavery, with three of my co-slaves. That was tedious but kind of important, and took seven hours.

Then, I met the Nazgul to go to her library where there was an event with the illustrator Shaun Tan, whose exhibition we'd seen when the Little Lady was there. Poor bloke came all the way from Australia and was sitting jet-lagged in the front row and then first got treated to an half-hour introductory lesson of which he didn't understand a single friggin' word. I found that really rude of the organisers.

And then, during his talk, when he had this picture from 'The Arrival' up in his presentation,



my cell phone went off with a horrible ringtone of alarms and howling panic, because my mum had a question. Normally, my cell phone never rings, but she was very insistent tonight. Everybody totally jumped out of their skins, as if those people-sucking giants were actually attacking.

I was very sorry, and said so at the little book-signing afterwards. He drew me the white shark-tadpole critter into my own copy of the book, which I bought especially to get it signed. Now, despite having been such a nuisance, I have my own shark-tadpole critter, which is very cute. Will scan or take picture later, but now I'm just too tired to do anything at all except poke everything once and then go to bed. This is the shark-tadpole critter; you will agree it is very cute in a surrealistic way?