Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

5. By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?

I've been searching my memory on this one. I think the youngest was Sly (of PokeMUSH). I can't recall if he was a young teen or preteen though... I want to say he was 11 or 12 when I first started playing him, and he was a teen by the end of his storyline. No matter if he was a teen or preteen, he was (another!) disturbing storyline. He wasn't a good kid, but he was taken in by a criminal (an older adult) and not just turned into a remorseless killer, he was groomed into having a physical "relationship" with him, too. (Relationship is a poor word, as Sly wasn't gay/bi and wouldn't have chosen a sexual relationship with the man on his own.) While he was fun to play (especially in the beginning of his storyline), by the end he was a little too strong and perfect for my tastes. The RP had lead to that point, but... looking back on it now, he was a tad too close to twinky.

For oldest, I had to really think. I almost always play adults, so I thought oldest would be a tie between a few of them. Jacob (a short term leader of Team Rocket), I seem to remember he had grey in his hair. Jesse (leader of a biker gang) was an older adult and had arthritis. Then I remembered! C. Shell! (And yes, that name was supposed to be punny.) Ahhh, C. Shell, my outlet on PokeMUSH. He was a grumpy, kid-hating old man -- I was able to say everything I wanted to the playerbase through him. "You all suck! Go away! Leave me alone! And get the hell off my lawn!"

Youngest and oldest creation-wise... I guess Keen/Kianlar of WoW RP is my newest character, though he's more than a year old. Oldest would be covered by yesterday's "first character" question, so I'll say "oldest still played character", which would be Haken of WoW RP.

List of all 30 questions here.

4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!

My very first character wouldn't make for much of a story. Before the Internet existed, people "RPed" by mail, but it wasn't much like the RP we have today. I joined a RP group, but I was young and didn't write well, so while I was paying membership dues, I never got to take part in anything. (Dues were collected to cover the cost of putting out the fanzines with all the RP/stories in them.) The theme was half-people half-animal things in space. ("Furry" came into existence after the Internet did, so it wasn't a furry group.) I was a half-cougar thing named Taja Rak'ah.

My first online RPing is the more interesting embarrassing story. It was on a Lion King MUCK (online text-based game). I played an eeeeevvvvvilll cheetah. She didn't have much of a character, other than that she was evil. I made every RP mistake in the book. Everything from being unable to type/spell to horrible twinking things. For example, I wanted to kill the king and queen's cubs, so I waited for them to log off so I could do it without them getting in the way. People argued with me, telling me that wasn't right, and I actually argued back.

That game was also my first experience with TS (cyber, ERPing, pick the term you know). It's funny that my opinion on TSing has remained the same since then: Generally, after the first couple times of doing it, I get amazingly bored with RPing it out. Tab A, slot B. zzz (There are exceptions to that, with some people it does stay interesting RP!) At the time, I hadn't understood why the guy playing my cheetah-mate was so interested in doing it nonstop and trying to keep me interested in it...

Remember how I said that so long as the food I cook didn't make me sick I wouldn't grade it an F? Last night's chicken: F! So, as I was sick in the bathroom much of the night and feel like crap now, I'm going to skip exercising this morning and so have time to post this instead. (The chicken was white through, and I'm seriously careful about not having anything that touches raw chicken touch anything else, so I have no idea what happened.)

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3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you’re writing about fictional places)?

Ugh. Names are the hardest part of creating anything for me. I totally suck at it. But sometimes I cheat! I've been Thistle or Thistle-Chaser online for years, so when I needed to name my character in FFXI, I went with Thistle. I didn't get off so easy in WoW, as Thistle was taken. In that case, I made up something. "Okay, start with Th- like in Thistle, then after that..." and I tried out random sounds until I got Thess, and that sounded enough like it could be a name that I went for it. (When Thess changed servers for the first time, somehow Thess was already taken on the new one, so I figured Thester sounded enough like Thess... turns out I hated that name endlessly. When he switched once last time, he got an IC name and became Crowfeathers, which I love.)

Once, where I needed normal people-names (on GarouMUSH) I used a phone book. (It was so long ago we still had/used phone books!) Flipped trough it until I found a first name I liked, then a last name. In later years, I tried using baby name websites, but I never found ones I liked through them.

Rrr, this was a boring question. Oh well, tomorrow's will be better totally embarrassing!

List of all 30 questions here.

Warning: While I wouldn't call this post NWS, it involves some serious subject matter, including rape and torture. If those are trigger issues for you, please don't click the cut.

2. Tell us about one scene between your characters that you’ve never written or told anyone about before! Serious or not.

( A tale of rape, torture, and mindfuckery back here... No graphic details. )

I switched question 2 and 22 around. As soon as I read 22, I knew I wanted to write about this and it wouldn't get out of my head, so I'll answer 2 on the 22nd day instead.

List of all 30 questions here.

Rereading this, I worry a bit about posting it. I hope no one thinks me (more of) a freak because I enjoyed RPing that. RP is a safe way to explore things you'd never do in RL.

I happened across a writing meme, and upon reading through the questions, I noticed that most of them could easily be applied to RP as well. I love talking about RP, so I'm going to take part in this one!

Day one: 1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with and why.

Starting out with a hard question! To pick just one... I'm debating between PokeMUSH and FFXI RP, but I think I have to go with PokeMUSH because it was mine, my baby. The fact that we could take one element of Pokemon (Team Rocket), and turn it from the joke it was in the cartoon to serious, mature, deadly, adult RP made me so proud and happy.

We did that with more than Team Rocket though. That we could take the whole Pokemon theme and make it adult, make characters die, treat things realistically (pokemon breeding, etc). In my opinion, we took the canon and made it a whole lot better.

In a way, FFXI RP wasn't really all that different though. One other person and I RPed through IM. We did a ton of world building, had a stable of NPCs to call from, etc. Unlike Pokemon, the FFXI theme was already nicely mature and dark, we just expanded within it.

PokeMUSH wins in the end though, for multiple reasons including the pool of other people to RP with was bigger, and I'm still in contact with so many of you guys all these years later. <3

( 30 questions for 30 days back here. )

This is really fun! I can't wait to post again tomorrow. :D I might not do 30 days in a row, but I do hope to get through the whole list without losing track of this project.