A tale of Sims, alphabets, hair, and being asleep
I haven’t blogged for ages, not since January if you don’t count my last post, which was in the works for a while.
I’m not up to a lot at the moment because I am having Chronic Fatigue problems. While it’s a condition that I always have, I go through phases of it being much worse at some times than at others. At the moment it’s really bad and I am barely moving.
I hate that it’s referred to as “extreme tiredness” because everybody and their uncle is like “oh I must have that then lol I’m always tired.” No, you don’t get it, I mean too tired to lift your forearm or even twitch your finger. Too tired to turn over in bed. Too tired to lift objects. Too tired to lift your head. The energy is not there in your body. It’s not a case of “I wish I could sleep-in today,” it’s, “oh, my body is literally not moving.”
It feels like having the flu all the time (not a cold, the actual flu. Sometimes I cannot tell when I have caught a more severe illness because I feel literally so dreadful all the time). It’s like a truck has hit you in the chest, you just don’t have anything in you.
People don’t realise how much lying down I have to do generally. But at times like this I pretty much don’t stop being horizontal.
While it was thought I had ME as a kid, this seemed to not affect me as much as a teenager, Ehlers-Danlos came into play then instead. Apparently a lot of people with Ehlers-Danlos do end up with ME/ CFS for one reason or another, but in my case it’s thought to be because I had Glandular Fever a few years ago. It affects you for the rest of your life, Will had it when he was younger and even he gets out of breath doing normal stuff sometimes.
I was actually having an appointment for something completely different when I was diagnosed, but I was in such a state from when I got out of our taxi and went into the doctor’s room, that he diagnosed me and said he expected me to be on constant bed rest for the next 6 years.
Thankfully, I haven’t actually been constantly in bed. Some times are better than others. Sometimes I am more affected by one of the many other things going on with my body. But at the moment I’m in a really bad period.
I have been getting out of bed most days, only to sleep all day on the sofa. Sometimes I am stupidly brain-awake in the night, but with a body that still doesn’t want to do much. Been going long periods between being able to wash, as well.
With that, here are some photos of various things spanning from mid-January.
As previously mentioned, I am letting my hair go curly. Which is a bit of a battle since 90% of my head is old growth that has been chemically straightened for years; the bonds of the hair are permanently broken, and so while they do frizz up again after a few months, they are not going to curl entirely of their own accord.
I am trying to encourage my new growth to curl by wrapping the hair up for bed after each wash, not brushing at all, only combing when wet etc. I found out surprisingly late in life that people with curly hair are not actually meant to brush it.
Back when I was brushing my hair, I would have put my unstraightened hair between 2b and 3a.
But now I think it might actually go all the way to 3c!
It’s actually 4 tiers, but, because I mismeasured (jutting bit of sink at the top I didn’t account for and a sticky-out bit of cabinet), I had to take the top tier off, and unfortunately the rest of the unit will not actually slide up beside our sink. BUT I managed to wedge it in far enough that we can close our bathroom door, and I’m still really happy with it. There are probably various places in the house you could put one of these.
(Although I am very deaf, the bell is a lot more audible to me than the sounds of the dog moving around on her own. She had her collar off after a bath recently and it was so weird not being able to pinpoint where she was).
We’ve been watching 13 Deadly Sims on Giant Bomb (sidenote: I love Abby Russell, Will calls her “American Letti,” apparently we have a lot of the same mannerisms and noises) recently and it’s really good. I don’t know quite what is is about the Sims that makes me laugh so much. My laptop unfortunately wouldn’t let me play any of the games, I’m not even sure that Will’s PC would run some of them, I think his graphics card died. I have a really old copy of the Sims 2: Pets on PS2 somewhere, and we also have Sims: 3 Pets for the PS3, but we have absolutely no idea where a lot of our physical games are since we moved, there is so much still packed. I’m really itching to just play some Sims in general. In fact I’d love to try and build my final house plan as a house on there and have Sims live in it. I’d need a mod with unlimited money though, I remember building the house we were living in at the time on the Sims once, and the Sims themselves could not actually afford to move in for ages!
Anyway.
I am actually very fascinated by the Simlish alphabet, although there doesn’t seem to be a consistent one. This goes back to the topic of how interesting it would be to found one’s own country, because you could also make a new writing system, even if it was just used to write an existing language.
To cut a long story short, I decided to pursue this idea quite far, as I usually do when my brain goes off the rails. I wound up looking at some of the alphabets I liked, including 2 versions of Simlish, and then constructing my own alphabet.
I did it based on the phonemic alphabet that you can hear here, rather than just on ABC etc.
I stole the letters Ѫ (Yus) and Ж (Zhe) from Cyrillic because I love them so much. Also the П.
Obviously I wrote this with English in mind because that’s the language I use every day, but I like to think you could transliterate a lot of languages into it.
And because my body isn’t doing anything else at the moment, I also decided to make the letters in Photoshop Elements. I actually had to make the Yus from scratch because the software didn’t actually like it and just turned it into a square box. I’d like it if the line thickness was consistent, but I’m not actually very good at this.
You should be able to click on those to make them larger. This link is helpful if you are thinking of doing something similar.
But yeah, I think the letters I’ve made would be fun to see on the side of shampoo bottles and billboards and shop signs and things. I like that it’s got a Paleo Hebrew vibe going on as well as some of that lovely Cyrillic. I think the letters would become a lot less blocky if commonly used in handwriting, people would find a way to make them flow, but hopefully not as madly as cursive Hebrew. Also there’s no upper and lower case in this alphabet, which probably saves a bit of grief.
I hand-drew some elevations for our house plan (note: I have no architectural education whatsoever, which may immediately be very apparent). Although I made some digital ones with Floorplanner screenshots before, it wasn’t very satisfying not having the roof and everything in them.
Also, me and Will finally started watching Stranger Things, Dustin is my fave.