In an effort to minimise spam, I'm going to be shutting my LJ email address off soon. I get obscene amounts of spam to this address, and it's already being run through SpamAssassin and Thunderbird's junk controls, and it does little good. For now, everything sent to my LJ address is being rerouted to a secondary junk folder so I can make sure that any place that regularly emails me at my LJ address is changed to send elsewhere, but eventually I'll shut it off entirely.

Edit: LJ address is no longer functional; do not use it!

Now if you want to get in touch with me, myfirstname@my domain, or myusername@gmail. I used to have a catchall so anything@mydomain would reach me, but I started getting an obscene amount of spam there as well, so now only my pre-approved addresses will work. I have a bunch of them, but personal mail should go to emma@.

This should be obfuscated enough now. My domain is emmavescence.net, and when I say "my username", I mean "emmavescence".

I'm slowly trying to get my friends list into more manageable levels. I went away for a few days and even though I was actually checking LJ some of the time, I ended up with a friends page stretching back to skip 200. I can only hope that I do this whole "having a life" thing more often in the future, which leaves me even less time for LJ.

If I've defriended you recently, or if I do so in the future, it's probably not because I OMG HATE you or anything. Much more likely to be a combination of needing to make it smaller (both for reading and so I feel more comfortable writing here again, because it's been difficult sometimes recently), and not feeling as close to or having much in common with you as others on my list. I know I'll end up keeping people who I don't have much in common with or aren't really close to either, but I sometimes find it interesting being able to get a window in to people's lives that I would otherwise not get out in the real world. This list isn't a true reflection of who my friends are and who I like the best, so I hope people don't take it too personally and think that I like them less than random!person who's still on there or anything, because it's not quite how I use my friends list.

Being defriended always sucks (unless you've secretly been wanting to defriend that person yourself - for that matter, if you have secretly been wanting to defriend me, now is a good time to do it because I probably won't take it badly! Only don't all rush at once or I'll get paranoid >.>), and I'll probably manage to upset someone, but I do wish you all well, and if we cross each other's paths again in the future, I hope we do it on good terms.

For a long time now I haven't been involved or interested in a lot of the graphics related communities I once spent a lot of time on. I had separate filters for them but I haven't even looked at them in months. My graphical muse has upped and left me and looking at these regularly just makes me feel more frustrated at my current lack of creativity and inspiration, plus it's making my friends list and userinfo very clogged and harder to manage. So, I'm trimming my friends list severely and removing all of this stuff. I want to keep a record of it so I can find them again later, should my inspiration return, or just so I can find pretty icons for my own use. I figured I may as well make this public so it can be of use to some others, but this is mostly for my own records.

Phew. I defriended 21 journals and 73 comms and left 68 comms. My friends list is looking a lot less messy now. I'll probably be doing more of a cut sometime soon. It's just that time of year.

This is damn long, so I'll cut it. ( Huge long list )

So, lately I've discovered how to make a tasty and quick pudding (well, the recipe is mostly stolen from Delia Smith and my mum), and while I'm very full up from eating the latest one, I thought I'd share.

Preheat your oven. I have an electric fan oven, and 180C works for me. Google for conversion charts for Fahrenheit and gas marks because I'm feeling lazy.

Take an oven proof dish, an inch or two deep and about 8? inches across, and grease up the inside with some butter to prevent the pudding sticking. Take about three slices of bread (white or brown, but I use white), cut off the crusts (or you can leave them on if you prefer), tear them into bitesize chunks, and arrange them in the dish in layers. If you like, throw in some raisins or other mixed fruit as you build up the layers of bread. I usually forget this step, and it's just as good without. Or you can put them on the top if you remember before you put it in the oven ;)

Pour some milk over the top, being sure to soak it into all of the bread. Don't put in too much; the milk swilling around the bottom will be absorbed by the bread, just give it a minute. This is a good time to use your fingers to squish it around to even out the milk and be sure there are no dry chunks left. This is a very imprecise pudding :)

Then beat an egg with a few knobs of melted butter. I'm not convinced the butter is necessary, but I've added it anyway. Weigh out approximately 3 ounces of brown sugar. I tried it with white sugar last time and it just wasn't as good. We still don't have any soft brown sugar, so I used about half and half white caster sugar and dark brown muscavado. Add some cinnamon and nutmeg to the sugar. The amount you add depends on your preferences; I add a very liberal shake of cinnamon, with much less nutmeg.

Now, mix the egg with the sugar and spice. It'll be a dark brown treacley looking sticky mess. That's what you're going for. Now pour it over the bread in the dish, trying to spread it out evenly over the top. It will sink through the cracks between the chunks of bread and permeate the whole pudding. Add some more raisins and perhaps a dusting of more spice, and pop it in the oven for 20-30 mins. My oven is a beast, and if I leave it in longer than 20 mins, it starts smoking, but yours may be different.

When you take it out, it will have puffed up quite a bit, and will be making moist settling sounds (I don't know how else to describe that). Leave it 5 mins to cool down a little and stand, then serve warm, preferably with whipped cream. If there's any leftover (with me there usually isn't), you can heat it up in the microwave to eat it later.

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You don't want to read my journal right now. No, really. I'm depressed and I'm avoidant and I'm a really shitty friend, either real or on the internet. I won't necessarily reply to your posts, though I will be reading them. I probably won't reply to the comments you leave in my journal (see above mention of avoidant behaviour). My entries are entirely depressing and there's nothing you can do, unless you can somehow get in here and re-wire my brain to how it used to be when I was functional. Thanks for the thought though.

I used to have some public entries here, but they were only very impersonal things, links, polls, etc. And I know I don't like reading journals that are comprised only of such things, so they weren't giving a very good impression of me or my journal. I also just don't feel like being even that public right now. I use my journal like a journal, only with feedback. I don't like the idea of those things being public for anyone on the internet to see. Sometimes I wish I could hide all of the past, even from those on my friends list, because they're personal and they're a me that doesn't exist anymore. But a lot of them have got to be a better reflection of me than what I currently post, plus I don't really feel like editing 2000 entries. These things mount up when you stick around a place for 5 years.

This isn't an entry saying "friends only, comment to be added". I probably won't add you. If you still feel like you want to read my journal, then add me and leave me a comment and we'll see what happens.