So remember my talk about the seasons? I stand by Fall being my favorite, but when snow covers the ground as it does right now, I think that Winter gives Fall a run for its money, taking a very close second. The snow-covered landscape is absolutely breathtaking, and very much worth the cold it induces. (Rather, cold induces it, butstill, point holds.)

Today, I had round dancing, and while my frame is improving some, and I'm becoming more aware of what needs to be done, I'm a long ways off. It certainly doesn't help that my lower back was killing me (likely as a result of too much standing during work and improper technique). Honestly, my posture is bad enough that I sort-of feel like I should be wearing a corset during the day: something to force all the muscles from below my shoulder right to my waist to stay in alignment, to correct the years of neglect and damage that have been done. (I don't think it'd be good for it to be on all the time--something like 16 hours on, to really, really work the muscles of my body into their correct position and strength, and then eight hours of letting them regenerate.)

Anyway, as you might be able to guess, it was during said driving to round dancing that I noted the gorgeous scenery. What a wonderful winterland, indeed.

You know, this is never an easy thing to admit, but I figure lacking anything better to talk about, I might as well say it. On the subject of how I know I'm trans, I'm not gonna lie to you. Sometimes, I do have my doubts about it. (I am a creature riddled with self-doubt, constantly and consistently, about basically everything in life. If you don't see me showing doubt, chances are that I still have it locked away, hidden.) However, each time, I end up finding my resolve stronger than before. It's like a muscle strained by a workout--the doubt breaks it down, but then I do some soul searching and it builds up more resolute than ever before when I finish, my conviction grown because of the mental exercise.

As just one example, today (I think it began when I was practicing my womanly stride in spare time at work) I asked myself, would I really be happier as a woman? Not much physically would change, there would be consequences with the change, and given my bipolar disorder, I likely will never feel like I'm living a satisfied life. (That sounds overly harsh, maybe a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I know me. No matter how much wishing it to not be true may help, it'll never stop existing, that dissatisfaction.) There will always be a lingering sensation that I could be "more", and I'd endlessly be plagued by the "what if"s of life.

Yet I looked into this painfully-honest evaluation of my future. It's realistic...but do you know what I found? If I transition, my life may not be happier, but I'd feel better from having done it. (How does that make sense? It just does. Like I said...this is something I actually put serious, serious thought into and tried to attack as realistically as possible, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, not idealistically naive nor cynically harsh, to paint an accurate picture. And that was my conclusion.) That, alone, is proof enough that this is no delusion, that I am not lying to myself, that I'm not making a mistake. It is me. (There's various other ways I know, like the happiness the name Bree brings and the pain my real name brings, the happiness of having done a female version of me, the happiness in seeing the addressing of me as 'she', and so on and so forth, but we're dealing with moments of the low which prove it, rather than moments of the high which prove it.) It might not ALWAYS seem like that, but it's one of the few things in my life that I have little doubt in.

Now, don't get me wrong, that doubt's gonna be a pain to deal with, because it keeps coming back. Yet let me tell you what I know will happen, for a FACT, when I'm about to begin transitioning. I have absolutely zero doubt about this happening, I'm not gonna lie, and it's going to sound freaky unless you've gone through similar and know what I'm talking about. When the day would come for me to begin transitioning...one last time, I'd second-guess myself. There'd be no going back, so if I later decided it was a mistake...whoops, too late! And that? That's terrifying. That's a horrible, fear-inducing feeling. "What if this wasn't such a good idea?" I know I will think it. I absolutely know that thought will come up to me and punch me in the gut. It'd consume me, this doubt, about the path I've chosen.

...But then...I'd ask myself, truly, if that fear was justified. And you know what? I already know it isn't. I don't care what those niggles of doubt say. They'd be last-minute nerves. Having gotten that far...I'd take the plunge. Because, yes...that is who I am. Deep down in my soul, I know it's true. The deeper I go, the more I know it's the right course of action, no matter what my horrible paranoia may try to drag me down into thinking.

