This is the excellent foppery of the world

Okay, this is beginning to annoy me. Since around one o'clock this afternoon - maybe longer, but that was the first chance I've had to get on line since early morning yesterday (yeah, I stay up way too late) - I've been having problems with three sites:

1) LJ itself - most pages seem to take somewhere between ten minutes and half an hour to load completely. It seems to stall out on the ads. A couple pages load at the normal rate, though - I've only seen it in two communities so far (dramadramaduck and kingdomdressing)
2) Plurk completely refuses to load.
3) Some pages on Neopets also take ages to load.

Now, for a while, I had this problem where Plurk and LJ would occasionally do this, but that a) went away if I quit and restarted Firefox; b) didn't happen at all in Safari; and c) stopped happening once I fixed the thing that was preventing me from upgrading Firefox. So far I've tried restarting Firefox - no luck. Switching over to Safari didn't work either. Nor did restarting the whole computer. The fact that it's three different sites makes me hesitate to blame it on the sites themselves, especially Neopets (which has never done this before even when this happened normally), but the other options are either my computer or the dorm's internet connection, and I'm slightly mystified as to why either of those would have screwed up in the time I was offline.

Has this been happening for anyone else?

All right. I already play someone at permanent_way, but another muse has decided to camp out in my consciousness. Which is irritating because she isn't even fully put together yet.

See, it's Erika, one of the Gym Leaders from Pokemon. Not only would this involve either watching the episodes of the anime or finding the bits of the manga that she shows up in, but Permanent Way requires that all characters be played from a different canon.

And I can't decide where she'd be from, though she insists on going there. The possibilities that present themselves are Code Lyoko and Kingdom Hearts.

Of course, in the former case I'd have to go rewatch at least bits of Code Lyoko, if not the whole freaking thing...

*needs Muse-B-Gone...*