Writing isn't the only way to play with words. Take them down a peg, look at them as just letters, forms on a page and you can make a different art with them. This isn't writing, its a whole new creation.

ASCII art is my personal favourite. But, there are other ways to get into the game of playing with your words. Typography is playing with fonts. What others have you found? Email me, I'd like to hear about them.

There is the whole riddle, puzzle, Scrabble issue. But, I'm looking at making plain ordinary everyday text into art.

Does anyone make ASCII art or am I the only retro geek? Someday, that ever illusive day, I want to make a whole website in just ASCII and ASCII art as illustrations/ graphics. I've seen one done in this way. It was very unique looking now. Back in the old days of dinosaur computers it would have been normal, if not cutting edge.

Anyway, this week take a break from fiddling with words and try something new. Play around and look at them in a whole new way. You and your keyboard will never be the same again.

Although I'm not getting a lot of progress on my book writing I am writing and working for several other sites plus a few of my own. I think I am stretching myself thin and working on projects which aren't really giving me back enough for all the time and energy I put into them. I need to step back and think about which of them matter enough to keep working on.

Here is the list:

The Open Directory Project - heading the list for a reason.

BackWash - Bewitching Vagabond and Adult BackWash and several newsletters and a few communities there too.

Suite101 as a Contributing Writer. Featured Writers are what they now call those who dedicate themselves to keeping a topic going.

LockerGnome - Creative Fat Grrl which is one I think I will keep going.

There are and were others but I've already left them fall off the back burner. Some I would have liked to stick with. But, there is just so much you can do when it's all freebie work. I count those ad share sites as freebie cause I've never seen a cent from Google or any other of those scam-sense things. BackWash is the only site that ever paid, but they went back to not paying.

Posting early in the morning is like cheating, packing two days into one. I like it. A bit of cheating can be a good thing. At least I don't feel like I'm a complete hopeless goodie goodie. That would be sickening. This way I can still be friendly, optimistic, honest (but for the odd bit of cheating and lies) and not feel like a dork. Nice grrls get treated like mindless doormats if they let it happen. It seems people think anyone nice is also dense and gullible. I am not foolhardy. I will lie and cheat, just a bit. Just enough to keep myself from being easy. Easily fooled that is.

Even so it is funny when someone realizes I lied. They always look so surprised. Stunned even. It makes me laugh, inside my head where no one can hear. They really do think I'm such a goodie goodie. Fooled them!

People get caught up in the stereotypes they create for other people. I'm nice therefor I'm easily fooled and I can always be trusted. Morons! True, most of the time, at least 99% I am good and honest and all that stuff. It's that extra 1% that keeps me sane. Otherwise how could I live with myself.

Once upon a time in a land pretty much forgotten now with IM's running rampant, there was IRC (Internet Relay Chat) I was a queen of my own realm there. I let my wild grrl out of the closet and I did very bad things. Evil and wicked even. I hung out with other wild women and we were nasty to the pigs... I mean, men on the IRC channels. Oh sure, there were a few we allowed to be friends and not get tormented. Just a few, we didn't go overboard on the being nice or ladylike thing. Of course, I was not really good at being extremely evil. Being a virgin was a hindrance. Not because I never had intimacy but because I didn't know the basic mechanics of the whole thing. So, sometimes I had guidance from the rest of the pack. They didn't mind. Although only two actually knew I was a 30 year old virgin.

It was really interesting play truth or dare on IRC. Men loved to ask raunchy questions and see how they could trip me up. Not that they knew... they just noticed I was a bit less technically plain spoken and because of this I very seldom picked a truth question. I couldn't hardly answer them, could I? Unless they asked about something I could do by myself. That I knew about quite well. That isn't what they usually asked though. So, I picked a dare. They liked that too. Other men must have heard about us, we had quite a following. They really did invent some daring dares. I did most of them. Some were foolish and a fool should be fooled if he is that bloody stupid. Sure I ran outside naked... no sorry I don't own a web cam or any other kind of photo software... what a shame... Poor drooling male.

I miss IRC and my days as a wicked, evil, temptress. I don't miss the men. Hard to miss them when they never left, just changed venues. I think they are all on the free online dating sites now. If they are anywhere else I'm just not seeing them. I don't do the online chat stuff any more. I never did like IM's. I don't want people thinking I'm available 24 hours a day. When I check email I'm available, not before. Still, I wonder about the other women I knew then. Whatever became of Liz from Australia who moved to the US and was battling cancer last time I heard from her. Then there was Vixen who met men and had them all falling in love with her but she never wanted to do anything real with them. She was an online grrl only. Those are the two I most remember of the women. I think of a couple of the men who were friends but I'm sure they moved along. I hope so. There were a lot of lonely people there and that was more than 10 years ago. A long time to feel outside and alone.

