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

The two MMOs that I'm the most excited about getting into are, unfortunately, still in development. Those being:

--"World of Darkness": I can thank "Dragon Guy" for getting me into this, even though I've had to content myself with reading the corebooks, since I have not been able to locate a good troupe in the area. I'm thinking of porting my MxO characters into this, since there's an urban fantasy slant to their personas.

--"Star Wars: The Old Republic": Two old friends from MxO have invited me to go over to the Dark Side with them. I may not be big on Star Wars, but it will be fun to muck around in a galaxy far, far away.

But till those are released, and till I get a better GFX card for my comp, since my current one is acting dithery after four years of running MxO, the gang of people I play MxO with are looking to:

--"City of Heroes/Villains": I'm looking at this universe with a hint of "Watchmen" in the back of my mind, despite someone in the group considering the look of the game "cartoonish". Plus, the Rogues expansion coming out soon is going to give us Chaotic Neutral Mervs a chance to be our usual not-so-bad but not so good selves. We're even thinking of running this (at least among ourselves) as something of a MxO-crossover, with Paragon City and the Rogue Isles as "part of Rhodes Island which the Machines sealed off from most Redpills".

And Jim Butcher plays on the Virtue server, so who knows? We might bump into him some night, which would be insanely cool.

Before I scoot off to the beach, here's something I just found on the Dresden Files forum I hang out on regularly:

http://jagoex.blogspot.com/2008/06/10-ways-for-gamers-to-save-money.html

I'd sworn up and down that I was going to wait till October to get the compilation of "Welcome to the Jungle", the new Dresden Files graphic novel...

But, I knuckled down and made the trip to Larry's Comics the other day, first time I'd been there since the fall. Said Larry, with a big grin, on seeing me, "Oh, I know what *you're* here for: Dresden Files."

Also made a trip to the GameStop in Burlington and finally got the copy of Hellgate: London I was going to get myself as an Easter present/"Thank God Jack Thompson got tossed out of the Florida Bar Association like yesterday's news" celebration gift. I have to admit, this is a little more intense than I usually go for, but I've heard nothing but good things about it from my gamer-geek friends.

In celebration of *finally* getting the copy of "Vampire: The Masquerade -- Bloodlines" in the mail -- it came all the way from India -- which I'd ordered some time ago from Amazon, I've changed the layout to this lovely one. I was looking for a single-player RPG for the times when people are driving me nuts in MxO and my patience has been tried too much for EvE Online, and a couple friends -- notably Baten and Vanil -- had recommended this one. Plus I'm getting interested in the universe of World of Darkness. thanks to the same guy who got me into the Dresden Files, though we know I need another fandom like I need a hole in the head. I kind of had to smuggle this one past my mother since she's critical of my watching R-rated movies, I don't know what she'd do about an M-rated video game. I have to keep reminding her that I *am* thirty years old, even if my emotional age is about nineteen. I can handle it, even if she can't (or won't).

At least the problem wasn't at my end: considering the nasty bugs some people have had to deal with in the past, I've been very fortunate, but I don't doubt my luck is due to get shaky. I tried logging onto the forum, but something went wierd, so I tried logging into the game and got shut out. I waited about an hour and tried logging in again, and had no glitches at all.

I'm tempted to take this as a sign that I should consider quietly ending my present main character's involvment there, switch to my alt on the Syntax server and make the transition with the rest of my faction to EvE Online, which I'll admit, has been growing on me. :: Points to icon:: Behold the EvE incarnation of Sieges, the scatterbrained character.

Well, it looks like Lent will be off to an odd start tomorrow: I asked to have the day off because I had an appointment in Lowell (as I mentioned before, my appointment in Burlington today, with the nurse practitioner got cancelled), and I was looking forward to having two days off in a row... Because of the snowstorm that's supposed to hit on Thursday -- a storm that isn't even here yet and might just go out to sea or break up or something -- they want me to come in tomorrow as early as I can, and there's an outside chance I may not have to go in Thursday. Well, the earliest that I *COULD* make it will be at three in the afternoon, but that's if everything cooperates and I don't miss the 2.00 pm bus back home. *sigh*. I really don't want to lose the five hour shft on Thursday, and only get a three hour shift tomorrow in exchange.

On the plus side (sort of): Got back from a trip to Burlington just for the heck of it. Neo, you'll probably fwhap me for buying "The Path of Neo": I got it simply because I'm/we're curious about the extended Chateau scenes; His Unholy Highness is the most intrigued with the idea and he wants to see if the Marketing Brothers got anything else right, but the Snark Barrage Master has no interest in it whatsoever (because he isn't in it, of course...).

(( ::Uses her "Sin City" icon to cheer herself up:: ))

Finally managed to get to the library and run some needed-to-be-done printout jobs, though I didn't get a chance to burn some files onto CDs that I want/need to transfer to the new comp (most notably, the working files for "Motion to Deactivate"; I discovered that I transferred the wrong version onto the new comp, via the flash drive I used to get the important files off the old comp. I know they're on floppy disks, but I have yet to get the external floppy drive. I'll see if I can't nip into Staples Wednesday and get it then.). Partly I ran out of time and partly I wanted to get away from the horde of brats who were circling behind my chair like vultures when I was in the middle of my second hour on that particular comp. Scratch vultures, they're more like harpies.

