Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

That's Dissociative Imaginary Character Disorder, to translate the alphabet soup there. I found This test over on the soulbonding community, and I got this result:

You answered "yes" to 31 of 39 questions, with a total value of 34 points out of 42, making you 19.0% dicd pure (81.0% dicd corrupt).

According to the scoring guide, your dicd experience level is: Seriously DICD: it might be important to remember that those people in your head aren’t actually real. Remember RL? Interacting with real people is occasionally beneficial. In any case, you can’t let the characters forget who’s in charge, or they’ll walk all over you. Maintain your authority, or you’ll never have any peace!

Some of the questions were waaay too applicable:

--Have you ever had a character listen to music/read a book/watch a show with you and comment on it? Have you ever been unable to continue listening to a song/reading a book/watching a show because you couldn’t concentrate with the snarking going on? Happens all the time when I'm watching "Supernatural", and Constantine kibitzes on the Winchester Brothers' techniques.

--Have you ever had a character name themself? This was how I found out Flood has a first name.

--Have you ever written a dialogue between yourself and a character in an attempt to circumvent writer's block? My writing technique is very like David Gerrold's technique of imagining that you're sitting in some suitable environment with your character (ie. a restaurant or a club they might frequent, etc.), interviewing them, only now it's grown beyond that.

Still downloading MxO updates... I've only got 66 MB left to go, which is down from 120 last night. Maybe I'll actually be able to start gameplay Sunday night, after I've written my quota for the day. I just took some Airborne, which I *SWEAR* by, and I'm feeling better.

That and some laughter reading over the bug fixes on the MxO update page. Some of the classics begged to be shared, though that got certain members of the Houseparty chattering:

--Players can no longer use Hyper-Jump indoors (the Merv: "Zat should keep zem from marking up ze wallpaper..." Flood: ::Hyper-jumps up onto the wall and sort of crouches up in a corner, looking down at me:: "And that buys *me* an advantage over any ponces who try taking me on.")

--Bug causing players to be invisible to other players after activating an Ability (that doesn't impart invisibility) has been fixed. (Flood: "Good. You have no idea how utterly aggravating it was to be doling out a task to some human who'd suddenly disappear from sight, even though they were right in front of me a moment ago! I thought it meant my visual parameters had gotten infected.")

--Fixed an issue where a Level 20 mission pitted you against a Level 50 NPC (Me: "Whew... otherwise, it'd be my dumb luck to get up to Level 20 and get myself hosed by someone twice as strong as me." tM: "Why? Would you not prefer to have your mettle well tested?" Me: "I don't wanna be tested *that* thoroughly...")

--Inaccessible skyscraper door has been fixed. (Flood: "That would be a nuisance beyond all tolerance, and I'm glad they did something about that felching thing." Me: "Why do I have this funny feeling you know more than you care to about that door?" Flood: ::Sipping his mimosa, ignores me::)

--Interior sign for The Vault is no longer invisible (Me/Flood, almost simulataneously: "What good is an invisible sign??")

--Bug causing locked doors to appear to be open has been fixed (Flood: "That should give the raggamuffins something to think about when they're poking around where they shouldn't...")

--Missing "l" returned to the Pillsen Stairwalk map label (Flood: "A map is only useful if it's accurate. What imbecile released that thing with a typo like that?!")

--Bug causing players to walk on air after being hit with a Poison Knife while climbing has been fixed (Me: "Why is that funny?" Flood: "It's just your mental image of that event, m'dear.")

--Many invisible walls have been ficed throughout MegaCity (Flood: "Good. I was sick and tired of walking into the bloody things." Me: "Eh, I see how that could be a problem...")

--Swimming underwater in the Creston Heights park is now prohibited (Flood: "All right, how are you supposed to swim *above* the water?!" Me: "I bet a lot of people have tried that. A lot of people like the lamerz who ganged up on Stack, or the crowd that was making orangutang noises.")

