Sometimes Sinner, Sometimes Saint

Twitter of the….long period of time

Janet — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 00:29:17 +0000

Just….wow! XD

MnK Fundraiser FTW

Janet — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 03:43:59 +0000

Editing out Koffee’s and Yuki’s RL names and ages out of respect for them controlling where their information goes.

Everyone has a story: Galloway woman choreographs Rockin Eve – pressofAtlanticCity.com : Scott Cronicks Blog: Everyone has a story.

‘Milk N Kookies’ pay off
A Web site where adults role play as virtual children may be a foreign concept to some. But for a local church, there was nothing virtual about $3,000 worth of food and toys being delivered Dec. 23 to help needy families for the holidays.
Ocean City’s XXXX & XXXXX are Koffeekid Smalls and Yuki Eliot on “The Milk N Kookies Show,” a live weekly broadcast that airs in a virtual world called Second Life, where more than 1,000 people listen weekly.
Last year, they used the radio show to raise about $1,200 to purchase more than 400 pounds of food, clothes and toys for the Community FoodBank of New Jersey, Southern Branch.
This year, they raised more than $3,000 and are adopting 50 children and 20 adults at Northfield’s Church of God of Prophecy, which is also a food bank that feeds more than 800 families a month.
“The money came from people all over the world … Germany, France, Spain. …” said [Koffee], who was motivated by his own childhood memories of not having much around the holidays. “I knew there would be no Christmas presents, no big meal, and I certainly wasn’t getting the Game Boy I wanted. We could barely afford to eat at all, and deep down my parents were far more hurt by the lack of toys than we were. So it’s an incredible experience to do this. We went around and bought all these gifts and wrapped them. We’re pretty exhausted. It was more than we ever expected.”

Testing 123…

Janet — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:41:40 +0000

Testing twitterfeed to see if it can in fact tell when I’ve updated this blog and then automatically update my Twitter account with a notification and link. I don’t know when it’ll be ‘checking,’ so this might be delayed.

Oh yeah!

Janet — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:13:29 +0000

Acer’s already fixed my laptop, I should have it back by Monday or Tuesday, and given that I never once got a call from them about payment, I think I can safely presume that my warranty did cover the repairs! Huzzah! ^^

‘The Nun’ speakith (part I of…something, probably)

Janet — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:56:54 +0000

Side note: interesting WordPress ‘bug’. So on the SecondLifeKid.com homepage, where it shows recent updates with a small excerpt…apparently that shows ‘draft’ entries, too, even when not logged in. It also re-does that every time you edit said draft, even after posting newer entries. Not cool. I had that entry marked as ‘draft’ still because it’s still not refined and ready for prime-time, especially given that that entry may well cost me almost every friend I have in SL on this avie. (If I’m going to be ‘excommunicated’ from anyone’s Friends list, I’d rather it be for what I DID mean rather than what I stated poorly and was subsequently misinterpreted.)

However, that post won’t be the only one I post lately that’s controversial. Tonight’s (hopefully short) musings were partially inspired by conversation at Aspen Nights tonight. Apparently I’m in the extreme minority to believe that it is grossly inappropriate for people to have ‘relationships’ with someone old enough to be that person’s parent or child. ‘Age is nothing but a number’ is nothing but bull, especially these days, when the maturity of your average 18-yo would’ve gotten a 12-yo 30 years ago smacked for being a spoiled-rotten brat. However, that age wouldn’t be considered, to me, speaks that I’m not even looking at the ‘issue’ from the same angle or through the same ‘lenses’ as most, darn near all, of my SL friends. For me, the ’starting point’ for anything is the cross around my digital and physical necks. I DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT intend to sound ‘holier than thou,’ but some folks’ll read that out of me saying a blasted thing that might be taken as the least bit ‘critical’ of anyone, all the while that same person can be saying things that I find deeply offensive, but I’m supposed to remain silent. I’ve more or less completely ‘censored’ myself in SL since I created the Janet avatar, and yes I’m freaking getting sick of it, getting sick of the things I believe, (not me, I do understand,) being belittled by people who are otherwise so ‘open-minded’ and ‘tolerant’ to everything.