Maybe some of this online dating hell is fate snapping back on me after all my wicked ways towards those trolls on IRC. But I don't really think so. The women on the chat were there for romance, mostly all of them wanted to find someone to love them, be there with them eventually. The men however were all leading with their cocks. I never met one who was really sincere about wanting to meet and get to know a woman, other than parts of her: breasts, pussy and etc. That's why we were so mean really. It got to be sickening how shallow and perverted and selfish they all were. Some women needed to help balance things out and torture the piss out of them. We made it a game to see which of us could piss the trolls off the most and the fastest. I did pretty well. Not sure I was the best, but I did have fun laughing where only the other wicked women could see.

I'm putting this out there, like a message in a bottle. Maybe one of those women will see it and remember those days on IRC when I was SheDragon and they were... I'd tell you but that would be cheating. ;)

I've heard a debate about how women are becoming (being) anorexic in order to conform to the media image of a stick thin woman or the other side of the debate says she wants to be stick thin but with boob implants in order to please men. A few people try to say she's doing it for herself, to feel better about herself. Don't believe them.

I'm doing it to please men. Also, to try to stretch my grocery shopping dollars from one end of the month to the other. It's not fun or particularly amusing. But, one can of tomato soup can be filling for quite awhile if you take your mind off of things immediately afterwards by watching TV, playing games on the computer or taking a trek outside. The TV is a poor distraction, all those ads for fast food don't do me any favours. Plus that McDonald's commercial with the alarm clock pisses me off to extremes. Who wants to hear an alarm clock shrilling away at you when you're in the middle of watching mindless TV.

I don't think I have lost much weight so far. My sister did say I looked thinner when she saw me last weekend. So there is hope.

Don't count on me ever having the boob job part of this though. My boobs are just fine, already a happy pair of DD, I expect they will shrink down to a C or B and I will be just fine with that. I had a Family Studies teacher in high school who tried to keep herself a bit chubby cause each time she dieted to be a bit thinner her boobs disappeared. That was just her body type, thin and boobless. I think about her now and then. My body type is not thin or boobless. I'm one of those curvy types, just over doing it on the curviness at the moment. Once I melt myself away I will have an hourglass figure. Even now I have a small waist, though it's hidden away under big clothes.

That's another interesting thing, the clothes you choose to wear. I go for comfort and nice colours. I don't care for the tailored look and I really don't care for fashion. Why follow what worked for some other skinny woman when I can wear something that works for me. I'm a fashion leader in my own mind. I do look very good in red too, I wear it on days I want to dress to impress. Or days when I'm feeling kind of down and need a little boost. It almost always works too.

I think I will get out for groceries on Monday, if not over the weekend. I have about $100 left to cover this month. Rent is taken care of. I bought the TTC pass so I'm ok for getting around on all the buses I could stand for (literally since they are often busy with standing room only). The only real expense left for this month is groceries. I can manage. It's only for myself after all.

Sometimes I think about what if Todd and I had kids. How would I be managing if I wasn't alone now? I guess I could get help from the government, a little freeloading for the sake of the kids. But that wouldn't be good for me. How would it feel to have your kids know you were freeloading when they see other Mothers on TV with great careers, cars, a house, dating, taking trips here and there and never seeming to really have any financial hardships. It wouldn't be a good feeling to be a Mom struggling these days. At least she might be thin. The media and men in general like a thin woman.

I'm glad the fashion show types are beginning to change. They have made some rules for standards of how thin a woman should be to appear in their shows. She is still underweight but they prefer one who doesn't look like she just escaped from her grave. Not a little meat on her exactly but the potential to live until the end of the show, not quite starving herself to death.

In that case it is interesting to think about who they are doing it for. Those teenaged girls (most of them seem to be high school age) who dream of making their fortune by trotting down a runway wearing something someone thinks is going to be the next big fashionable thing every woman simply must have. What are those girls starving themselves for? Think about how ironic it is that they have to be stick then to sell clothes to us. We, who are not often stick thin, yet perhaps dream of being so in order to get dates. Round and round it goes...

Very unfair of the weather to go from unseasonably mild to freezing so quickly. I've noticed more spiders too. Tried to get a photo of one yesterday but it just came out all blurry. Then it moved to the inside of the kitchen sink and the flash spoiled it.

I'm cooking perogies for a late lunch/ early dinner. They are so good with sour cream. The afternoon soap opera is on. Some building is exploding. It all looks kind of silly. Phony. But I'm sure they are all sincere and trying hard to be dramatic. Somehow, there is just something about the way a soap opera is filmed that makes those big scenes look artificial. It might be something to do with how perfect everyone looks under the dirt smudges. People don't look that perfect, like they just stepped out of Vogue, during a catastrophe.

I stayed up writing last night. Now I am tired. I did go back to bed but it was so cold I didn't sleep much.

Tomorrow I decided not to do anything but head out to Newmarket. Makes it easier to just go to one place when the weather is so cold. I need to pack up a few overnight things. The bus takes about an hour to get from Toronto to Newmarket. It's kind of a nice trip. You can get a seat to yourself most of the time. I used to have a Walkman that I'd bring along for those long bus rides. I don't know where it is any more. Too bad the Go Bus has tinted windows, spoils the option of taking pictures out of the window along the way.

Time for those perogies. Have a great weekend if I don't get online again.