(I wanted to come online last night, but stuff happened with the stuff I was doing and prevented me from it. Such stuff will form the substance of this backdated post.)

I pity my scanner. It suffers.

How in the Hell is it possible for someone to trip over the cable of their seven-year-old scanner - and I'm still not sure quite how I managed this - send the thing flying for what has to be about the three hundredth time, break one of the catches on the lids so that the lid for the flatbed is now hanging on more by luck than judgment and yet still be able to scan pictures afterward? I think I've lucked out. By rights I should have ended up with one very broken scanner, but no. The thing's now making unhappy noises at me and I'm getting the distinct feeling it's definitely gonna need replacing (and soon), but it's still working and it really shouldn't be.

Given what I've done to that scanner over the course of its operational life - I also managed to spill orange juice all over it a year or so previous and the thing's been ominously unpredictable for well over a year (half the time the computer fails to realize the machine's connected and the software needs reinstalling pretty much every other time I try and make it work and every so often it stops scanning halfway through a picture and I have to close the scanner and reopen it to make it reset) perhaps as a result of its other 'falls' - it shouldn't still be working. It should have winged its way off to Computer Heaven long ago. But no. It hangs in there. It still scans pictures and they come out surprisingly okay, actually.

Someone up there likes me. Or at least they like my scanner.

I don't completely like my computer, though. I'd been scanning pictures for most of the afternoon for the purposes of making my AngstilySmoking!Youji icon (though inevitably I got a touch carried away), and was just saving them all after finally deciding I'd had enough of playing with the thing when my paint shop program crashed. Follows a horrible moment in which I feel convinced that I've lost all God-Knows-How-Many pictures as when I open the program again I don't see any evidence of autosaving. Hoping against hope I close it and open it again, during which time I retrieve about a third of the pictures. Opening another window managed to get back another third or so.

All in all I only lost seven or eight images to the Error Message of Death, which isn't bad going all things considered. Of course, being stubborn and obsessed I immediately went back to rescan my missing pictures with the result that I missed dinner and didn't get online at all.

Now all I have to do is tidy them up. By the time I'd rescanned the last lost little picture believe me I was utterly bloody sick of image software and decided that I genuinely could not be bothered to spend any more time trying to play with images. I'll deal with sorting out the shading and the edges and resizing and all the rest of the tidying I'm going to have to do before the fruits of my labors are in any fit state to be stared happily at and perhaps utilized for my own vicious fangirl ends.

Oh well, I'll get there in the end.

Ah. And I had a fanfic idea last night, but it's so horrible and twisted - well, it's a SchuKen one-shot and it wants to be from Schuldich's perspective, so of course it's twisted - that I'm not actually sure I want to try and write it. I don't actually like the thought of indulging my darkest fic-instincts and yet this thing popped into my head almost fully-formed (the last fic I had do this to me was 'A step forward into night' and I didn't get any respite from that until it was written and out the way). When I get ideas like this the only way to get them out is to write them, yet I really don't think this thing should see the light of day. It's gratuitous and it's just plain nasty.

This leaves me with a dilemma. Should I write the stupid thing just to get it out and resign myself to never posting it anywhere? Should I write it and post it to LJ and my homepage (because submitting something like this to my Pit of Voles Account would probably lead to banishment)? Should I get an aff.net account? Should I not write it and cope with the irritation of a plot bunnie gnawing at my ankles for weeks on end?

Decisions, decisions.