Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Car update: Made an offer at 9 AM. Just now (1 PM) got a reply back from the salesguy saying he'd bring it to his manager to check. It's possible he just got in, but he's surprisingly slow to reply back to emails. (Once one went two days without a reply and I had to poke him again for a response.) He seems a really nice guy though, so I'd like to keep the sale going to him so long as he doesn't make it too hard. (He's an older fellow of Asian descent. He offered his business card to me with both hands (I love that!), and bowed to me. Made me feel both embarrassed and special.)

RP: I've not RPed in weeks. Probably months by this point. I think part of it is my job (I do writing and editing all day, so when I get home I don't really want to do more of it). I have very little interest in WoW RP, which also likely adds into it.

On that last point, I joined rp_me. Maybe a one-on-one partner in some new theme would help spark something? Seems not though. There have been a few people who have interested me, but not enough to contact them.

That being said, the comm is still a really interesting place. Seeing what other RPers want or don't want. "Smut" (ERP, tinysex -- whatever you want to call it, RPing out sex) is an interesting topic to read what people want. Today was the first time I saw someone post "Must enjoy writing graphic smut when the story calls for it, fade to black is a big NO" (paired with a requirement: "Aren't creepy (if you ask me what my characters' breast sizes are, we're done)" from the same person).

Willingness (or lack thereof) to fade to black is an interesting thing. Long time back, I hated fading, but nowadays I think I'd rather fade. If I RPed. Which I don't. So it's a moot point. :P Anyway, if you're looking for RP or just interested in seeing current RP trends, I recommend rp_me.

Sorry for the IC post! Feel free to skip. :) I needed a place where I could write something longer than in-game mail would permit.

( An IC report. )

For everyone else, here's a line from the scene:

[Name] says: If you make another remark about the Horde being lower than the elves, I'm going to tear out your throat and dress the whole sea with your blood, then stuff the hole in your penis with dynamite and light it on fire...

"stuff the hole in your penis". How's that for an awkward insult!

Gah, biggest let down ever. I saw a fellow with an interesting RSP and his 'current' setting stated he was looking for death knights for a plot and so I went all EEE! It could be interesting!

I spent the whole day trying to RP with him, but again and again he logged on and then idled out. Eventually, later than I usually start RPing, I caught him!

Starting random RP with someone is often hard, but in this case I had a good opening. He was a death knight, walking around in "street clothing" (no armor), and no rune blade! So Haken stomped up, frowned, and demanded to know where his blade was. (For non-WoW folks, a DK's blade is basically their soul.)

The guy frowned back at him, but told him he could earn the right to know the secret of not being bound to a runeblade. (Yes, at this point I could have run away, but a wacky RP idea can work well in the hands of a good RPer, so I'm willing to give odd ideas a chance.)

Turns out he wanted Haken to earn the right by fighting him, but that he has been a former Scourge Lord and Haken was one step above canon fodder... On top of that, my time was going short, so I asked if we could keep the fight brief.

Oddly, the guy was still in just cloth clothing. Then he posted. Somehow he made "magic snow" fall all around him, which formed into his armor and an axe as big as him. o.O

The fight went downhill from there. His fighting was straight out of a DBZ ep. At one point, the two were three paces apart. The guy comes running at Haken, and in the space of those three paces, makes a ghoul arm pop out of the ground. He stepped into the hand and launched himself at Haken, intending to knee him in the face.

Um, hello? A ghoul arm is basically just the bones. A man in, um, magic armor, carrying a massive axe, stepping into a ghoul's hand will break the bones. It is not a springboard that would permit him to launch himself into the air high enough to knee someone's face!

But whatever, fight done in two post rounds. And so, by losing the fight, Haken earned the right to hear about the secret. (Buh?)

This is where things got good (bad). There had been a living blood elf woman who had been tagging along. He waved her over and pulled up her sleeves, showing Haken the runes along her arms. Haken was all WTF MAN, putting your soul into a living person instead of a blade is S-T-U-P-I-D. The guy went on to explain that his soul was scattered all across "the Azeroth" in various objects. Harry Potter/Horcruxes, anyone?

Then it got even better (worse). All this time, he's rubbing the woman, standing right up behind her, rubbing her all over, as he explains to Haken how the he can use the runes to command and control her. (She attempted to pull away at one point, but he wouldn't let her go.) I could too easily guess where he was going with that, but he laid it out further anyway: He told Haken that Haken could get his emotions back (ummmm, he has emotions now...) if he found a living elf to "coexist" with.

Luckily I had IC reason to leave at that point (hello batshit insane knight), and I was OOCly out of time.

