Nicked from tomboy_typist:


Name one of my RP characters and I will tell you:

+ what their bedroom looks like:
+ something about their eating habits:
+ my opinion on their love life (or lack thereof):
+ something about their sleeping habits:
+ a plot I'd like to see them involved in eventually:

No, no, this isn't going to be wanking about other players: that's what bad_rpers_suck is for, and frankly I've gotten away from there since there was too much wank about how blah should be done in blah-verse; some of it was warranted, but much of it bordered on Keeper of the Canon behavior (including mine...). It's more on the lines of being disappointed that things I've tossed out there have not hit the mark I was aiming for.

Case in point bringing Titus Groan, aka the Emo Earl to romancedressing in a bid to let him keep wandering a bit (he dun like being cooped up at The Mansion all the time, much as he likes it). However, the threads he's in seem to die easily, or people just don't respond at all. I keep wondering if it's just because his canon is relatively obscure. Which makes me suffer bouts of jealousy when I see Popular Big Name Canon Characters getting scads of canonmates/people who are just interested in playing with them. Not that I want scads of threads, I just want to feel like there's a nice handful of people outside the circle that I play with who are interested in this character.

Especially since I want to do a little Steerpike/Titus slashage (no doubt due to the really good SP/Titus fics I've run across lately), but that's not likely to happen within my circle, since we're playing up the not!brothers aspect in the BBC miniseries, which I don't doubt was an undeveloped idea that is lurking in Mervyn Peake's notebooks for the Bricks. And incest is a squick/trigger for me due to Personal Issues I don't want to discuss (unless it's festishy siblings in spirit sort of stuff, that's just fine, but if actual shared genetics are involved, I don't go there).

Also considering -- haven't decided yet -- dropping one of my mains. He's not happy with what I have planned, and he's balking at it, while being very loud on the other hand. It's as if he wants me to drop him, and I'm reluctant to do so, since that would satisfy him too much on so many levels. I want to keep him and keep tormenting him, but he's starting to turn around and fight me. Eurgh. I hate having imaginary people causing drama.

Though I've had some delighted moments on dear_mun: Spotted a few "Black Swan" RPers, including one or two Ninas and then there was deliciously surreal BlackSwan!Nina. Since I'm writing him now, I'm tempted to pick up Thomas, but he's a bit of a bastard toward women.

Aside from work being dull and the weather being dreary: I've been curled up under a blanket reading (A Game of Thrones with an occasional manga chaser) when I haven't been going on Wiki Walks or researching things (ranging from making ofuda to reading lists of medical slang terms).

And... and... and... Things are getting exciting in carpe_ho_ras. I'm contemplating bringing Inari Raith from The Dresden Files (possibly a pre-"Blood Rites" version) into play, except I'm having a few problems finding a model for her since 1.) based on her name and her description, I keep seeing her as having a Japanese mother and thus I'm stuck trying to find a grey-eyed Japanese stand-in for her, and 2). It doesn't help that Jim Butcher has said that he always imagines TDF as an anime when he's writing it, so the temptation is there to start looking for grey-eyed anime girls. To say nothing of how much it would amuse me to bring in the bit of fanon in which I stealth crossed-over TDF and Yami no Matsuei, with Thomas Raith commenting on "his half-nephew in Tokyo". Which would make Inari the half-aunt to Muraki, whom I'm already gauging to bring into play (albeit burned, bleeding and looking like a ceiling collapsed on him because it did, per the climax of the Kyoto arc...), and thus would make for some awkward explanations:

Inari: "Oh, he's my nephew."

Random interloper: "What? He's in his thirties and you're not old enough to drink yet."

I'd almost like to see how our girl would turn out if her demon *did* get awakened, and how she'd be trying to keep it controlled, since I don't see her being a total sex bomb like her sisters. She's too kyoot!

...which is sapping my energy completely and leaving me irritable and exhausted. I can't believe just earlier this week, it was cool enough that I could wear my Oleg Cassini jacket.

But, in better news, I'm happily back in the MxO and helping a friend start a new faction (after the one I'd created sort of folded). Lots of old faces are returning (including, but not limited to "Dragon-Guy"), and the devs have been adding a lot of new, cool little things, including new content for the incoming new players brought in by the buddy key program (wish I'd gotten some for anyone lookig for one...), little things to nudge people towards the Neighborhood Mission Contacts, a shiny new black fedora and the quest to get the items for it, and some funny-freaky new spawn in one of the Hideouts.

Little heads-up, in a day or two, I'm going to try using the VoicePost feature here on LJ to create a soundfile to lead into an RPvP event I got planned for Monday, so if you hear a panicked VoicePost on here, I'm just doing an Orson Welles.

(I know, it needs a better title... I'll think of one. This is also a chapter from the novel I was attempting to write in a month... I didn't get very far I'm afraid...)