--Interior sign for Zeitgeist now shows the correct floor (Flood: "Who makes these interior signs? They're probably going to be deleted for doing such a lousy job.")

--Floating air conditioners have been bolted down (My favorite of the lot.)

--Mini Guinness Lake has been paved over (Me: "Bzuh? How do you pave over a *lake*?!" Flood: "Oh come now, it's all code: they can do what they will with it." tM: ::Has a look on his face like he's considering doing what he will to Flood's code...::)

--Maintenance removed a trashcan from a revolving door in Downtown (Flood: "I figured that's what happened to that wretched thing. It was always getting in the way." Me: :Has mental image of Flood barking his shins/ripping the cuffs of his pants on a refractory trashcan...::)

--Bugs Bunny style dual elevator doors have been removed from the Slums buildings. (Me: ::Doesn't know what to make of that, but it sounds funny::)

--Players no longer sound like a cartoon dog when using the /r command (Me: ::Laughing hysterically:: Flood: "So that explains the dog-barking sounds I kept hearing...")

--Bookwyrm Intellectuals now spell their name correctly (Flood: "They must not be very intellectual if they can't even spell their name properly.")

--Cellphone mission objects that overflow onto the floor can now be picked up. (Me: ::Mental image of a "Fibber McGee" closet-load of stuff falling onto the floor, out of the mouthpiece of a cellphone, and a bunch of Redpills trying to pry said stuff off the floor:: Flood: "You have a strange mind, m'dear.")

--One and three chevron Nightmares have been brought down to more reasonable levels (a bit less "nightmarish") (Me: "Whew, that's a relief, but I'm not sure why." Flood: "You don't want to know until you have to...")

--Chateau Guards now have their mohawks properly rendered (Flood: ::Rolls eyes, shakes head:: "Not that it improved their appearances. I don't understand the impulse to style one's hair so that it looks like you have the head of a push broom attached to your scalp.")

--City Courthouse now appears in the correct location in the Atlas (Flood: "Which would have come in handy for me the other day when I was driving Downtown and I couldn't find the bloody place, even thought the dashboard navigational system indicated that I should have been right in front of the place.")

--The Archaologist has moved his digs to the Historical District (Ref: "I wondered where he'd gotten to..")

And I'm also creating a character LJ for Mercedes Hannaford, the Bluepill who's been hanging around my headspace lately. She and Ref went to high school and college together, which is all I know about Mercie. I think she's gonna be my MxO character...

I just finished reading "The Darkness Did Not" (Which I think should be titled "The Darkness Did Not Comprehend", since the current title just kinda leaves you hanging. As in "the darkness did not... do what?!"). I liked it, but parts of it had me wanting to punt the book across the room, namely, some of the unnecessary preaching about how suicides do not deserve to have Requiem Masses said for them or be buried in consecrated ground; and also some really maddening preaching about baptism of desire. I could be dead wrong, but I believe that if a person really, really wants to be with God and asks Him to let them into heaven at the moment of death -- whether they're baptised or not -- then He will take them in. We're all His children, and what truly loving father turns his child away from his home, for whatever reason? I don't think that *everyone* goes to heaven, since everyone has the ability to choose not to, if they cling to their sins and selfishness and refuse to let go. But I don't believe that the gate to heaven is quite so narrow as some people make it out to be.

That said... I loved the final confrontation between the priest aided by his cohorts, the Knights Tumblar (a group of chivalric Catholic laymen; why can't I find guys like them?!), and the vampire: spooky and funny at the same time; it could have been a little tighter if the writing had been less urplish, but it still worked. My other carp is that the book was a bit short on strong female characters (some of the few female characters seemed a little stereotyped, but that's just me), but I'm not going to go crazy about that, lest I sound like one of those fanbrats who write Tenth Member of the Fellowship of the Ring-fics or who give the Winchester Brothers a sister.