I am not a guy. I am, always was (even before I realized it!), and always will be, Bree.

So last night, we got the first snowfall of the season. (Okay, since I was up so late, it was likely done snowing by the time I'd gone to bed, but I didn't see the results until today.)

It's an absolutely beautiful sight to be seen, naturally. I'm horrible at guesstimations (emphasis 'guess') for this sort of thing, but I'd put it at somewhere between one and two inches--not amazingly deep, but also not thin. It's thick enough to weigh branches down on trees and to give that brilliant white coat to everything.

Rather impressive. Of course, I woke up after nine hours of sleep again at two in the afternoon, so I didn't really get to see it at its peak. (Apparently, there was sunlight at some point during the day, though it never got above freezing.)


In Heroes of the Realm news, I went from having 350,000+ gold to being stone-cold broke, recently. Why? Because I was searching for a weapon upgrade for Edith. She had turned Level 20, and was using a L15 staff with a L3 Fire Gem in it. I expected to find a cheap Fire Drake and buy it, get an L3 Fire Gem, and equip it. Instead, I found a massively-expensive Fire Drake.

I knew it'd be a bad deal, and that there'd be much, much cheaper ones, but I hovered over it to see what was inside...and found that it was three L6 Fire Gems. The staff I wanted to buy, with the gem I wanted to buy, only x3 and at double the level for each. Suddenly, that ridiculously-expensive staff seemed well worth the price, so I spent the quarter of a million to buy it.

Combine that with a little other spending here and there, plus getting items in the forge to have gem slots unlocked, and harvesting my resources and needing to start the ore/wheat/mana again (at 4300 each, doing 9 or 12 typically, it adds up), and I lost basically all my gold.

Not to worry, though. Checking in every few hours or so means that I get a ton of gold in a day. That 300,000 took me less than a week to make. Now, it might take me longer to recover my funds this time, since I went on a MASSIVE campaign where I burned through a ton of my excess resources by going to every event area and conquering each level in addition to my normal routine (clearing the 1/2-star levels along with the boss levels until I run out of energy or time), but I'll recover.

It's not making much of a difference in the Champion's League, mind you (still getting massacred), nor is it making a noticeable difference in my normal army, but in spite of that, I think it was an investment well worth the time and gold spent, which will pay off in the long-run.

One of the main things right now I'm doing is getting characters built up gem-wise and equipment-wise. For instance, with one or two exceptions here and there, nearly every character has Ice Gems in their helmets, meaning that the demand for Frost Gems (most of them L5, mind you) is at an all-time high.

In contrast, I keep burning through things to use for an L5 Earth Gem, which I keep getting yet not knowing what to use it for. I'm saving up for an L6 Fire/Wind gem for an upgrade to one of my army heroes, but after that, I won't know what to do for the Wind. (Fire, though, is in high demand as well.)


For Clicker Heroes, I suppose I should mention that I keep on cruising through levels rather rapidly. Worth mentioning is the fact that I actually play Clicker Heroes on two different computers: the laptop I use for blog posts, and the desktop I check in on once a week. You'd THINK this would mean the desktop would be an idle-build and my laptop (which I'm constantly on) would be a click-build, but it's actually the other way around; my desktop game (which is mainly for familial gatherings) is moving towards a click-build.

I've got an ancient lined up there for idling, but that'll be to help boost the 6 days I'm away. I reset that playthrough to get 4 hero souls and am planning to reset it at the same point (99) to get 5 this time. (And the time after that, 6, and so on and so forth, each time getting there faster than the last.)

In contrast, my laptop is my main one, because I've gotten so many energized dark rituals that it'll take me forever to get back to where I currently am at. (579, though I'm about to go further since I have yet to spend my excess of cash.)

I woke up from what could only be described as the awesomest of awesome dreams.