Edit: Also! Sorry for slow reply on comments! I suck at keeping up with them over the weekend, I always fall behind on Saturday and Sunday, then catch up on Monday.

I'm missing a basic life skill and I don't know how to go about getting it. (Or maybe no one has it and I just think everyone does.)

How do you know when it's okay to get angry? How do you know how much anger is okay in response to a situation?

I have confrontation issues, and they're getting worse as I get older. The latest example: My bathtub doesn't drain. Even though I live in an apartment, I always start by using Draino. Usually this fixes the issue, but this time it did not.

A week ago, I emailed the apartment owner (he fired the manager to save money). No reply from him.
Two days later, the complex handyman showed up, but said he couldn't do it that day and we arranged a time for the next day.
The next day, he did not show up at all.
I emailed the owner, letting him know that. No reply.
Four days passed, no reply, no handyman. I'm still standing in ankle-deep water each time I shower, takes hours to drain.
Tonight I sent off another email. I gave him the above summary and closed with "When will someone be coming? I'm getting tired of waiting day after day, with no word of when or if someone will show up."

But in this situation and others like it, I question myself endlessly. Do I have a right to be angry? (In this case I'd say so. Especially since he's been raising our rent every other month for six months...) It's not a life or death issue though, so...

How in the world do people learn when it's okay to be angry and how angry is appropriate? Seems like something little kids should learn. How did I miss learning?

In unrelated news: I think I ate nothing but carbs today. D: I went to the farmer's market and got the most wonderful carbs things. Corn on the cob that was as sweet as candy. I've never had corn that sweet before! AMAZING.

Unfortunately the strawberries I got weren't very good. Booths always get me with samples though, I feel like if I take a sample, I really should buy from them, which is just totally wrong.

I bought bread, which is something I never do at the farmer's market. Mmm, fresh baked rolls. Silly me bought way too many though. "Oh? It's okay to buy bread this week? THEN I WANT ALL OF IT GIMME!". I wonder if rolls freeze? I'm going to have to try that.

RP: As in, I RPed! Finally, eee! It's not a deadline at all, but I had a goal of going back to RP by the end of the month. I had a long scene with the wonderful prettyredeyes, and after that came about a reason for further RP: Thistle's going to throw himself into the world of sex, ha ha! (Edit: I suspect that sentence sounds so wrong...) He's got old, outdated opinions about sexuality in his head, and he has to figure out how to get them changed. I suspect it will make for some mighty amusing RP!

One day I'll make a WoW post, but by then I'll likely forget all the things I wanted to post about. :P I guess I should do it now:
- Crossed the 90K HK mark, but decided no rush to do the last 10K before MoP, since after MoP I could get XP for BGs as well.
- Finished the Hellscream's Reach rep (with mostly just TBs, I only did three or four days of dailies), got my ghost wolf mount. YAY YAY YAY I love that mount so much but never thought I'd get it.
- I now own nearly every heirloom in the game, JP and honor both. I have honor coming out of my ears and nothing else to spend it on.
- I'm strongly considering getting a second WoW account even though I REALLY don't want to. (I know, I know, so why am I considering it?) It's just that it would be so handy, would make making money easier, I could get a RAF mount, and I have 10/10 85s on my first account, so there's no use for all those heirlooms. And more alts = more goldmaking!

Back to work tomorrow, blah. I wish I had taken more days off post-cruise, but I was already using so many of them for that...

I also wish I wasn't still sick. During the day I'm somewhat okay (still coughing lots), but I haven't gotten more than a couple broken hours each night for the past while -- whenever I'm horizontal, my chest and throat fill up with stuff and I feel like I'm drowning. I'm not sure when/if I should go to the doctor. It's been about eight days of coughing/chest clogged. I don't feel sick at all, other than that (and low energy).

"Tell me more about your problems."


But that being said, I'm still SO SO SO HAPPY. Being home is such a joy. My desk. My chair. My TV (with real shows on it!). My bathroom is such a wonderful thing! (I didn't write about how TINY the shower on the cruise ship was.) I walk through my apartment and I'm just so happy.

I saw The Avengers yesterday and liked it a lot. I wish it had had more interaction and less action (the scenes with the guys just talking were my favorite ones, I could have done without all the battle scenes). I'm poking about at fics now, but haven't found anything I really like yet.

Ellie New Cat has 5 fewer teeth. She has a couple of viruses in her mouth and they're causing her teeth to become loose and rot. D: She's only two years old! Hopefully we can fix this before she loses any more. (And amusingly, fewer teeth do nothing to stop her efforts to steal things. She's such a bold thief! She tries to take the pen right out of my hand and items right next to me...)

I've not RPed in forever, so I pushed myself to try to find some tonight. I did, and it was good! Though apparently it was someone Thistle yelled at over how he dressed and I didn't OOCly remember it at all. Oops. I have to make more effort to get to SMC in the future. I really do like RPing, I just feel so lazy about finding it (and everything else).

I've spent most of my on-WoW time PvPing. I live in TB (or at least as much as the queue permits me to). Clove has 4,900 HKs now, of the 20K I need to hit 100K on my account. The problem is honor. As in, I have too much of it. I converted it to 4K of JP and bought a heirloom weapon I don't need (I have 10 85 alts!). I know you can trade honor for some items, but the rate per item is so bad I'd rather buy heirlooms I'll likely never need.

I've not been RPing much in the last week or so. RL has been stressful and it was hard to think about IC stuff. (Plus IC Twitter is really good at scratching the RP itch.) So today I went to SMC and made an effort. Luckily I found someone I knew right away, and we had a nice little scene. When it ended and I turned around, I ran into a woman whose RP 'current' setting read that she's "now bi" and "she's wearing no pants". Usually I'd ignore someone like that, but the previous scene hadn't been very long, so I posted at Little Miss No Pants...

( Pants are not complicated. People wear pants. You should be wearing pants. (RP log back here!) )

For bad, pointless RP, that was surprisingly entertaining.

I didn't realize how bad I was at RPing Thistle's IC garden. My RL one is being visited by the Plagues of Egypt. Wait, there was a Plague of Powdery Mildews, right?

Yesterday I went out to check and see how my plants were doing in our uncharacteristic rain. They're under an overhang, so they don't get rained on directly, but they were still nice and damp so I was happy. Until I noticed the rosemary looked like it had been snowed on. Hm.

Google tells me it's likely Powdery Mildew, a common plant disease. If this were a flower or something, I'd be less upset, but it's on a herb I'd like to one day eat! And will it spread to the others? (Survey says... YEP!) I thought about digging up and throwing out the rosemary, since only it had signs, but it was so badly covered with the stuff that I figured the spores must have spread already.

Sigh. Growing plants is way too much trouble. Going into this, I thought my worst trouble might be squirrels eating things. Now I have bugs and mold and blah. Thistle's IC garden grew fine in RP! :P

Speaking of RP, Penny is four months old now. For those playing at home, that's this big:

She'd be looking all grown up!

And I haven't been RPing at all lately, which has me very depressed. Ore, ore, ore, ore. All I do in game anymore is make money. I spent 6 hours yesterday on it, 8 hours each night before that, and even more over the weekend. I finally crossed the million gold mark (again), but it's at a high cost. I meant to take a break and RP last night... but then a ton of cheap ore got listed at the AH. When I hit a million last night I said that would be the end of my ore buying... then this morning there were 150 seriously cheap stacks up. Sigh. I'm just going to move my buy price lower. I'll only deal with the cheapest of cheap ores. I will take my free time back! ...but there's so much money to be made.

Ellie New Cat had a most traumatic trip to the vet today. It started with having to get her into her new carrying case. Ellie and I disagree on the spiffiness of the case. I think it's a great, good looking case, plenty big enough for her to turn around in, good quality, unlikely to let her escape. She thinks it's a death trap.

But I planned ahead! For the last ten days, I've been tossing treats into it for her. She goes in to get the treat. My cunning plan was to throw a treat in and close it behind her, but cats can be mighty slippery when they're trying to escape, and she got out before I could get it closed. I ended up having to corner her in the bathroom and physically manhandle her into it. D: There goes the last year of trust-building!

She had a horrible time at the vet, I'm afraid. First time I've ever heard her hiss. She was terrified. My vet is a very, very patient lady.

But! The bright side of the story is Ellie seems to have mostly recovered. It's only been a couple hours and she's back to looking for pats. We have lost some ground (she has zero interest in letting me pick her up anymore), but she does come to me, so that's something.

RP: Thistle has a wolf puppy, and I kind of lost track of how old she is *cough*, so I looked it up. 13 weeks! So of course I had to google what a 13 week/three month old wolf puppy would look like. Still a puppy, but starting to look like a wolf! This storyline makes me want a dog, even though I'm not a dog person at all.

Very, very oddly, I've had almost no RP in the last week, and I don't mind at all. (What's wrong with me?!) I had one scene last night, because I felt like I should more than because I wanted to, so unsurprisingly it felt forced. Part of it is that IC Twitter somewhat satisfies the itch, but part of it is that I'm stressed/tired/distracted with RL work. Hopefully that'll get better soon.