Which brings me to the wacky thought that's been pricking at my brain: I started out by playing the "Hm, if I was gonna make a movie of this, who would play what character?" game, but since I couldn't come up with anything beyond fantasy-casting a young Lambert Wilson as Pierre Bontemps (one of the Knights Tumblar and a guy I would love to marry, if I ever found him or someone like him), I started throwing other ideas around... Which lead me to the looney thought: "What would happen if Father Jean Baptist crossed paths with a certain snarky, chain-smoking demon hunter?" It's not impossible: they both deal with things that go bump in the night, they both live in Los Angeles, they're both Catholic, though one's a Traditionalist Catholic cop-turned-priest, and the other is a Walker Percy-esque "bad Catholic" who has a better idea of what's going on than a lot of so-called "good Catholics". I ran it past Constantine, who at first was adverse to the idea, but then he admitted he's had some run-ins with anNOYing Traditionalist Catholics of the sort I call "Traddies", or which he calls just plain "Trads". I've been tossing around a few ideas and sketches, but I don't have anything definate yet, and probably won't, but it's a neat little thought exercise.

Speaking of fanfics, I think Flood is getting his revenge against me for a certain AU fic I started quiddling with: Last night I had this wierd dream about being pregnant and not knowing who the father is (very unlikely to happen) and not even knowing how I ended up that way in the first place. Yes, his snarkiness is going about in my headspace with an utterly evil smirk on his handsome face.

( Houseparty Headaches )

Aside from that, it was a quiet day: work, poking at fanfics... the usual.

And to make the computer shopping matters messier, my crazy father told one of his co-workers about my plans, to which his co-worker suggested I should try getting a Hewlett-Packard. So I looked into it and found a model that would be just right for what I need... only problem is, I don't think there are any actual Hewlett Packard stores, and I wouldn't know where to look for 'em. I've been trying to make heads or tails out of Macs by reading that book on OS X Tiger I got last night. Argggh... no wonder my head feels like an elephant stomped on it... and at the same time, I feel as if someone cut open my chest, pulled my still-beating heart halfway out, pissed on it then stuffed it back under my ribs.

Notes to idiots at work:

To the grossly obese woman who insisted that I make the bags light: Maybe you'd be able to pick up the bags if you'd been getting a little exercise in the past. Now might be a good time to start ((Note: I was only snarking about this maddening customer, not horizontally enhanced people in general.))

To the woman with the mentally handicapped son: Please teach your son a little bit about personal space; if he isn't capable of grasping that concept, consider getting a leash and a harness, like the kind they use on large dogs. I have a three foot reach and a nasty temper when I'm provoked to attack (one of those possible causes of provocation being someone getting in my face when I'm trying to work). If your son stays back four feet from the female bagger, he'll be fine.

To the kid from the meat department who called me "sweetcheeks": Okay, I'm glad to hear that males can actually *see* me; I was beginning to think that nothing with a Y chromosome could see me except for the town's village idiot/pervert. There's just one problem: I'm post-college and you're in high school. For that matter, I have voices in my head and they don't like you.

( The males of the Houseparty react to the fresh kid )

Aside from running into Lowell for an appointment with my therapist, it's been a rather quiet day. Not to say I'm not making some plans, though: I'm tinkering with a few original fic ideas, most notably a novel inspired by the recent fanbrat debacle. Now, to those of you who were unfortunate enough to get dragged into that exchange by those verbal terrorists, please don't get nervous: the operating words here are "inspired by". I'm making up a non-existant fandom (probably a fantasy, along the lines of Tolkien or Neil Gaiman) for this novel, and while I'm telling it in the form of message board postings, emails, weblog comments and weblog entries, it's gonna be heavily fictionalized. I'll be creating incidents that never happened, excising things that did, and completely changing the identities of all persons involved. The character that's based off of me, for instance, is going to be male, as is the new identity of one of the vociferious fan-its.

