My subconscious: weird

I went to have a lie down at about 6pm and now it is 4am and I only got up cause I got thirsty.

I dreamed I went to buy yarn and walked in on a crime boss trying to buy what he considered embarrassing sex toys. So he spent the rest of the dream trying to kill me. While other people tried to kill him with explosives.

Yarn and sex toys shop... I can see a whole creativity unifying theme there... guess it isn't much different from the costumes and sex toys that often happens. But I think the little back room in our high street yarn shop only has really exciting buttons.

Jane Eyre

Finished reading JE today.
Mr Rochester is a monster, though he probably doesn't know he is. A monster of his time.
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Sorry anyone that likes the book, but the disability things are just gross bad wrong.


ETA: Yes, Mr Rochester is a creep and the list has some good points. Except the last. Ugly isn't a good point.
Treating Adele like a charity orphan because he doesn't believe her mother when she says he's the father, that's creepy too. And the school he sends her to Jane had to take her out of when she went to look, it wasn't a good school. Given the school Jane grew up in and liked one wonders how not good it would have to be. Bad.


"Wide Sargasso Sea" is the other set text for this term so I'm reading it next.
And 'The Madwoman in the Attic' I had previously tried to read but it was full of Freud and other rubbish so I gave up.

Military customs and courtesies

I started writing a tiny something today and bumped into a question of protocol: The Captain walks in, what do you do?
So I started looking up when people stand at attention and salute and all that.
Turns out the answer has layers and circumstances and depends on if you're Navy, Air Force or Army, and almost certainly varies by country but the US has a handy huge amount of stuff online.
I found a powerpoint presentation on it. It has little diagrams of navy dudes to teach them how to salute.
It also has different rules for if people are 'covered' or 'uncovered'. Close reading suggests this means 'wearing a hat' but there are far more amusing possibilities.
There's a lot of room in the rules for being practical ie if you have your hands full you don't have to juggle, and if it's crowded you probably don't have to salute unless someone particularly talks to you.

These rules, they accrete and get modified and added to and have bits taken out and really, do I want the future space navy to (a) have hats at all or (b) pretend to take them off at all?

Or maybe they do the hand on heart thing. There's a whole different history and tradition for that though.


I either need a proper book on 'how to be in the Royal Navy without looking like an idiot' or to just decide to Make Stuff Up.

Original Fic: Mirrors [First draft]

Malcolm kept catching sight of himself in the mirror, and it kept on startling him. Ridiculous, of course. But the image of self from the outside, without the echoes of his wife’s thoughts, felt cold and unnatural; he kept reaching for the connection every time it happened, and every time he kept bumping into the nothing where the door should be, like a bee into a window pane.
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Interesting Royal Navy words

http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/training-and-people/rn-life/navy-slang/index.htm
links to a list of slang terms and also a list of nicknames connected to different surnames