helen-louise's journal

It's been quite a week. TOO MUCH WORK combined with technological issues, and one of my dear ones suffering from a severe attack of the Drama Queen Who Eats Spoons And Gives None Back. (Said DQ has now stormed off in a massive explosion of rage and will be troubling my love no more, hooray!). Have also been very chronic fatigue-y, as in tired and achy all the time, while also having trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, and weird-ass dreams that have left me waking up panicky and shaky. One of these things may be connected to the other.

I have two half-written livejournal posts saved on the computer here that I ran out of time/energy to finish. Got to go to work soon (I only really put the laptop on to write an invoice). But I wanted to record that I went to bed last night at 3.30am and didn't get up today until 2.15pm (though I woke up at 7, and got woken up around 10, and again around 12), and consequently feel almost like a human being. Also, I feel very pleased with myself that I sent my partner a text message yesterday along the lines of "Enjoy your date with [other partner I have historically been jealous of]" and MEANT it. She deserved to have fun with someone after the stressful few days with the Drama Queen, and I was too busy for it to be me. So I was pleased that someone was available, even if I have had problems with them in the past. I feel all Mature Poly Person now.

Yesterday [0] I wrote a web forum post about human cloning. I wanted Richard to read it to see if it was comprehensible to non-scientists. So I asked him "What's your cell biology like?". He answered "Non-existent", before correcting himself to "Much like any other wuzzie's." Yes indeed, Richard is made of wuzzie cells, which are principally proteins, carbohydrates, fats and water...

---

Richard is back from his trip to Germany with his other girlfriend [1]. He reports they stayed in a Center Parks, which was mostly civilised. However, he had some trouble with the All You Can Eat buffet.:
"What's this?"
"Meat."
"How about this?"
"Meat."
"And, er, this?"
"Meat, wrapped in meat."

Apparently, he is pleased to be home with me, where I will feed him vegetables.

Mind you, Ludy reports that plumsbitch coined a phrase "meatamours" - for when your partner is vegetarian but your partner's partner is an omnivore. Richard is now thinking that the next time I go to see Ludy, he's going to grab Alexa and go out on a Meat Date. Well, once he's recovered from the All You Can Meat buffet, that is.

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[0] 3 days ago, now, as I wrote this entry 2 days ago but didn't get round to posting it, as dealing with Microsoft ActiveSync took too much effort for my then state-of-brain.

[1] Although Richard is monogamous with people, he's so not monogamous. His three partners are me, his machines, and paintball. I suspect we're all about equal in his affections. Some women would find it offensive to have to share their man with a lathe and milling machine, but I'm enough of a geek to get the attraction. Fortunately.

Context: Richard & I went out for dinner last night because I was too tired & run-down to cook. We did our usual thing of ordering two starters and swapping halfway.
wuzzie:   "You're eyeing up my soup!"
baratron: "I've been trying to save these vegetable fritters for you, but they've got rather depleted."
wuzzie:   "The half-life of the vegetable fritters is very short. Microseconds."
baratron: *giggles* "You can have this tomato, if you want."
wuzzie:   "It seems to have burst out of its battered coating. Or is that the fission product? One battered zucchino decays into a quarter of a tomato and a bit of red cabbage? Shouldn't it emit a foodon as well?"

Later on that same meal.
wuzzie:   "I phoned A- today. She said she's been reading your livejournal, and apparently you have a new partner. I said I didn't know anything about that, and I'd have to ask you."
baratron: "Thank you for talking to your sister and making it sound like I'm doing something sneaky and underhand. (Never mind that writing about it in livejournal would rather defeat that purpose)."
wuzzie:   "That's ok. It's all part of the game, isn't it?"
baratron: "What game?"
wuzzie:   "Didn't K-, M- and S- have a weekend where they pretended they didn't know what was going on?"
baratron: "Yes, and they kept bursting in on each other and saying 'You're sleeping with my wife!' - 'What do you mean, your wife?'."

Richard is a very silly wuzzie.