And oh, the roadwork is progressing: they've finally moved the bloody jersey barriers that were blocking a strip of sidewalk: I actually have a place to walk now, as long as there aren't any earth movers chugging around, digging in the dirt that's left behind. I'll be glad when this is over... No, I won't, since the darn street will be even wider, and it's bloody wide enough as it is. I'll have to run to cross it.

::Just waiting for the day when all these middle-aged town planning board members start losing their vision and their drivers' licenses... and then *THEY* have to try toddling across these lousy wide streets...::

In other news, I watched the second episode of "Supernatural". I have to admit, it was better than the pilot episode: there was a hint of character development, as the younger brother starts to get a leetle bit more hair-trigger, and the older brother tries to get him to tone it down. But it wouldn't kill these guys to keep some holy water and/or some blessed salt on them when they go after the spook of the week. And I have to give the writers credit for doing some homework and using other kinds of spooks besides the usual vampires and werewolves: this week it was a spook from an American Indian legend.

Which reminds me, I have to get some packs of blessed salt: Hallowe'en is coming, and since I (quite inadvertantly) told Constantine about the wierd person in the area who seems to be dabbling in graveyard magick; he's been bugging me to get some blessed salt and sprinkle it along the walls and across the entrances to the burying ground where I've found traces of this strange person's rituals (the bells on the tombstone and the candles on the stump). In his words: "We gotta keep this person's demons from clawin' them up, and block whatever infernal bastards they might have pulled up that don't belong here."

I nipped up to the library here in town today, to take care of a few computer-related things (Didn't get as many of them done as I wanted to, since I wanted to get back early since it was warm today, and I didn't know how soon the bus would come: I ended up missing it anyway, and had to wait for the next one...). Plus, I also took out "The Macintosh Bible", as prepartion for getting the eMac: it's a great book, but it's a classic case of More Than Enough Information. I think I'd better find a recent version of "Macs for Dummies" or something like it: I might nip into Lowell Thursday and see if I can find it at the library there.

And someone please tell me that you **can** run WinDoze-based gaming software on VirtualPC. Because otherwise, I'm back at square one in terms of getting into the MxO, according to "The Macintosh Bible".

And I got back to editing "Motion to Deactivate", preparatory to *trying* to publish it via Lulu.com. I should take a stab at "Sophisticated Ladies", too, get that on there in time for Hallowe'en. My next thought was that once it gets cool again, I should talk to my mom about doing an "author photo shoot". The headshot I got on my Lulu.com page isn't very good. Only trouble is, all we have is analog cameras, and I need a digital one, to be able to actually upload the picture. ::Sighs::

Watched the premiere episode of "Supernatural" on the WB: It's like they're trying to rehash the supernatural detective/demon-hunter shtick from "Constantine" for the small screen, and they're failing horribly (though for some reason, the older of the two spook-chasing brothers reminds me of the blond, British version of John Constantine: He's got the same sort of "rake at the gates of hell" charm, but he's got nowhere near half the panache). The demon-hunter gave the show two thumbs waaaay down, to quote him: "Hunting spooks without being warded? No holy water, no blessed medals, no exorcism salt, no binding chants, not a word of the Ritualis, and I bet you five bucks the shells in those fuckin' shotguns those kids are totin' ain't made of blessed silver. Ten bucks says they don't know a damn word of Latin. Betcha twenty they couldn't tell a soldier demon from a sock." Me in reply: "Why do I see you crossing paths with those two and taking their kills from them, just to tick them off... besides the fact that they're in the same neck of the woods?" He came back with, "They're inept, and nosy kids drive me nuts."

And This Article Here should be required reading for the fanbrats who insist on writing Mpreg fics.

Continued from my previous post: I had to get a towel because I started drooling over those pics I posted...

We managed to get to Mass at Holy Trinity today: The people of real-world version of Sankt Maria Magdalena's may be finally getting the word across. The heads of the group trying to keep the church open were recently able to speak with Bishop Mallegant's real world counterpart, Archbishop He Who Must Not Be Named in Front of the Matrix Refugee. And he *listened* to them this time. The last time they tried to speak with him, *he* did all the talking and wouldn't let us folks get a word in edgewise. Also, the Vatican may be taking punative action against Archbishop He Who Must Not Be Named: they've found that he handled the reconfiguration to be completely unethical (eg. Police arresting people holding vigils inside churches, closing dates getting moved up, with or without warning, etc.). Stay tuned...

