Red Threads

achiasa @ 2009-12-06T20:20:00

2009-12-06T20:20:20Z

This is turning into the season of Revisiting Old Fandoms. Hikaru no Go, and now Fullmetal Alchemist, which has only got more awesome since I stopped reading it. Possibly I need to stop reading it before I get completely obsessed, because I have fic to finish, lol.

achiasa @ 2009-12-05T17:32:00

2009-12-05T17:32:13Z

They just played Bump of Chicken on Radio 2.

I am slightly concerned that I may have wandered into a parallel dimension.

achiasa @ 2009-11-21T19:19:00

2009-11-21T19:19:02Z

Infinite Gravity
85k
Started: April 27th
Final chapter posted: November 21st

It feels like it's been forever. *blinks* I guess now I have no excuse not to revise and post that other fic. >.> And to get rid of all these notebooks that are cluttering up the place.

More and more I seem to've been developing a healthy aversion to, or even sometimes dislike of, Fandom as an entity. With a capital F, to distinguish it from the concept of fandom, ie Stuff I Like . I mean, I like Stuff and I write fic (of variable quality), and I read a whole lot, but I wouldn't say that I really have much to do with Fandom. I don't post fic here - I used to put it on kasoku but even that got annoying, and I stopped reading that flist because it was too filled with fan-comms. This year's fic, which is all of 2 stories even if one of them is technically quite large, goes on ff.net despite my issues with the Pit in general, because the Pit is much more anonymous, and completely divorced from the 'me' stuff here.

I've been making an effort to keep the 'me' stuff out of my fic, because that's what I don't like about Fandom; the ego that inevitably seems to creep in. I just want to read fic; I'm not interested in name-dropping/BNFs/drama/whatever else, because it inevitably starts to spoil the Stuff for me. If I write fic, I want it to stand on its own and be appreciated (or not) on its own merits, not tainted by whatever else I might or might not do. It's got to the point where I don't even like to read long recs, because a lot of them inevitably turn into 'I like this because blah blah and I think this is the best fic in the fandom because yada yada and I say you should totally read it' and it's... divisive, I suppose. Just give me the author's title and summary, and the fact that you've bothered to do so will be enough to get me to look.

I prefer posting fic on ff.net because it is so comparatively anonymous, and because the favourite lists and communities and whatnot are just lists, which I can pick and choose from according to my own taste. I also hate it because it's the Pit - the standard is sadly low, the interface sucks, and there are stupid limitations that stunt a lot of potentially useful features. Also, visually speaking it's only tolerable with Adblock. But I really don't want to go back to posting fic here, or even linking to it here, because it's not about me.

I guess probably I'm just strange.

apropos of entirely nothing...

2009-11-10T20:55:16Z

If your car breaks down under warranty, or you have the right kind of insurance, they give you a courtesy car while it's being fixed. So if you have to send your computer away to be mended, shouldn't they give you a courtesy laptop?

In entirely unrelated news, note to self: next time, research it before you write it. Some of this stuff I can fix, but I think a couple of things are going to have to remain under the artistic licence umbrella >.>

achiasa @ 2009-11-10T00:31:00

2009-11-10T00:37:14Z

djsak;fdjlskfhdasjlkfd dude I finished the obon fic. No doubt tomorrow I will hate it, because inevitably I try for 'subtle' and end up with 'brick to the head', and then I will look up all the things that I scribbled on a napkin to research later, and hate it some more because it's all wrong and the sea is too far away or something, but right now I have finished it and it is done. And I have writer's cramp. -.-;;

Look, the last time I finished something was like. July. These are milestones, damn it. >.>

achiasa @ 2009-11-09T10:31:00

2009-11-09T10:46:39Z

Volume 17 arrived today~ The translation's a bit awkward in places, and they've switched the names back to Japanese order, but at this point I kind of almost know it by heart anyway. Hikaru ♥ They need to bring these out faster!

