darksiren's domaine

I was, incidentally, recently rereading some ADoA scenes. Namely the ones where Alexsei came to rescue Ryshassa after the kidnapping, when she was already deeply changed by the emotional manipulation, rape and torture she went through.

(I do still reread the Ryshy kidnapping scenes now and then when in a particularly masochistic mood.)

It struck me while reading them that I truly did not appreciate the powerful feelings my husband put into his posts as Alexsei. They were lengthy but very beautiful, personal and heartfelt, and I knew that he wasn't writing them 'for show'. He was writing them because he wanted to save not just Ryshy, but me as well. He wanted to show me that he loves me even when I hate myself, even when I try so hard to make myself look like a monster.

Been waiting on the OS upgrade, since I'm checking to make sure people have backed up stuff. Though I'm pretty sure I will sign up for it today.

Basically, I've been told that to upgrade, I have to order a new VPS on a new server, as the one I want is incompatible with the server I'm on right now. Apparently. So they have to go through the fun process of transferring my data and giving me a new IP and etc.

I did save backups of my sis's, Eni, Rin and Selina's directories, and MAY do it again right before I know the site will go offline, but if I REALLY wanted to be thorough, I should go on IRC and tell people myself. Meeeh don't wanna. I know Eni reads this now and then, so Rin is the only one who'd be kinda in the dark. I'm just... having a hard time nowadays being communicative with anyone. I feel like withdrawing more and more. Maybe I will still try to nudge him myself though, I really ought to. :(

Compounding my asocial behavior is the fact I had a bad situation happen with RPoL recently. I am reluctant to write about it much because I don't want to risk any messy fallout if the people involved read this. But it put me in a terrible mood for a while, and so I feel inclined to detail it. Perhaps it will be therapeutic.

Well I'm also setting up to get the OS kernel updated for the webserver. It may occur tonight. I'm making my $40/month work for me and getting the techs to do it. Why else would I pay that much, heh!

I'm running into problems figuring out how to install some caching stuff, and while I was flailing at things I thought "I should upgrade my OS." (In this case from CentOS 4.7 to ... 5.3? or whichever it is) Lo and behold the hostforweb people are willing to do it for me. So I will let them do it. :P Mostly, because I'm lazy. Note: I haven't decided to do it yet, because the techs are informing me it's more complicated than I originally thought. But I am starting to backup to my hard drive right now.

It depresses me a bit that I'm too lazy with OS stuff to even bother. I know I ought to at some point just bite the bullet and reinstall from scratch, and really optimize things, because it's something I *could* do... but I am no linux hobbyist. All I want is for my site to run faster than it is right now, the problem is hindering what I *really* want to be doing. That is, WRITING!

I wonder if this bodes ill for when I am actually going to go back to college. Oh well. I have a headache right now so I'm going to lie down soon. I've been having insomnia problems... again.

This is a small redesign I've been wanting to do for a little while now. Returning to dark background, eliminating a great deal of cluttery links and blocks, and so on. Getting some cache modules installed. I even reduced the number of posts per page (it's actually 5 now instead of 10. That may help, or maybe not.)

For a base, I took an existing Drupal layout (it's called 'decayed' if you're interested) and tweaked a lot of stuff here and there. Jon helped me with all the photoshop manipulation here (including finding some REALLY gorgeous looking flower and butterfly brushes - he says they're free to use, if I knew where they're from I'd credit it ;.;). And I'm reminding myself how much I hate CSS! :D though it isn't quite as bad this time around. Float and clear are my friends.

Not quite done tweaking with all the details yet. I'm going to expand the Announcements section some, for example. Still need to make a final decision on what blocks go where, and how I'll make up for the info that gets cut out.

I'll be working on this more later (and possibly a real post. Maybe?!) but for now it is PSU TIME!

I don't even know what to write any more most days.

I start posts but then never finish them. And I'm too busy with writing on rpol or trying to fix my crappy sleep patterns lately (argh insomnia).

Also, my site has gotten *annoyingly* slow to load (I have no idea if it's like that for others but definitely is for me), and it is starting to bug me a lot so I've really been depressed about that. I have to actually go and figure out why, and whether it's worth throwing more time and money to solve, or whether I should switch servers, or use an apache alternative (not sure is worth the learning curve, as I don't have the time for it), and so forth.

BTW please don't give me 'helpful advice' about this problem unless you want me to bite your head off, I'll ask if I want it. It'll just trigger some sort of "I really suck with optimization" inferiority right now.