Anyway so where was I…*re-reads* Oh yeah. Necks. Right. Anyway. So what would dating, courting, whatever you wish to call it, mean in light of that? Well, to the Catholic, (and most ‘mainline’ Christians, as far as I can tell,) dating has one purpose: to discern whether that person is the one the Lord has called me to be united in Holy Matrimony with. (Naturally, if the person I am considering isn’t ‘valid matter’ for that Sacrament, and the Holy Father himself does not have the authority to change what constitutes ‘valid matter’ for any Sacrament, say the man is civilly divorced from what is a Sacramentally valid marriage, for example, then it’s already ‘game over.’ The Lord doesn’t work against Himself, of course.) And what’s the purpose of the Sacrament of Marriage? Not personal gratification, though our culture over the past 50 years has gone through great pains to convince us that such is the end-all and be-all of it. The primary purpose of marriage, as every pamphlet, book, or anything else on the matter prior to the mid-60s made explicit, is the procreating and raising of children. The ‘unitive’ {sp?} end is secondary, and quite distantly so. Now what of women like myself who can’t conceive? (Looooooong story, starts about 10 years ago, and would be way TMI for a blog that any robot can read.) (Or even if it’s the man who’s got the ‘issues;’ same principle applies, but I single out women because a critic would be hard-pressed to tell me I’m not ‘walking the talk’ when it’s myself I write of.) Obviously yes, the secondary end can still be met, but the couple must remain open to life should the Lord allow it. (Stranger things HAVE happened. =-p )

Also, the purpose of any Sacrament is ultimately to assist us, through the grace of God, mediated through Christ’s sacrifice of Himself on the cross, in the salvation of our souls. Who I marry and what I do before, during, and after (should I outlive my husband,) have ramifications not just in this life, but the next. Given that, I would hope even someone who disagrees passionately with everything I wrote above would still understand why I take the matter as seriously as I do. For the Catholic, there is no such thing as ‘a casual affair.’ (1 Corinthians would show St. Paul going to great pains to try and explain this to a city renowned throughout the ‘civilized’ world at that time for its loose sexual mores, most of which seem to have full acceptance and promotion in today’s world. Pro-tip: if it was wrong in 70AD, it’ll always be wrong; 1950 years haven’t changed a blinking thing. Men change, God does not.) My ex, the man I fully intended to marry, until he cheated on me, was easily one of the ugliest men in all of God’s creation, but I didn’t care. He seemed to have a strong relationship with Christ, and that’s the ‘deal-breaker;’ in Catholic marriage, which, to reiterate, dating is ‘merely’ a preparation for, the spouses are interested first and foremost in the sanctification of the other spouse and the children the Lord chooses to bless them with. It does not matter if the man is attractive or witty or ‘wise’ by the world’s standards; the important question is, ‘Will this man help or hinder my salvation?’ If the answer is the latter, Scripture makes no bones about it: run screaming in the other direction. Looks fade, QUICK, for the percentage of society who ever has them to begin with, and charm is deceptive (and, oftentimes, also fleeting.) But of the person who does fit that bill? There’ll probably be a whole heck of a lot of times I feel ‘unfulfilled’ in some way by that man, especially if he loves me enough to tell me the ‘hard things,’ be it ‘grow up’ or reminding me that I’m obligated to bring this or that sin into the Confessional. At those times, I’m probably going to hate his guts with every fiber of my being, and by the world’s standards, that’s when I should get the divorce lawyer on the phone, the instant I’m not ‘getting’ anything out of the marriage anymore. Bull.

But if I don’t date with all of the above in mind? Then sure, get with some guy old enough to be my dad; if it’s a cheap thrill and makes me ‘feel’ good why not? Feel free to smack me should I ever act that self-centered re: relationships with people. Go ahead, those who are critical of this. Hold me accountable to my own words. I’m not afraid. I expect no standard out of another human being that I have not first vigorously applied to myself. I’ve no patience for hypocrites and I will not become one, though I feel I’ve come close by my silence these past months on issues I claim to care greatly about. And far be it from this entry implying that I don’t sin myself, along with the rest of humanity. Confession and evaluating myself to see if I am worthy to partake in the Eucharist force me to be honest with myself every week of my life.

*At this point, the typist takes her hands off of the keyboard and sighs. Currently listening to Tobi DJ, and admittedly barely paying attention to genchat. She is also contemplating whether she will even be ‘welcome’ by this time next week, depending on the reception this blog entry and the other one she has drafted receive.*