I'm using up the last of my annual leave on long weekends because there are so many deadline weeks coming up, so today is for writing fic. :3

...did I really manage not to post at all in October? o.O

achiasa @ 2009-09-27T21:12:00

2009-09-27T20:19:34Z

....it's a very strange feeling to be sifting through ffn recs in search of decent fic you haven't already read, and find one of your own old, crappy fics that you wrote in 2003 before you'd even finished the whole series. o.o;

achiasa @ 2009-09-02T18:24:00

2009-09-02T17:33:45Z

...no computer problems today. *crosses fingers*

Work problems are another matter. Discovered that I made two completely moronic oversights last week, and now I'm wondering what the hell I was on. And whether I had an episode I just didn't notice - my memory is hazy, which might back that up, but it's pretty borderline. I wish I could discuss this with my manager, but she's on leave. :|

achiasa @ 2009-09-01T18:32:00

2009-09-01T17:46:43Z

...it just took me 3 tries to boot my laptop. fjlasbhdjaskl fuck. Halfway through the Windows startup screen it went bluescreen for like .25 of a second and died, the hard drive made a worrying noise, and it tried to start up again. Same thing happened, then the third time it started up as normal. This is something of a worry. Current plan: finish updating backups, do a virus scan and a hard drive scan, cross fingers and pray. On the one hand, at least I could actually afford a new computer right now. On the other hand, I refuse to get anything Vista ever - this thing was supposed to last me until they'd ironed the bugs out of Windows 7. Ironically, I spent a lot of last week trying to convince myself that I didn't actually need a netbook. I guess that's the backup plan, then...

achiasa @ 2009-08-30T22:50:00

2009-08-30T22:02:20Z

fhdsaldjs someone get me a tissue. Titanic was just on and I am weeeeaaak to tragic romance. Sobbing like a baby for the last ten minutes, god. I haven't cried this hard in years. >.>

I feel like I should blame someone for my Hikaru no Go obsession re-appearing, but I suspect it is my own damn fault anyway. Vague fic ideas are sloshing around, but I am currently beating them back with a stick in favour of the slightly less vague Ryuusei AU which no one will read, because I appear to be shipping something both incredibly random and completely unheard of which given my previous track record with distractions can have only one result, really.

...but right now I have to go wash my face and post chapter 7 of Infinite Gravity.

achiasa @ 2009-08-15T21:29:00

2009-08-15T20:56:14Z

fdhsalchdjas lol. I've been watching Starforce, finally - I kept seeing fics and art and videos around, and it looked kind of cool, but I swore I wasn't going to touch it until I finished Infinite Gravity because I have enough unfinished WIPs as it is. So now I've been watching it, and I was actually bizarrely disappointed because it's actually nothing like the vague impression I'd built up from the fics and art and videos. XD I was expecting awesome space cadet stuff, and it turned out to be... well, something like a less cool AU EXE-verse. Halfway through the first season I'd talked myself into starting a space cadet AU fic, and then I started on the second season and suddenly it turned into Yu-Gi-Oh. Lost civilisations, ancient weapons, sideways hair...

Bly: *shows up*
Chiya: OMG it's Yami Bakura O_O;

achiasa @ 2009-08-09T14:53:00

2009-08-09T13:56:10Z

Three months spent writing this damn story and when I finally come to upload it, FF.net's uploader is down. *headdesk* And this is progress; it wouldn't let me log in at all yesterday.

lololol my life XD

\o/

2009-08-02T03:38:59Z

Three months, nineteen chapters, five notebooks, and four pens later, and I finally just finished my story.

Now I get to type all 70,000-odd words of it up, but right now I am just going to enjoy this feeling. This blank, stunned 4:30am feeling.

achiasa @ 2009-07-26T03:08:00

2009-07-26T02:36:01Z

From annkiri: the WIP meme: post a single sentence from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations.

1. Just like a real heart, Riku had told her once, and now Kairi understood what he'd meant.

2. It watches the Thirteenth – its master, it thinks, with a feeling that it can almost identify as pride – as he slumps in the wake of the dissolving Shadows, hood falling back from pale hair, and it knows, again, that there is something it has lost forever.