See, yesterday, my family had time to watch a couple of Farscape episodes. (We're midway through season one, since given the show's age and early episodes, my family doesn't watch it too often, in spite of knowing the show matures later.)

That left an impression on my subconscious.

Because last night? I dreamed of what can only be described as an EPIC clash between a crew loosely inspired by Farscape (don't think they were exactly the same)...fighting against the Wraith, from Stargate Atlantis. (Well, not *quite* the Wraith, but they were called Wraith, had superstrength, could drain life, and looked like Wraith. They had what's likely a different culture, though.)

They were in the middle of an absolutely breathtaking fight scene, orchestral music playing and all. And then, I woke up, discovering that I had slept soundly for nine hours.

No regrets.


Anyway, I mentioned yesterday notes I wrote for the vamp/wolf/zomb story. Some additional character notes that I didn't write down there is that there's a werewolf(father)-zombie(walker/mother) couple, who figured they couldn't have children, thus, adapted a baby vampire boy 20 years ago. Only, they recently figured out that she's the one in a million (and, frankly for walkers, one in a billion) zombie that can have a child, so they recently gave birth to a baby girl. 

The wolf is someone who in a pack could easily be the alpha male. His pheromones are all over his son, essentially letting all wolves in the area know that this vampire is not for shredding, and if they so much as try, they'll be killed. (The vampire son is completely unaware of this, and for many years wasn't even aware that his parents were a werewolf and a zombie.) Now, said wolf is obviously leading a solitary life, away from other wolves, basically living a normal human life. He's a nice guy, and is completely honest about his feelings, not keeping them pent up. This means that when the full moon rolls around, he takes a leisurely stroll through the forest his home is inside (well, it's part of a development complex or whatever the term is, with other houses around it and roads/private roads a plenty, so not a true forest, but he owns a lot of land that is forest), basically harmless. 

The zombie was the source of the local outbreak of zombies. She made sure to be the originator zombie of the zone. One story I'm taking cues from is the webcomic, The Other Grey Meat, which I was an avid reader of back in the day, and basically there's a zombie hierarchy in place. This is in seeming contradiction to earlier notes, but it's really not, at least not by much. Mutated zombies legitimately do hold influence over the horde. AND, zombies do have a horde mentality, making everything equal. However, zombies have an instinctive recognition of who their maker is, and their maker's maker, and so on and so forth. And at the top of the chain, the zombie who holds that recognition is someone who retains some individuality beyond that of a normal zombie. NORMALLY, said zombies are runners evolved into mutants. However, it's possible for a walker to hold that rank, and the zombie mother in this case does. In other words, via the link zombies hold to one another, she bids them to leave her son alone.

But to go into detail about that now that I've explained the characters, the zombies more or less work this way:
The default zombie horde will work as a team, a hive mind directed towards their goal. Everyone is equal in this. Even the top maker is not immune to being influenced by horde mentality. (The mother has, at times, had to be pulled away by her husband from taking part in attacks, because her will only goes so far; the basic swarm is their base instinct.)

Then comes mutated zombies. Mutated zombies can be anywhere in the chain, from most recently created to oldest; it doesn't matter. They act as basically radio control centers, as battle commanders: they help to coordinate the horde. However, while they maintain their individuality when doing so (and thus, may have agendas), they're still working the same base instinct. For example, a mutated zombie cannot direct zombies to attack other zombies in spite of being their controller, because the idea behind mutated zombies in the horde is to increase their deadly infection potential. (This is also why truly intelligent mutated zombies are such a threat: they can direct zombies to deliver bites and then back off, so that the bitten is guaranteed to turn, rather than just be ripped to shreds as zombie food. They can also, by this same logic, determine that it'd be better to have a bitten person become zombie food rather than another zombie.)