So, I had this situation in one of my ongoing sim stories. Unearthly Tormented and her girlfriend Willow Midlock went off to university, and decided to "date other people" for a while before settling down. Of course, it was my decision: I was getting thoroughly bored with the idea of sims meeting each other as teenagers, going steady, going to university together, and then graduating and getting married. I didn't think that was very realistic (not that much of Sims 2 is, but that was worse than usual!). So I took the Age Transition Fixes - Teens Keep Loves hack out, and swapped in the other version.

However, what happened was that Unearthly dated a bunch of other people, but didn't fall in love with any of them. She just wasn't attracted to other sims, and all her Wants stayed attached to Willow, even though they weren't in love anymore. Meanwhile Willow had quite a heavy relationship going with a dormie called Candice - a girl with high Body skill who liked to beat people up. I'd always planned for Unearthly & Willow to get back together eventually, but now there was Candice in the picture as well.

So, me being me, I chose the "Embrace the power of AND" option. Flipped all three sims over to being Romance sims, let them all fall in love with each other, then flipped Unearthly and Willow back to Knowledge. As I have the Romance mod and all three girls have Playful + Outgoing + Nice > 15, this enabled them to be a polyfidelitous trio. Their mutual love stops slapping from occurring. Willow and Candice both ignore the other two making out in front of them, while Unearthly, who's the most Outgoing, actually nods with approval when Willow & Candice make out in front of her! Compersion, from a sim. Who'd have thought it?!

But then I had to come up with some elaborate plot device in the story to explain the idea of a three-person relationship to people who might not have ever encountered one before. This was rather difficult, so the story got abandoned for a few months while I worked on other chapters that were easier. Today, I decided to come back to it, and this is what I came up with.

Yes, it's really over the top. It's supposed to be!

Unearthly considered her options. It did seem that the "dating other people before settling down" experiment had run its course. She hadn't found anyone she liked better than Willow, and she didn't think she was likely to. However, Willow was now firmly attached to Candice. Did she REALLY want to upset a girl with such a powerful right hook? Plus, there was the fact that she rather liked Candice too...

So she collared Willow and Candice one day after supper. "I've been reading about this new relationship style called lesbian polyfidelity..." said Unearthly, entirely without ulterior motive.

"Lesbian poly-what?" asked Candice.( Read more... )

Are you going to Polyday?

It's this Saturday, 14th October, in the Blackfriars/London Bridge area of London.

[Poll #842501]

I will be there, along with my partner alexa_robinson, metamour rowan_leigh, partner twice removed fluffymormegil, tocotox artremis, and whatever a tocotox's primary partner's called, oilrig. Argh! The jargon! It burns! hehe. My primary wuzzie has no inclination whatsoever to come to Polyday itself (too many people for his introversion & little desire to talk to strangers about emotional stuff), but he should be coming into town to meet us for dinner. So you'll have to grab your Richard time when you see him.

I'm running a workshop/session/thing along with Anna ofiwriter: it's called When poly meets real life and here's the blurb from the programme:

Love is infinite, but real life has definite limits. Time, money, distance and health are just four of the resources that can stop us having as many lovers, partners or relationships as we'd like. How can we do non-monogamy with these limiting factors as constraints? How can we achieve the best balance between the relationships we'd like to have with infinite resources, and what's actually possible in the real world?

This workshop will be particularly useful for people with disabilities or chronic health conditions, as well as those with other life limitations. However, the session is open to & should be beneficial for all, as none of us have unlimited time or finances! At no stage will you be asked to reveal any personal information about your life limits; sharing a problem or answer with the whole group is entirely optional.

It's from 2.30-3.45pm, which is quite civilised - but I've literally just looked at the programme and seen that we're clashing with Safer Sex. I hope that won't stop too many people from coming :/

Just so that you know it's not all doom and gloom in my life (which is an impression you could easily get from the last two posts), I should point out that there is a very good reason why I haven't been online much recently. *notes the last line of bio and perks*

The "loved" icon in this mood set is possibly the only one I don't much like, so instead here's a happy blob of love: