Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Now and then I get embarrassingly angry on WoW. I asked the GMs for another name to be freed, and this time I had less hope of it being approved. (Someone on Alliance had it, I could friend it.) Still, it was under level 10, so I asked.

Three days later, I got a reply. They freed it, with the usual "it's free for anyone, so use it fast if you want it" message. Logged off, tried to make it... it was already taken. I seriously pondered deleting my account then and there. This was yet another example of people who work full time jobs losing out on stuff and being behind those who can play 24/7. (Which, really, is a stupid thing to be mad about. I get bored playing WoW as much as I do! I don't want to play it all day and all night... but try to make me remember that when I lose out on something due to work.)

Anyway, stewing and fuming and pondering quitting, I tried over and over to get the name. Who knows what I was expecting (the person who got it to change their mind within the hour and delete?), but, amazingly, on the fifth try I got it. I have no idea what happened, I can't imagine the GM sending the reply before the name was finished being released...

So anyway, now I have Keen! Kianlar tells everyone his name is Keen, not one single person ICly knows his real name, plus he pretends to be a warrior, so I thought it would be good to have Keen the warrior (come Cata anyway, he's a belf). Leveled him to 10 tonight, so hopefully now the name is safely mine.

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18. Favorite antagonist and why!

Getting tired of this meme. I should stop and pick it up at some future date. zzz

This answer will be odd, as I can't remember the character's name. On GarouMUSH, I played a serial rapist/murderer. More than that the character was oddles of fun to play, it was a great example of how well working with a staffer could work. I approached the wizard with my idea (I'm pretty sure it was accipiter/Tiski(sp?) ). He had me do an app that was half-character, half-TP. Once approved, he helped me by posting things (so it wouldn't be under my character's name), and keeping me reasonable ("no, you can't kill every night, he would have been caught by now if he killed that quickly...").

I knew going in that the character would die, it was how I wanted the story to end and also was a condition of the app being approved. It actually happened a little sooner than I wanted, but still, it made for some amusing times and I really enjoyed playing whatever his name was.

List of all 30 questions here.

17. Favorite protagonist and why!

Seems like I play a lot of good, innocent characters, even though I find bad guys more interesting. And the most good, most innocent of them all is also today's answer: Thistle, of FFXI RP (on-FFXI as well as the FF MUX, they were the same character just in different time periods). He was just so happy and positive, and not a scheming bone in his body. Very much the believer in law and order, it's strange that he ended up with the Corsairs (pirates) instead of the Immortals (who protect and defend the city).

Doing this meme makes me feel certain I'm forgetting RP characters somewhere... my answers keep centering around the same handful of them.

Lion King MUCK
(TerraFro...something or other, a MU* I helped create, didn't last long)
GarouMUSH
PokeMUSH
FFXI
(One-on-one FFXI RP over IM)
FF MUX
WoW
(One-on-one WoW RP over IM)

I've been RPing online for an embarrassingly many number of years, there has to be a heck of a lot more games than that. Work, brain!

List of all 30 questions here.

Night at the Museum 2 is a darned cute movie. I very much enjoyed the first one, so it doesn't surprise me that I like the second. Ever since I was a little kid, I've loved the thought that things in the museum could come alive when people weren't around.

I'm still watching West Wing, so that NatM2 takes place at the Smithsonian in Washington DC gave me all sorts of Ideas. What a crossover that would be! The serious West Wing characters having to deal with all the stuff from the museums coming to life and running around Washington... Dinosaurs, wild animals, historical figures, even statues coming to life!

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15. Midway question! Tell us about a writer you admire, whether professional or not!

I hate questions like this, and I always refuse to answer them. Problem is, if you name one writer/RPer/whatever that you admire, you're not naming all the others. I hate the idea of making all the others feel like they're not good enough to be named, so I'm just going to skip this one.

16. Do you write romantic relationships? How do you do with those, and how "far" are you willing to go in your writing? ;)

I think anyone who has been reading my answers thus far would already know the answer to this one! Yes, I write them.

How far I'm willing to go? "All the way" is fine with me. Or fading to black before the first kiss is fine. Generally I do whatever the person I'm RPing with is comfortable with (since I'm okay with either). There are positives and negatives to each (which I think I might have wrote about once already, so I'll be brief). The positives about going all the way is it can be exciting, interesting RP, and it always surprises me how much character development can actually happen during sex. The positives to fading to black is that I find detailed sex scenes with the same person sometimes can grow boring and redundant (tab A, slot B, repeat nightly), and that they can take hours to write... zzzz.

On the first part of the question, how I do with them, I'd hope fine. I enjoy RPing relationships (enjoy it a heck of a lot). I've had a lot of practice with it. Hopefully I handle them realistically!

List of all 30 questions here.

Why, oh why, do people use cornflakes as breadcrumbs? I used my last chicken breast from the pack I bought last week (frozen until today), and made it in a different way. Cut into strips, stuck in buttermilk for an hour, then breaded in cornflake crumbs and various spices.

The chicken itself, outside of the coating, was good. (HOLY COW, I love buttermilk! It smelled SO GOOD! I should have tasted some plain, but I didn't think of that until it was in the bowl with raw chicken in it.) However, the chicken with coating tasted like cornflakes. Nothing else, just cornflakes. Why would anyone want food that tastes like cornflakes? (Other than breakfast cereals...)

Turning the chicken tenders into chicken parm improved them enough that I ate this one serving, but I'm not sure if I'm going to eat the rest.

When I try again, I'm going to do this same thing but with plain breadcrumbs.

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14. How do you map out locations, if needed? Do you have any to show us?

Generally, if I need to keep track of places in a RP scene, I'll make a little sketch with boxes and circles and lines to give me a rough idea of how things are. This is pretty rare though, because none of the RP I've been in have been so exact about things. You could pose "Joe leaves his quarters and strolls off to the mess" or something like that.

PokeMUSH was an exception to that, as it was a world that we needed everyone to see in the same way. Funny thing is, this is the only map I remembered making. However, when I went looking for that, I found all sorts of maps I've made for PokeMUSH! Tiny little ones like:

To... the big complex one I can't find now. I'm pretty sure I made one like this one, but when you clicked on each location you'd get a popup of what pokemon could be caught there...

So, all in all, few to no maps in my personal RP. I don't feel the need to know exactly where things are and where X is in relation to Y.

List of all 30 questions here.

Okay, Heinz folks, I get it, you're sorry. Email yesterday (form letter), long voice message yesterday, and now today I got a LONG personal email. This is so very, very not what I expected from a company! And now they're going to send me coupons too, woo. (Not that I ever use coupons, but maybe if they're good enough I'll remember to.)

Posting about FFXI RP so much is doing bad things to my head. I looked through my hundreds of FFXI screenshots again and I'm really missing the game. I won't go back, it'd be pointless to, not to mention I have zero time for another MMO, but... This screenshot, with the banner/flags, totally killed me. Man did I love those two! The one on the right especially!

Sigh. FFXI really beats WoW on the armor, coloring, buildings/cities... Everything's so nice and reasonable and not 94751284534758490350 different BRIGHT contrasting colors and shoulderpads 100 feet wide...

That screenshot I linked caught so many nice things in my house, too. Sigh. Stupid FFXI, get out of my head again! Life is easier when I'm not missing you.

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13. What’s your favorite culture to write, fictional or not?

That's kinda like yesterday's question (best example of world building), though I suppose I could have taken yesterday's honorable mention and used it as the answer here...

*waves hands* So pretend that's the answer here! FFXI, while not the biggest world building, was my favorite culture. We couldn't take credit for the original idea, but we sure did expand on it a lot.

That feels like a cop-out answer, but I'm sure I'll make up for it by writing some overly long answer to a future question. My head isn't on writing a post, it's off in the reef, knee-deep in cold fog, wrecks of ships all around, snake-women waiting at every turn to kill you. But, at the end, loved ones wait for you at home. (Nevermind that's Sandy in the background, not some fictional Corsair base in the reef!)

List of all 30 questions here.

Edit: Huh! I just noticed some of those screenshots are exactly three years old. They were taken on 8-6-07.

Last night I was microwaving something for dinner, so I checked the directions first. "...b4 you put it in the oven..." "b4", they actually used "b4" instead of "before", in directions, on a big-name product.

For only the second time in my life, I called the 1-800 number on a product. (First time was when I found a bug in my OJ.) Unfortunately the place was closed already, so I found the website and sent an email. They replied today... yay form letter.

"I'm pleased to know you've tried our T.G.I. Friday's Frozen Snacks but very sorry you were not completely satisfied. We strive to make each item the best available at retail markets. I will forward your comments to our distributor, Heinz and Heinz Frozen Food Company for consideration."

This better not become a trend...

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12. In what story did you feel you did the best job of world building? Any side-notes on it you'd like to share?

I think that would have to be PokeMUSH, if for no other reason than the size and the amount of work that went into it. How pokeballs worked, PokeForce, the cops of the Pokemon world, detailed chart on when different pokemon could breed... if it exists in a world, we tried to cover it. (Note: Catlove as a whole seems slow today, it's not just that the PokeMUSH pages are old or anything.)

It's funny, but even today that breeding chart makes me happy. I have such a love of charts, spreadsheets, being organized, tracking changes. I have no idea where it comes from, but I'm always filled with glee when I can use spreadsheets in my personal life. Tracking the wants, haves, and points of our FFXI Assault static was the most fun in FFXI I had for months. There may be something wrong with me!

While PokeMUSH was the best world building, honorable mention needs to be made for FFXI RPing. We took what I considered the best part of the best expansion (the Corsair/Immortal struggle of ToAU expansion) and made it real, fully fleshed it out. We made the battles, both the large ones and the personal ones, seem real. Before that RP, I never, ever empathized with "terrorists", with the little people fighting the overpowering nation in the only ways they could. Now it's different, now I understand what it feels like to be not just fighting for your life, but for the lives of your remaining friends and family, your people, against those who want to erase you from the face of the planet.

That's one of the many wonderful things about RP, how it expands your horizons and your points of view. The FFXI RP was one of those "RP every waking moment, 24/7, for months on end" times, so I really feel like I experienced that battle, the war, the struggles and hardships not just to survive fights, but to survive in other ways -- how do you feed your family when you can't just go out and get a job? How do you raise children when you'd be shot on sight and you know they'd be placed with the enemy's families to be raised as one of them "for their own good"? How do you get through each day not knowing if this would be the day the person you love got killed? Or worse, captured, when capture means tortured with zero chance of rescue?

I could babble on endlessly about that. RP really is just a wonderful, amazing thing.

List of all 30 questions here.

Another pre-work post! I swear, I've been not exercising more than I've been exercising lately. If I'm not too exhausted to move (must be something going on with my blood sugar, there's no way being too tired to lift your head off the desk can be normal), I'm sick (stupid stomach! Food is our friend! Stop being sick when I eat!). No worries, those two things aren't related; my stomach isn't the only thing that's stupid, I ate poorly last night. My own fault my stomach isn't happy today.

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11. Who is your favorite character to write? Least favorite?

Whichever character I'm playing at the moment. (In this case, Haken!) I can only keep one character's voice in my head at a time (which is why Keen hasn't gotten back IC yet, no matter how much I want him to), so whichever character I'm currently playing is my favorite. Rare exception to this would be when I was tired of the character (when the story was done or the voice was gone) and I just haven't yet gotten that character out of RP yet. (The last days Keen was IC, when he was nothing but a raging fel-junkie, were like this. Miserable to play him, zero fun, but he still had IC ties that had to be dealt with.)

Least favorite... I know there were some NPCs I didn't like playing back in PokeMUSH days. Whoever my breeder NPC was, some woman dealing with fire types. C. Shell after he had to become nicer because eventually no PCs would come trade when he was on duty. And... I can't remember if it was PokeMUSH or somewhere else, but once I had a male character some female character lusted after (for no reason I could tell), and I hated logging him on because I had to deal with her. (Maybe it was Sly and fealubryne! Ha ha, joking! :D )


List of all 30 questions here.