I ended up chatting with a few folks I hadn't seen in a while, so unfortunatly, I missed seeing an incident in the parking lot, involving a pigeon and a plastic bag. Apparantly, one of the pigeons that make their home on the roof of Holy Trinity had gotten the handle of a plastic bag caught around his neck. He kept running around, trying to shake it off, and he tried flying to escape from it, but the bag acted like a parachute and it kept pulling him down. My dad and one of the older kids who come to Mass at HT tried cornering him, but he kept running under cars to get away from this strange predator. My mother managed to coax the bird out from under one car, whereupon the kid put his foot on the bag, and my dad got ahold of the pigeon and pulled the bag off the bird. The pigeon was fine and flew right away. I suspect that's the last time he tries fishing for treats in a tempting plastic bag, though.

And it was one year ago that I went to WorldCon with Mark... My, how the year flew by.... Read here for the whole story: http://www.livejournal.com/users/matrixrefugee/30252.html One year ago, I was at the Academy Awards of sci-fi... One year ago I started my admiration for Neil Gaiman... I think the next U.S. WorldCon is supposed to be in Columbus, Ohio, in 2007. Maybe I'll make it! I didn't go this year, since they're holding it in Glasgow, Scotland, which is too far for me, at this point; and next year it's is in Tokoyo, Japan: definately too far, and I don't speak Japanese.

Last, and probably least, the joys of watching DVDs with a soulbond, in this case Ref looking over my shoulder as I watch the behind-the-scenes documentaries on "The Matrix: Revolutions": ( Cannonballs through Rows of Old Washing Machines )

I managed to add Patric Lepage's new "A.I." fic to the AIFFOA, but since I was updating the site via the sssslllllooooowwww computers at the library in Lowell, that meant I barely got it done. The site editor refused to load after I finished creating the page and the links for it, and thus I wasn't able to add to the Update log on the homepage. Oh well...

And I nipped in to Larry's Comics for my semi every-other-weekly visit: I knew that the next issue of "Neverwhere" was coming out *sometime* at the end of the month, I just couldn't remember exactly when. It hadn't come out yet, but I managed to get the September issue of "Hellblazer", and for the heck of it, I got the first volume of "The Sandman", which I don't have and which is *always* out at the Lowell library.

While I was there, I got chit-chatting with a fellow who's a struggling comics artist, who used to work as a manager in a grocery store, so we got talking about comics and grocery store horror stories, like his adventures with a haunted register where customers would trip for no reason, or the day a disgruntled ex-employee hacked into their computer system using "a Pringles can and a laptop" (How the hell does someone pull that off??). I came within inches of asking him if he'd be interested in helping me out with the "Constantine"/"Hellblazer" comic-idea I'm tinkering with, but as I overheard him say, he's got enough next-to-nothing jobs on his hands right now.

I almost bought a volume of "Promethea", based on a reccommendation "seven" gave over on for_zion, even if *is* by Alan Moore, and some of you may remember my rant about his attitude problem. It's been described, in "seven"'s words as "a primer on soulbonding". Only trouble was, it was book 4 and I felt wierd about starting in the middle.

Also got the next volume of the "Fullmetal Alchemist" manga, and as luck would have it, I'm now developing a crush on Lust...

Watched the DVD of "Vanity Fair": Reese Witherspoon is starting to grow on me as an actress, and I loved the costuming in this movie (and the bit with Regency-era ladies trying to be Indian nautch dancers made me smile; hey, it was directed by a Bollywood director, it's entitled to have an Indian dance number in it).

( What comes of watching a 19th century costume drama with a soulbond looking over your shoulder )