I hatched such a plan tonight. I couldn't find RP, for the first night in forever. (I so jinxed myself last night writing about how I find it every night now!) But SMC was full of people! People in walk mode, people RPing, there's no reason why I couldn't RP, too!

So I decided to make a game of it. I'd find the worst RSP I could and RP with that person. It'd be amusing! Fun!

My first option was a "freed slave" orc woman, but she had no RSP at all, so I looked for someone better. Surprisingly, I couldn't find anyone with a really bad one, so I settled for a level 71 DK whose whole RSP was "(NOT A DEATH KNIGHT!)". Bonus! RP plus I could find out what he was as well!

Unsurprisingly, it didn't go as planned. He didn't write very well (not awful, but bad enough that I felt like I was wasting my time), and he didn't pick up on my hints asking what the heck he was. (I didn't find out anything other than that he was a living elf.) Then his wife showed up. A death knight! Monday night shall now be known as necrophilia night, eh? Thistle argued with them that that was wrong, they kind of just :|'ed at him and said "You don't understand". Thistle left.

Both had their birthplace listed as "the shadowrealm", so I was hoping for a more interesting story.

So, on the plus side, I got RP. On the minus, the scene was both short and not very good. I don't think I'm going to give up on this plan, though I'm not going to use it very often. Hopefully I won't need to. Hopefully I'll be able to find more good RP soon.

Videos! The first one comes from peppygrowlithe:

The 'Three Little Pigs' story as seen through social media. Really cool and an interesting look at how those things work, how stories and information spread, what one little news story can start.

The second I spotted myself. A three and a half minute long seriously cool commercial:

It's more like a fantasy movie than a commercial. It took over two years to make, was filmed in 60 different locations, and had a giant staff. It's like a major movie studio movie, boiled down to three and a half minutes.

Edit: Make sure you hit the cog and hit the highest setting to see the best quality version of the second commercial. It's beautiful!

I love this icon. It's by that guy who does big batches of free icons. It really came out well. I love the little toes. I caught the artist's livestream a couple times, and it's really interesting to watch. Surprisingly, he works in traditional mediums -- all watercolors. Fast, too. Drawing and painting, he gets the whole thing done in maybe two minutes. I didn't even realize how simple the coloring is, until I watched him do it.

The icon is based on Ellie, who is doing much better now. Every time she has a serious... I don't know what to call it. Fear reaction, I guess. Every time she has one, it's like she turns a corner right after. After mauling my throat because she got scared at being picked up, suddenly she loves being in my arms. Against my shoulder, her head next to mine, my free hand patting her. So long as I remain standing up, she loves that. For some reason being held while I'm sitting doesn't make her happy and she wiggles to escape (and so I put her right down).

I had so much stuff I wanted to get done this weekend, but I got next to nothing finished. I didn't even get any reading done, which I was determined to do this weekend. Blah!

Included in the things I didn't do this weekend was finish my application for the RP on LJ game. I'm so close to being done! I just need two writing samples, that's easy! I can write! I wish I'd just sit down and do them, it's been a week or two now. I could be RPing there already!

I did poke my head into a MU*. The Lion King MUCK, to be exact. As far as I can tell, it looks quite alive. 15 folks online and seemingly active at 9:30 this morning. (Though I'll never fully trust that, I remember how we faked PokeMUSH looking active with staff alts...) I was surprised both at how much and how little I remembered. Apparently MUCKs don't have a +finger command, and I couldn't find the equivalent. But I was surprised at how many other commands I recalled, like news and globals. (Then I snickered at myself for being impressed that I remembered them. Not too many years ago I lived and breathed those commands... I WROTE those commands!)

I have zero ideas for a Lion King character (though I did note the name Thistle isn't taken yet, though I suspect it wouldn't be themely). I don't know if I intend to app there or on one of the other MU*s suggested in the previous post.

I tell you, RP on WoW is feast or famine. One week I got none at all, then this last week I had scheduled RP almost every night. Wacky! Heck, I got more RP today alone than I had that slow week!

So tired now. I have no idea at all how doing nothing all day could leave me tired, but it always does. I'm more tired on weekends than I am on work nights. I'd say I'm falling asleep at the keyboard, but Ellie keeps meowing for pats, so that keeps me awake.

If you like talking cats, pat your cat every time they meow! While it makes for a demanding kitty, Ellie is quite a bit more of a talker now than she was when I first got her. Louder as well, not just more frequent. Hopefully she'll keep talking more and more.

Word of the day is trundle, as in the verb, "trundled him off to school". It was used in RP tonight and made me stop and grin at it. I hadn't heard it in so long, but it's such a great word!

Edit: Tonight's Walking Dead. EEEEEEEEKKKKKK. What an opening! I love this show so much. :D