A mutated zombie is still an agent of the horde. They don't have to follow the horde's exact will, allowing for deviations, but the more control they exert over a horde, the less individual will they retain and the more they have merged with the hive mind. In essence, for a mutated zombie to control with precision the entire horde, they mutated zombie must, by extent, be part of said horde. It makes a lot of sense to me, not only from a justification point of view, but also as a built-in failsafe. A mutated zombie maintaining their agenda only has weak control; a mutated zombie fully devoted to the cause has full control.

Then, comes the hierarchy in play. The maker-zombie will never give true orders to the horde like a mutated zombie will. They'll instead simply give 'directives', so to speak. It's almost the same thing, but not quite. Orders require proximity, and are specific to the situation. Directives are things inserted into the zombies that the zombies will instantly recognize and follow. For instance, a mutated zombie must give orders for zombies to gather. The mutated zombie's proximity is large, stretching across a whole town (and that's just one mutated zombie; multiple can, like radio towers, exchange signals to potentially cover full metropolises), but it is not limitless. It requires conscious oversight, as an active action. The maker-zombie's directives are automatic, inserted into all zombies, and are a passive action, automatically executed.

Thus, there is a directive in them to never hurt her son. There's a separate directive to recognize her will when she commands it of them, overlapping into an active. While this certainly makes the control of the maker-zombie that of a deeper level, it has its drawbacks. Mutated zombies can control any zombie; maker-zombies only control those beneath them in the chain. There's also the fact that maker-zombies cannot give directives that override zombie's basic instincts, just like mutated zombies cannot. 

She can give a directive to not overwhelm the natives of her town because it'd disrupt harmony, but cannot give a directive for the zombies not to spread at all. Nor would she; she likes to have the safety net of as many zombies around as she can safely get away with, but that's another reason the directive not to overwhelm the humans exists: for the sake of not attracting unwanted attention to them. (It's easier to spread in the shadows than in broad daylight.)

I really like the mechanics I'm building up for this story, but if you don't mind...family's coming over again, today, so gotta go!

So much happened today that I'm not even sure where to begin. It was Thanksgiving; of course stuff happened a plenty. I had family over and we watched Shaun of the Dead (pretty negative reception), which...you probably won't be surprised to learn sparked inspiration in the zombie/werewolf/vampire story, for which I have compiled some additional notes.

In HotR, there's been something interesting: the Masters league I was in only had four players, and had four NPCs. This, with me at level 20 heroes, got me into the top-3, promotion range. So right now, I'm about to begin the Champion's League for my very first time. When just a couple goes ago, I was near the bottom of the Masters league. Really moving my way up, and that applies to my ranking, too. I might drop into the 3000s occasionally, but I'm mostly seeing 2700s and 2900s. Plus, my guild is currently climbing up the ranks. It's on the 13th page of guilds right now, and keeps on moving up and up. (Mind you, I'm a one-person guild, which I imagine for some of these guilds is quite rare. And even of those that are, I imagine the majority of them have been there rather a while.)

They had a black Friday event which gave me a couple of cool helms. One I won't be able to use any time soon (it's level 30; the best I have is 20 going on 21), but the other is something that Carpeia is inches away from getting equipped with: a really powerful helm, boosting all stats ridiculously high and offering fire attack/resist. (Thus, Carpeia. Almost gave it to Edith, before I noticed it boosted strength and didn't boost intelligence.) I got a T3 hero card from it, too, a powerful card that I don't much care for but is nice to have all the same.

Basically, things are going very well in that game. 

There's really not that much I can say, today. I got up at one, having slept basically nine hours. I went to work a couple hours later, where I've been since then.

And I don't really have anything beyond that.

Aside from weebly, annoyingly enough, yet again...logging me out, interfering with me making a blog post today. Apparently 'remember me' means "remember me for a couple weeks, then highly inconvenience me".

...Did I mention I'm not very good at this whole blogging thing?

I suppose I should mention I blocked out an idea for the game that retells the story of Disease only modified for the flash-game format. (A TD game, more specifically.)

That's really it.