Made a "quick" trip to the EB Games in Burlington: on my way out the other day, I'd spotted a used copy of the comp. version of "Enter the Matrix" (for all of $6; it's missing the box, but at least all the disks are there). I almost bought then, but I was in a hurry to catch the next bus after missing one. I asked the clerk the "idiotic question" if they had a copy of the comp version of the new game from the Marketing Brothers, but no luck there. Guess I'll have to wait a few months until one of the folks who thought it bites, sell their copy for a little extra cash. I really need to scale back my spending, since Boskone is coming up later next month and I need to save up for that (not the admission fee, but to accomodate the fact that I usually go a little mad at the book stalls in the dealers' room...)

Other than taking a later bus to my therapist and nipping into Wal-Mart to get CD-Rs and more Airborne, it's been quiet...

But my headspace activity has picked up, now that I'm feeling a little better: Unfortunately, this means Sieges has joined the Houseparty. I had a dream about her last night: I was sitting with her in Jacob's Ladder, a club in Capitol City (which I haven't seen yet, in-game, so it's gonna be interesting if my dream image of it matches the game devs' image of it...), talking with her, finding out more about her background; she's the middle sibling of five kids -- one sister older than her, the other sister is the baby of the family, Sieges is smack in between two brothers -- her dad is a college professor, her mom works in an antique shop. And as we were talking, Flood walked in like the place wasn't good enough for him and asked me if he could speak with Sieges alone, so I excused myself and went to the washroom. When I got back, Flood had left and Sieges had this wierd look on her face; she promptly said to me, "I don't know whether to kiss that guy or clock him one." To which I replied, "Don't try it, baby-girl: you're a level 5 Awakened/partial Operative, and he's a beyond level 50 elder Exile. If you thought the Guillotines handed your ass to you, this guy could nail it to the wall before he handed it to you."

I'm a little worried for her: she's an odd mixture of toughness and naivety, if that makes sense. All this was, of course, torched off by the fact that Sieges completed her introductory missions last night and now she's in the "seduction phase", where the three organizations (Zion's, the Machines', and the Merv's) are each vying to get a Redpill onto their side. We know where my empathy lies, let's see where Sieges's runs...

15,084 / 50,000 (30.2%)

It's not that I'm out of ideas, and it's not that I've lost my way with this novel. I just don't seem to have the creative impetus to get beyond the ~600 words that came out of my head today. I sat down and did the math, and found that I'm actually ahead by 800 words, even though I did so badly Saturday. When I made the calculation, I simply divided the number of words I'd written by the number of days I'd been writing; thus, I'm caught up from Saturday, but I really don't want to get behind. I'll see if I can beat 300 more words out onto the page before midnight tonight, but I think I might take it easy: watch "Criminal Minds" and maybe "Law & Order", maybe play the MxO for another hour or so, poke around on Amazon.com and see if I can't get a budget price on "The Path of Neo".

I've been doing more than just moving into my new comp -- I just loaded the MxO software, and I might activate it after I've browsed around GAFF for a bit and posted to a few threads there: We've been putting up Hallowe'en decorations. I hunted up the branch for this year's Hallowe'en tree (for you new folks, I have this custom of putting up a dead tree branch decorated with pumpkin lights in our house. I got the idea from Ray Bradbury's children's novel "The Halloween Tree"), and my dad helped me anchor it to the bookcase in our living room. And while I had my nose buried in computer activation, he strung up more pumpkin lights outside in the yard, including a string around the railing of the deck, and along some of the trees in the front yard. He even got a light-up plastic jack o'lantern which he stood up under one of the trees, plus he stretched out some of the pumpkin lights by taking the housings off a damaged string and putting them on a string of amber lights, with one pumpkin put on every third light.

I've been listening to the "Lost 45's" show on the local Golden Oldies station: they were playing all kinds of spooky songs, which made the perfect backdrop for re-re-reading "The Shadows Between the Neon". I love that fic: it's one of the best out of the "Cecie Martin" series of "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" fics I wrote.

And I had an early Hallowe'en treat last night at work: I was between orders, chatting with the cashier (one of the seven or eight girls named "Sarah" or some variant thereof), when I happen to glance over toward the main aisle in time to spot a guy and a gal dressed as respectively Batman ("Batman Returns"-version) and Catwoman (the Eartha Kitt version, I think -- she didn't look as cool as Michelle Pfeiffer's, and she certainly was more covered than Halle Berry's!). Ten minutes later, guess who came through the lane where I was bagging, but Batman and Catwoman! I couldn't help joking with them: said I "Even comic book heroes gotta do their grocery shopping somewhere, sometime!" Said Batman to Catwoman, re: the bag of ice and cases of root beer they'd bought, "Come on, we'd better get this home and put it in the bat-cooler." Priceless!

They won't be the only DC Comics hero (well, make that ANTI-hero) to show up at that store: I'm dressing as Constantine tomorrow. I heard from "Martha", one of the supervisors, that if you work the front end, you can wear your Hallowe'en costume to work, as long as it isn't anything offensive or wierd. Well, considering that my costume is liable to offend only Alan Moore, and he's over in England, I should be safe. Martha herself is supposed to be dressing up as a witch; I asked her if she was a good witch or a bad witch, to which she replied, "I'm definately a bad witch".