9. How do you get ideas for your characters? Describe the process of creating them.

Used to be, back in PokeMUSH days, I was a big believer in applications (and thus getting a complex personality and full background down on paper before you start) for RP... and, in some respects, I still am. However, character creation is no longer one of those reasons. (Quality control? Still a big yes on that one. Nothing like applications to weed out the sucky people.) Nowadays, I like the process to be... some word I can't think of at the moment. Natural. Evolving. Abstract? Loose. Just starting with the vaguest idea ("grumpy death knight", "light-hearted rogue", "druid stuck in bear form"), and let the character grow and develop through RPing with others.

Though, thinking back... I wonder if I was really a believer in apps in PokeMUSH days or if I just wanted them for quality control. (Or, perhaps, was a believer in them for everyone but me.) Sly started as an NPC, I played him for a week or two before applying to turn him into a PC. It worked really well learning his character through RP before writing his app.

One of the big things that stops me from returning to MU*s is the application process. It seems like too much work to write one (I know I can RP! I know I can make good characters! Why should I have to prove it to others? I just want to RP!), but more than that, it seems too hard to come up with the background and full personality until I've RPed the character enough to learn it. (However, that being said, I know just how important applications are to keep up quality. It's one of the big, big, big issues with WoW RP. I'd never argue for games to stop requiring them.)

List of all 30 questions here.

8. What's your favorite genre to write? To read?

Serious, dark, "deadly" stuff. I generally don't enjoy light, fluffy RP, or that "crack" RPing. Gimme torture! Pain! Betrayal! Character death! Darkness! Doom and gloom!

Realism is very important to me as well. (See also: PokeMUSH!) This can sometimes get me into trouble though: Last week, a person on WoW told me he wasn't comfortable RPing with with me and wouldn't anymore. This made me go all o.O . (I'm not really comfortable saying this, but since it applies to the story: I'm one of the better RPers in WoW, so for someone to not want to play with me was just extra boggling.) His reasoning was that my character was too far from lore. My character is a death knight *points at icon*. In my opinion, every DK cannot have the same background. Not only cannot, should not! The idea that every IC character has done the exact same quests and have the exact same experience... thousands of people... Sorry, if that makes me a lore-breaker, so be it, but that just doesn't work for me. (However, I can understand someone not liking other people stretching lore. One of the many, many, many issues with WoW RP is that there's no staff to set how things should be.)

There are exceptions to my dislike of lighter stuff: I love snuggle-wuggle cuddling between characters in love. Silly little days at home doing nothing Earth-shattering. Just the little things.

Man, the above two paragraphs took me over three hours to write, I kept getting interrupted. Hope they read smoother than that!

Looking ahead, Tuesday's question is going to be fun! I'll just need time to write it from home; hermaphrodite elves in space might not be very work safe.

List of all 30 questions here.

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In WoW news: Almost halfway through honored on Neitherwing rep! 5K/12K! Unfortunately the second half will go slower, as I had a bunch of one-time quests I could do once I hit honored. Plus, I beat almost all of the races! I think the final one is beyond my abilities, but I beat all the other ones! Woot!



Our second one dropped, almost one week after the first one. I think we only got one pet during that time too? Maybe none, but I think one. Now we're done with H-MGT!

6. Where are you most comfortable writing? At what time of day? Computer or good ol’ pen and paper?
7. Do you listen to music while you write? What kind? Are there any songs you like to relate/apply to your characters?

Question six is one of the questions that doesn't fit quite well with RP, and question seven has a really short answer, so I'm going to do both in one day to make this whole 30 days of meme a little less spammy.

Where? At my desk. My computer is a desktop, so... kind of limited there.
What time of day? Nowadays, it's after work. When life was different (couple years back) and I was RPing every waking hour, I did it both during and after work.
Computer/pen and paper? Since it's online with other online people...

On music: NO NO NO NO NO. I like silence or as close to silence as possible when I RP. No music, no TV, nothing to pull me out of the IC world and into the RL one. When the RP is good, I don't even do stuff in another window, and no matter if the RP is good or not, I generally dislike chatting OOC during it. Staying in the character's headspace is what makes RP so enjoyable to me.

No songs applying to characters, I'm not really a music person in general.

Tomorrow should be more interesting!

List of all 30 questions here.