Yes, even though it's Tuesday, because it's fallout from yesterday. Remember the fitness testing? Yeah, well, it had elements to it that I forgot to do. Now, they're not particularly challenging or time-consuming things to do, but they eat up time. Time I had yesterday, and had today...yet squandered both times because I forgot. In spite of putting the papers for said fitness testing in a spot where it was very obvious where they were.

Still missed them. Until literally the minute before I was supposed to be leaving. I should have gotten them done yesterday, but didn't.

...That being said, one of the things that I did do which was among the tasks was take my weight...and much to my surprise? I came in at 150, ten pounds heavier than when I started. This is a GOOD thing, mind you. Because I have been underweight. Now, I'm close to my healthy weight. YAY!

So know that quiz I mentioned?

Bombed it. Got a 60% on it. (I hate Mondays.)

That said, know that assignment I said was also due?
Turned out to be another quiz.

Which I aced.
(The 'slightly-less'.)

I'll take my small victories where I can get 'em.

(Well, I was raised coming up on Garfield comics...)
I managed to pull it off, getting my paper in on time...barely. By telling a lie ("I forgot to print" = "I didn't finish, thus, never had the chance to"), I was able to have the chance to finish it (in class, mind you) and turn it in...with a myriad of problems. The chart was in black and white rather than the color it should have been in. I made multiple factual errors that I realized on the drive home. It's riddled with issues, and wasn't proofread at all. I just slabbed things on and hoped I met the requirements. (I went down the list and tried to BS stuff that made it sound like I was meeting them, but who knows if I succeeded.)

Fun stuff.

But it gets better.

Chrome crashed.
I've yet to get the kongpanion of the week since I've been too busy with schoolwork.
And I've got not only a quiz, but also an assignment, also due today in addition to the dyadic encounter paper.

Oh. And that's not going into obligations, for which I said I'd be posting today since I took a fairly relaxed weekend.

Today sucks.

So I just now had an idea for a new story, titled, "The Seven Anglo-Saxon Warlords". You might be able to guess that, yes, it'd be loosely inspired by The Seven Samurai. (And remakes, such as The Magnificent Seven and the anime series which I first got to see the concept of the idea in.) But in this case, it'd be given with a unique historical twist:
The "farmers" in this case are the citizens of Brittania, desperate for aid. They face invasion from the northern barbarians (bandits), and have nothing but a dead currency and their spare worthless supplies to offer as payment. Yet in spite of their poor status, seven warlords are attracted to the cause.

One of them would be named Arturius, him commanding the remnants of the last legion: better trained than all the other warlords in the art of war, and with the finest equipment, yet also with the lowest supplies and the least number of troops; every loss he suffers is irreplaceable, so he knows he is of a dieing kind of soldier. (And, ultimately, yup, he dies.)

There would be three from the Saxons, and three from the Angles. Together, the warlords would forge a loose alliance to stave back the enemy threat until it has been dealt with decisively, working out the particulars later. Each brings their own army, so unlike most variants on the scenario, it's not seven warriors fighting dozens of bandits; it's seven warlords fighting a vastly-numerically-superior force controlled by dozens of enemy chieftains they aim to kill.

The idea was loosely inspired by historical knowledge that Brittania wasn't instantly overwhelmed by barbarians when Rome withdrew its forces, and remembering a tidbit of info which I remember theorizing that the Anglo-Saxons were brought in for actually a similar purpose, not themselves being raiders but being protectors that happened to seize the land they were protecting for themselves.

So I'm planning on doing some fairly decent historical research to see details of that era, in particular, how many kingdoms there ended up. I think there were three Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which if I'm right about, would be perfect for the number of surviving warlords.

It's highly rough around the edges given my rusty knowledge of that historical era (heck, historians themselves don't know as much about then as they should, and those who're in the know are in the minority because there's so much obsolete information about that time period that most people are similarly in the dark [ha, ha]), but I really like the concept. I certainly think it has potential!