3. Teito's mouth drops open in dismay – there are toothmarks in the cover and everything! - but the Bishop only taps Burupya once on the head before setting him back into Teito's waiting hands.

4. Shinra had a corporate horror of damaging cadets, but the moment they'd put you through training you were expected to earn the gil they paid you.

5. He'd even braved Medical once, almost hoping he was about to go unstable and take out half the HQ in the fallout, only to be told as usual that there was nothing wrong with him physically.

6. As certain as he was that he could feel X's eyes on his back, when he turned at the door X was already gone.

7. Sensor ghosts danced in his vision as he collapsed to his knees, unable to hold himself upright, and the last thing he saw as Netto forcibly logged him out was the grim set of Blues' mouth as he ripped through the rogue Navi like an avenging demon.

achiasa @ 2009-07-20T22:30:00

2009-07-20T21:36:29Z

aaaaaaah the Dead Fantasy guy released parts III and IV and holy shit *_* Most Awesome Fanmade Thing Ever or Most Awesome Fanmade Thing Ever?

...yeah, IV is coming close but II is still my favourite :D

achiasa @ 2009-07-13T19:42:00

2009-07-13T20:06:07Z

I've been meaning to address this for a while - or, more broadly, the entire issue of the welfare-to-work process, because every time I see articles like this, or about whichever latest set of unemployment figures are out, I see misconceptions and misrepresentations. I also see a lot of comments from members of the public and people recently made redundant who don't seem to understand what's out there or available to them, but that's a separate - and bigger! - post in its own right.

For now, I want to talk about the fraud investigations, and a bit of background on the industry, because not a lot of people outside it actually know much about it.

Full disclosure: I work for a training company that provides welfare-to-work services on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). I'm writing here as a private individual, and no confidential, identifying, or prejudicial information is contained in this post. Any DWP paperwork, guidance and procedures referenced are publically available on the DWP website, and are a fascinating read if you're into the study of acronyms. Last time it took me two minutes before I had to Google (LCWRA, anybody?).

The most basic background, for those who've not come across or been involved in these schemes before, is that DWP contracts out various employability training services - which can be everything from how to write a CV to vocational qualifications and NVQs - to private providers, which are either private training companies or non-profit organisations. Actually, most of the larger providers, who work across multiple regions, are national non-profits. The private training companies usually seem to be smaller and more local/regional, probably because it's actually quite difficult to make a profit in this industry.

Which, really, is the first misconception I'd like to dispel. My first thought on reading that article was "Who's making tens of millions of pounds?!" To put things into perspective, my company has held one of DWP's flagship welfare-to-work contracts for fourteen months now, and we're only just starting to make a fraction of profit. The overheads are so huge that we've been in the red for over a year, and even without the recession factored in we're never going to be raking it in the way the papers imply.

The way these contracts work varies a lot, but the main aim is always to take in unemployed people, make them employable, and get them off benefits and into a job. Sometimes, like on the New Deal programmes, certain qualifications are also mandated as part of the provisions - adult literacy and numeracy, or IT, or vocational qualifications like the CSCS card that's required to get work on construction sites. In almost all cases, the training provider is paid what's called a Job Outcome Payment once the client starts work. Payments - or, strictly speaking, the percentage of the training cost that's paid as a Job Outcome - vary from contract to contract, but as a general rule the newer contracts pay more of the fee on the outcome, and there've been moves towards paying more for sustained jobs. Flexible New Deal, which is the next new thing, will pay 80% of the fee only when the customer has been in work for 13 weeks. Think of it that way, and it's no wonder that only the big national providers that can afford to bankroll that level of risk have been bidding for FND.

