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

Removed one entry due to whining.

All I'm going to say is, did a crankiness virus escape from a CDC lab? I've been seeing a lot of whininess around and it's starting to wear down the Zen-like calm I've been trying to cultivate. I know I shouldn't let it get to me, but it is making it hard to type up some of the Valentine's fics I'm working on.

I won't say more about the whining: I'm going to talk about the cosmic irony that is a girl who hated Valentine's Day with a vengeance, due to a bad relationship and a horrible dust-up that happened on Valentine's Day due to that bad relationship, even has an Anti-Valentine's Day icon on her LJ (which I'm trying to find a more positive replacement for. Any suggestions??), who is now writing Valentine's Day fanfics! (Well, ficlets...) How did I get from there to here...? I credit it to the fact that among the collective of characters I have "living" as it were in a big rambling Queen Anne-style mansion (think along the lines of the house in "The Addams Family") in the creativity centers of my brain, I have more than a few hopeless romantics (including, but not limited to Frank Sweitz, my "A.I." OMC, and to some extent, a certain bouncy shinigami with violet eyes). I guess they finally won the battle for my sentimentality. Re: the headspace-dwellers, I'm tempted to put together a weekly rundown of some of the craziness they seem to come up with which is too silly not to post, but which will never make it into a fanfiction:

--Hal McGeever trying to find out who keeps eating his chips
--The day we had Soul Reapers running down the hallway for some inexplicable reason
--Frank running out of clean shirts and stealing/borrowing shirts from other guys' rooms (including the Merovingian's room... Eek.)
--Fuyutsuki's abortive attempts at finding a quiet place to read his mail and drink his tea in the morning
--Hal and Muraki "not flirting with each other"
--Enniel Prussot deciding to trim his hair, thus making him look even more like an Expy of a certain crooked energy vampire

Did something to get my mind off the computer woes: My dad and I went to a flea market out in Lancaster. Got a few books, including Andrew Lang's "Blue Fairy Book" and Humphrey Carpenter's biography of J.R.R. Tolkien. And I did something I haven't done in a while, namely, buy something small that appealed both to me and to one of my headspace dwellers (I know, I haven't posted about the Houseparty in ages...): in this case, it was an small aluminium ourouboros pendant, an image of a dragon biting it's tail, which piqued the interest of a small Redpill with Exile code who snoozes in my head when I'm not playing the MxO...

And no, I did not watch the S(t)uper Bowl; I did however, just watch the new episode of "Criminal Minds" that aired after it. Yikes... how's Reid going to get out of this one? I hope they don't mangle him the way Elle got mangled last season. I love that kid. Hands off Aspie Boy! (Sorry, I've got a crush on the guy, can't yah tell? ::grins:: )

I said there was one yesterday: there's been a few more show up, and they're all female.

( Major Paradigm Shift-ness )

Just back from the library here in town, where I was printing out a few things (I have *GOT* to get a laser-jet printer/scanner combo...) and downloading/burning onto CD a bunch of MP3s, namely Bryan "Pazu" Harrison's fan novelization of "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence"; I'm thinking of converting that to audio CD, but I realize that's gonna take a heap of CDs to do that.

And the MxO is patching again. I found this out a moment ago when I went to jack in for a bit: we've got a contest going on where we have to pick up a bunch of stuff off the gang spawn, and I've been trying to keep ahead with that. I hope this means they did something with the glitch that messed me up last night, where I couldn't jack into either the Richland or the Westview districts. Had to run in International whether I wanted to or not.

Well, in the meantime, we've got a few gems from the patch notes:

--"Hooked up some new emotes that have been in limbo for a while" These include "KickDoor", which I can see Sieges using on those anNOYing Cryptos boxes (ask me about those...); "Cough", which she could use about now since she's getting over that flu bug; and "Sleep", which will definately come in handy during faction meetings when a Certain Long-Winded Merv Operative starts pontificating.

--Fixed a typo in Tyndall's text in the "Moving Target" Zion seduction mission".

Sieges: "Silly Cave Wackies and their bad writing." ::Indulgently::

Our Flood: "Well, what can you expect from idiots who pay more attention to fighting and less attention to education?"

Our Merv: "Or rather, they expend too much energy upon learning the dark arts of warfare and less upon what truly makes them free..."

And I hope they fixed the bug that croggled the missions: supposedly, they wouldn't download for anything last night.

Unless someone's shadow-self decided to shut off his cellphone....

Said icon being a slight-ly early Easter surprise from the purveyor of Lambert Wilson eyecandy. Yum... It also matches the mental image I had, thanks to some mild mischief in the Houseparty, aka. Exile Central this afternoon.

( Easter preparations among the headspace dwellers )

Miserable night at work. It was probably the Old Scratch getting back at me for burying the hatchet today with a dear friend I'd had a major falling-out with.