( WARNING: This fic contains adult material including slash (male/male romance). If you are under 17 or if material of this nature makes you uncomfortable, please, please don't click on this link. )

Whew! I finally finished typing and just posted (on ff.n) the second chapter of the "A.I."/Harry Potter crossover I've been poking at for some months now. I should be feeling happy, and I am. But that seems to be muted by other stuff going on...

( Pointless rant about things I shouldn't be ranting about )

I was going to practise Net celibacy for the next few days, but it seems the All Mighty wants me to air out some stuff in writing. Any feedback, worded considerately, would be greatly appreciated.

The past couple days have been hard for me. I've been struggling with insomnia and depression. I can hardly concentrate when I'm writing, and even reading or listening to music has been stressful today, so I've bascially been taking it easy. But I'm concentrating on this, even though it takes a supreme act of the will.

There's several factors that explain why I'm feeling this way: the warm weather lately (which has finally let up, thanks to some rain this morning), the fact that this week marks the fifth anniversary of the break-up of my engagement to be married -- I will post at length about that next time; I managed to write it all down, but I'm not emotionally equipped to type/post it right now -- and an emotional moment relating to the "A.I." RP game last night/this morning.

I'm seriously beginning to question if I really should be RP'ing at all. Not because I'm having issues seperating reality from fantasy, though that could be a factor since I already have an odd conception of reality anyway; Descartes, Kierkegaard, and Plato will love to have a discussion with me once I meet up with them in the next world. Not that the phobia of RPGs that my mother instilled in me has come up again (Thanks a lot, Jack Chick and everyone else who's ever sniped against RPGs.). I'll withold names and identities, but there's some friction between one of my characters and another player's characters, and it's seriously bothering me. I'm trying not to overreact to it, but the situation is making me very uncomfortable as a player, and there are times when I don't even want to play this character, if their very nature is going to make other people's characters uncomfortable. I just don't want to cause trouble for anyone on any level of reality. I have to be very honest with myself and admit that my character is very stubborn and impulsive and this character trusts in their own judgement too highly. And those are flaws I see in myself and so I'm trying to fix them. (I should add that another character that I play is the exact opposite: rather indecisive and at times a bit too easy-going. Both are facets of my personality: I know, I'm a very complex person. Anyone who thinks they have me figured out has another thought coming...) My method in creating characters is to find some facet in myself that is similar to something in this character that I have created and use that to play out this trait. (Come to think of it, I think Jude Law uses a very similar method.)

Maybe I'm making a serious mistake in trying to use RP as a method of therapy. I know one of the methods used to help people with Asperger's Syndrome adjust to social situations is to roleplay different scenarios they might encounter. Since I have Atypical AS, that really isn't necessary for the most part (though it really helped when "Damon", my job coach roleplayed a job interview with me), but I like the idea of using RPGs as a method of helping straighten things out in your head. I remember reading one really good article online about a man (a long time D&D player) whose family had adopted two brothers from a Guatemalan orphanage, and he invented an RPG to help his new sons learn to behave better: the kids are now fully grown and people remark at how polite and kind they are.

I'm going to try to get my character to back down and stop being such a hot shot. Most likely, something will scare her and make her shape up. I hope that similarly, the other player can have their character take it down a peg, but this is just my thought. They're free to do as they see fit. Thing is, the Team is in a very tight situation, and the last thing they need is to be wasting energy on internal tensions, which could very well drive them apart. Safety in numbers, folks! Maybe it might work out if my character could somehow earn the respect of the other character, but at the same time, the other character would do well to earn the trust of my character. These are just thoughts of course. I'm certainly not expecting these two characters to become the best of friends: they're both from such different backgrounds that it probably wouldn't be possible, but stranger things have happened. I just don't want any unnecessary tension; I'm not good with it in real life, so I sometimes have trouble with it in RP.

I'm very blessed and lucky to be in as strong, tight-knit a group of players as I'm in (Many of them came out of the "A.I." fanfiction community), who really work together to work things out. We're all female, so that might be why this group works so well (not to say that there aren't male players who are good negotiators, but I have no personal experience with that). We were actually trying to resolve this issue last night in chat, but my comp kept crashing and I was getting too tired and frazzled to continue, which obliged me to bow out before I conked out over the keyboard. I went to bed straight afterward and literally crashed in bed, but I ended up waking up a half-hour later and I had trouble getting back to sleep for an hour because my brain wouldn't stop mulling over the RP worries. Like the worrywort that I am, I kept trying to come up with ways to handle the situation. Of course I came up with the worst case scenario first -- this is just how I am, I have to air out the bad stuff that comes out of my head before I can focus on the good stuff -- the worst case scenario being: kill off my character. (But then the DVD player in my head started playing the scene in "The Matrix" when Morpheus is trapped inside the Matrix, and Tank is about to pull the cable out of Morpheus's head-jack to keep the Agents from hacking into his mind, even though that will kill him.)

If anyone has any good ideas as to how to resolve this, please run them past me: I'll share them with the GM before the next game, whenever we have the next game.