Going back to the original article, then, you might think I'm less surprised that fraud's been committed. Well, yes and no. I can see where the temptation lies, sure, but I'm also fully aware of just how stringent the DWP claim and audit procedures are. I was surprised that the big national providers were the ones involved, until I thought about it; smaller providers have so much to lose that the risk will never be worth it. However, while the article mentions fraudulent claims on "confirmation of employment" forms (on which more later), the actual situation seems to have been, in a nutshell, that some staff of these training providers were paying private recruitment companies to put their clients into jobs, not all of which were legitimate.

Which, again, surprises me a little, because it's difficult enough to evidence a perfectly legitimate job. Those "confirmation of employment" forms are the bane of many an existence - in my own experience, for example, 50% of the ones we receive must be sent back and done again, and in some cases again, because details are incorrect, or the employer has used Tippex, or the supporting evidence (to prove that the person who signs the confirmation is doing so on behalf of the employer) is invalid. Invalid - and unclaimable - supporting evidence can be as trivial as a company stamp or compliment slip that doesn't have a telephone number or address on. Or where the company name is different and it's not clearly marked as Trading As. The really difficult ones are the small employers or franchises who don't have company letterheads or business cards or stamps, because nothing else will do. It's best not to even ask about Self Employment, because DWP are getting stricter and stricter all the time about what they will and won't accept as evidence. Sometimes there's as much work involved in evidencing an outcome as there is in getting the client into the job in the first place.

In conclusion, it is neither easy nor profitable to put people into work, and the hardest part is proving it. Confirmation of Employment forms have to stand up to internal audit ("Is this going to be acceptable for claim?"), the JCP Regional Payments Team ("No it's not, we won't pay you for it."), and the JCP Financial Assurance and Monitoring team, aka the Auditors. And believe me, if your paperwork's invalid, they will clawback the funding. This is not a business that anyone goes into to make money.

So why do we do it? This is why - or it's why I do it, anyway, when any number of less stressful careers are open to me! I've seen first-hand the way people can change for the better with the support of these programmes, and getting someone into work will change not just their life but the lives of everyone connected with them.

Even still, though, I will admit that it's a relief to finally be making a bit of profit. Maybe in a couple of years it might even be enough for them to give me a raise with. (It's also a comparatively low-paid industry for the skill, time investment and dedication that's required.)

I'd say watch this space for an explanation of the benefits system and the help that's available to the unemployed or soon-to-be unemployed, but I doubt anyone's read this far anyway.

achiasa @ 2009-07-06T00:40:00

2009-07-05T23:45:02Z

I. I think I just broke 60,000 words. This is officially a novel. Or. Would be if it wasn't stupid fanfiction. fjdks;afhdsjkomgwhat.

But! The end is in sight! I just wrote the second of the scenes that I've been waiting weeks for, and now they're about to figure out who the bad guy is, and then it can be endgame tiem. Finally.

...of course, then I have to type it all up. lol.

achiasa @ 2009-06-25T00:55:00

2009-06-25T00:06:21Z

fdaslfhdasjfkadsl don't look now but I think I may have just spent 5 solid hours writing. My pen, which was a brand new pen that I got two weeks ago, ran out halfway through. I-it was the good part, okay.

...which is to say that after 50,000 words and a whole lot of AUGH WHY ME, I have finally, finally got my characters together. ♥ I'm sure I'll hate it in the morning (especially since it seems to be 1am crap I have work) but right now I am.... wrung out and shaking. Uh. Well, now it's onwards to the rest of the plot and an ending!

*falls over*

achiasa @ 2009-06-21T02:56:00

2009-06-21T01:56:50Z

snatched from... a whole lot of people.

01. ~~Anyone who looks at this entry has to~~ Anyone who wants to can post this meme and their current wallpaper at their LiveJournal.
02. Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper.
03. Don't change your wallpaper before doing this. The point is to see what you had on.