Other news: Two small packages I was expecting showed up, containing CDs I'd ordered (used) off Amazon.com:

--"The John Michael Talbot Collection" A lovely two-disk set with 35 of the greatest songs by the only Contemporary Christian Musician I like. He's an incredibly talented and holy man, who gave up a career as a rock composer/singer/guitarist to become a semi-hermitic Franciscan monk in Arkansas. My favorite of his work is the oratorio "Light Eternal" -- classical and folk-ish and charismatic all at the same time -- and his Mass setting "The Lord's Supper": I love singing the 'Creed' from that one; you can really feel the Spirit in that one!

Interesting note: the person selling that album was in Louisiana, and they'd put a label on the back of the package, reading: "This item survived Hurricanes Katrina and Rita". And it still plays good, too!

--the soundtrack to "V for Vendetta", which I haven't been able to find anywhere around here (what, retailers, is that movie too subversive for you?!).

One year ago yesterday, the MxO went live (though I didn't get my hands on a copy of the strategy guide or the software until nearly a month later, and we all know I didn't join up until I got the new comp and set it up. I think it was the very first software bundle I installed once I installed Juno and reconnected to the 'Net). I remember it happened in late March, but I don't recall knowing the exact date until just recently, though I remember feeling a little blue that I wasn't able to join in the fun (and headaches, and gleeful rampaging, and teeth-gnashing, and mission-running, and faction squabbling, and player events, and organization horn-locking, and Exile crushing, and player departures, and crew-member recruiting...) because my comp was a five year old spyware-raddled beater with nowhere the memory or hard-drive capacity needed to run it. The devs have promised that the new combat system will be going live then (and consequently, they had some rather brain-bending yet ridiculously simple instructions on what to do if you're on dial-up and you don't want to get stuck downloading the *HUGE* game patch that's coming out) and they're also promising "a patch of blue sky" for us players as part of an anniversary Live Event. But considering what can happen to you in this universe, after you've glimpsed the sky above the pall of darkness, I'm getting a bad feeling of what lies ahead... On the bright side, I'm hoping this means the Merv organization will cease to be the dartboard for everybody and their brother, at least for a few days. And on that note: to the stoopid Zionite fanboys who ./kiss spam my littie girl at hardlines, back off; not all girls who work for the Merv are sluts, notwithstanding a certain all-girl Merv faction who dress like sluts. I'm looking at *YOU*, members of "The Sirens"; thanks for giving us all a skewed image. Sieges is hoping.... well... ::Considers the email her scatter-brained scattershot is sending to the object of her desires...::

And in a odd turn of events, about one year ago today (based on my notes), Flood showed up in my headspace, though we didn't port him into DegSep until April 1st. Part of the reason I ran that by Laurie was to do something with the snarking, because he was giving me a headache. (Remind me, once I get a scanner, to post the early character design of his "shadow self", which appeared in the strategy guide: I find it amusing. He merely sneers at it.) What's really wierd is how spot-on I was playing him, months and months even before I signed up for the MxO: some of the stuff I figured out about him before hand was creepy (ie. his tendency to be a bit of a discreet ladykiller and his fondness for, er, potent potables, particulary mimosas. What really cooked my noodle was the fact that my favorite drink happens to be a [non-alcoholic] mimosa, too.). It remains to be seen if he's canonically supposed to be British or not (though three fans of the character -- yes, they do exist: they're as rare as 1913 U.S. postage stamps with upside down airplanes on them, but they exist -- figured he's Brit. One of these rare finds, the much-lamented __flood, was British himself, and I figure it takes one to spot one; he even said "Flood's definately a Brit".); if his "shadow self" ever turns up in one of the cinematics and the voice-actor is sporting a British accent, I will probably yell from the utter shock. We're still not sure about what's up with the gloves, though... time may tell. As I know him, he's since become a constant headspace companion, an unwitting internal therapist (his snarky and scathing commentary on things around me/us keeps me laughing and helps me keep things in their proper perspective) and a dearly loved and/or detested member of the DegSep family.

Whew... Got my income taxes *DONE*, with a little morale support from my mom, who used to do clerical work for the IRS and knows quite a bit about federal tax forms and how to decipher them. Please don't hold that against her, Neo!

And I've been taking a major stab at desnarling the squirrel's nest that is my room. I did something with the bag of gently-used clothes that someone gave me (ie, put most of them in the wash, sorted out a few things and put them in the bag for the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store).

Great news! Sieges just hit LEVEL 25! She's halfway through her training now. ::Hugs her little girl::

And somehow, I now have a new bond forming. I really don't need this to happen, and for some odd reason, they seem to show up in March. That's when John and Flood showed up, last year (John showed up within 12 hours of when I first saw the movie and it was one of those "What the... Him?!" moments; Flood came in within three days of when I first saw -- and dismissed -- his character sheet on the MxO site), and that's when I finally got my bearings with the Merv. But this guy, while he mesmerizes part of me, still terrifies me more than a little, and I'm not sure as if I want him in there....

It's no less than V from "V for Vendetta". I admit to somewhat liking the character -- from a writer's standpoint. But from an ethical standpoint? No. Not at all.

And already, the connection is deep enough that I know his real name.

God. Help. Me.