This is embarrassing and slightly hilarious, because up until my fangirl fit this morning I had a nice soothing pic of cherry blossoms on my desktop. And now I have Forte. *facepalms* More by default than anything, because I couldn't find a decent wallpaper-sized pic of Rock and Blues (♥♥♥) anywhere, and all my efforts at splicing official art together turned out crap. I ♥ Forte, although I laugh at him a lot in EXE because he's such a hilarious emo kid until he hands you your ass. I doubt this one will last very long, though - see me back to soothing flowers by next week.

achiasa @ 2009-06-19T19:54:00

2009-06-19T19:10:45Z

...that Back From Holiday feeling is always crap. :/ Have gained +1 suntan, and my fic is still kicking my ass.

Monday I took the train to Penzance! Actually I took the train to Bristol and another train to Plymouth and another train to Penzance, but whatever. Got in mid-afternoon and hopped on a bus around the bay to Marazion - pretty seaside village opposite St. Michael's Mount, full of art galleries and interesting handmade things. I was staying at Mount Haven Hotel, and it is every bit as nice as the website implies - highly recommended. This was the view from my window:

While there was some poking around shops and paddling toes in the sea, mostly what I did this week was sit around cafes and pubs scribbling like a madwoman. My best estimate is around 14,000 words, and I'm still nowhere near finished, but I had to make an emergency trip into Penzance yesterday morning to buy a new writing-in book because my lovely nearly-new hardback leather journal was perilously close to running out of pages.

Anyway, the pics are up here should anyone want to marvel at my terrible photographic skills, and I am going to poke at my flist a bit before tidying up my crap and getting back to the scribbling because I'm right in the middle of the good part! Somehow while I was away half of my sister's friends seem to have moved in.

achiasa @ 2009-06-14T23:38:00

2009-06-14T22:52:15Z

fjdsklafhdjaslf this fic is kicking my ass. *counts*

1. 32 pages 110-120 words per page, depending which bloody notebook - I'm on my 3rd. :|
2. 31 pages
3. 32 pages
4. 34 pages
5. 31 pages
6. 48 pages
7. 53 pages

...so even at a very conservative estimate and allowing for everything that's scribbled out, that's well over 25,000 words with no end in sight and still no fdhska;fdjks title. And starting tomorrow I have 5 days of holiday, and I am taking my multiple notebooks but not the computer, and I am going to make a damn good attempt at finishing this thing. Because even at that point I will still have to type it all up oh god.

achiasa @ 2009-06-09T23:24:00

2009-06-09T22:30:37Z

I need a name for this fic. Since, you know, I just worked out an estimate that puts it around 27,000 words so far, all longhand. I'm on my third notebook here. And it still doesn't have a name.

Anyone have any awesome ideas? Broad themes are change, growth, evolution, etc.

*goes off to hunt through random poetry*

achiasa @ 2009-06-07T15:31:00

2009-06-07T14:50:05Z

...so the question becomes, how long can I put up with the dub without screaming and running away.

First attempt: approximately 3 seconds.
Second attempt: 10 seconds.

Conclusion: this is not going to go well.

It's probably stupidly picky, and I know I'm terribly snobbish about dubs in general, but augh. Way to turn adorable Japanese pre-teens into attitude-laden American late-teenagers. Those aren't my characters :( Add in the changing of the names (whyyy) and chopping random bits out of the series, and it just loses all resemblance to the original. :/

The sad part is, I'd be happy with raws, but the torrents are old and no one's seeding. :// Guess I'm saving up for the Japanese DVDs, then.

achiasa @ 2009-05-10T00:36:00

2009-05-09T23:44:14Z

Things You Stumble Across That Turn Out To Be Unexpectedly Awesome, KH edition:

Kingdom Hearts Tarot fjdkslahfjdska

Also this fic was really unexpectedly good, omg, although I have slight issues with the ending due to my own interpretation of KH mythology etc. But those are my issues, this is a really good fic.

ah, DWP memos...

2009-04-20T17:43:34Z

Anyone who can decipher this without Googling deserves a prize...

"For HB/CTB purposes, customers on ESA(C) have a £20.00 disregard applied to their earnings from PWK (LCWRA) and anything over this is taken into account. For ESA(IR) customers, earnings up to the £92.00 limit have no effect on HB/CTB."

Any guesses? XD