Christ states in the Gospels that He came not to bring peace, but a sword. The Gospel reading for Mass today (Friday) is the one where Christ casts the money changers out of the temple with a makeshift whip. (Both of the above are passages that I keep on the forefront of my memory for dealing with ‘Jesus was a pacifist!’ hippies.) If finally breaking my silent ‘truce’ on matters proves a sword that ‘cuts me off’ from my SL friends, then so be it. I have always preferred to be hated for what I am than loved for what I am not. St. Thomas Moore held his tongue regarding the King’s illegitimate second ‘marriage’ until he was literally backed into a corner by the oath English citizens were required to swear. I am not yet in that desperate of a situation, but for a while now, my conscience has been quite disquieted. I’ve felt like I was not so much lying as not telling the full truth of what I believe. I am a Catholic, I have been seriously so since I was 16, and I will, by God’s grace, die one, in full communion with the Church. One of my fears, though, is that, either by my actions or inactions, the people I care about, on and offline, won’t be there with me. Indeed, with the online friends, Heaven may be the only time I see a single one of them face-to-face without a webcam being involved. So yes, it scares the Hell out of me, literally, to see anyone I care about choosing Hell by their actions. (More on why I phrase that statement in that way in the aforementioned drafted-and-almost-done entry.) And yes, I’m also scared of rebukes, hatred, any kind of negativity I may receive from my friends on account of this entry or the one I intend to follow it. That is something new to me. Before I even had friends, offline or otherwise, I didn’t care who I alienated with my statements. Indeed, in my teen years, I was self-righteous enough to relish in persecution, be it from my family or the other kids in youth group who were there as a mere social activity. Not so much now. Yeah I’m scared. But still…no reaction will befall me that God didn’t foresee from before He created a single atom. I just pray I have the spine to stand by my words, come what may.

Disallowing comments on this entry so that, if someone has an issue that they want to vent at me, they have to talk to me personally, in-world or on Skype or Twitter or whatever, rather than just leave an anonymous comment on this blog. I’m not being a coward for once, and I would appreciate readers not acting as cowards themselves.

Oh yeah I have a blog…

Janet — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:19:27 +0000

Heh…so…yeah…I’ve been MIA from this blog. Far from MIA in SL, mind you. Ummm….Undercity is now New Jericho, I’m still an RPO, aka Enz’s minion, and that RP should be resuming by the end of the month, for sure by the end of the year. What happened to Undercity? Well….that’s been part of why I’ve NOT been blogging, because I knew I’d feel obligated to address that, and I wasn’t not-ticked enough to do so. Now I am, but I’d rather do that in it’s OWN entry once we’re 100% going on NJ again. (Want to see it? Clicky!!!!! The RP site is here, but it’s been up and down as Tobi’s been plunking away at it. For anyone from the RP on the Underground sim, we DO still have the old character sheets.)

Anyway. So why the sudden postage? Because I might be MIA from SL it bit for a week or so in the fairly immediate future. The plastic of the bottom casing of my laptop is starting to crack, and I want to get that fixed before we’re heavily RPing in NJ again. Thankfully, I sprang for the extended warranty when I bought this thing, so it’s still covered. Still, I have to send it off to Acer to have it fixed, but on the upside I don’t have to pay for it.

So for the like 5 people who will notice me gone, chill. =-p I’m not mad at anyone or anything.

If I *do* make it in-world, it’ll likely be logged into my home location and via ajaxlife, so devoid of me being able to see jack squat. So yeah, that’s that.

More bloggage once RPage starts again, hopefully.

Laters!

2 Random Thoughts, One Entry

Janet — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:23:56 +0000

A) As some of y’all have figured out, Janet is my RL first name. The downsides to this are 2 and related: 1) that stupid song in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and 2) when someone swears with a d**nit at home, I think I’m being addressed sometimes, especially if I have headphones on and don’t hear it totally clearly. (Yes this just happened half a minute ago, thus why I mention it. =-p )

B) If you have a Twitter and see JesusFreak84 following you, that’d be me. I’m not ambitious enough to manage dual Twitter accounts. (Besides, TweetDeck is the only Windows Twitter app I’ve found that supports it anyway.)

Ran around SL a bit last night with Foxx, Enz, and a friend of Enz’s, but I’ll blog on that later.

Ja ne! (Roughly, that means “see you later” in Japanese.)

Possible Relocation?

Janet — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:12:22 +0000

Another RL-esque entry warning.

So there’s the slightest, most remote chance I might be in, vaguely Toledo, OH area-ish by the end of the year. (If this comes to pass before the MnK meetup and I have a car, I am so going!) How might this come to pass? Well, one of my friends from college who was able to get re-hired at the amusement park we both worked at last summer (and were roommates at,) is planning on settling down in that area for now, and I think she intends to kidnap me if she can’t get me out there voluntarily. =-p Still, like anywhere, I’ll need a job and money, so if anyone’s inclined to prayer, it’d be much appreciated, as always. (And I do offer the same up for my online friends as much as offline, for what that’s worth.)

The only downside to all of this would be less time for SL. =-p

Umm….oh yeah! Actually got some interesting RP in last night in Undercity—even got to meet some new characters. I swear, I don’t think my character and Kyuui’s are ever going to get along! XD I have zero animosity towards the man behind the keyboard, though, so it’s actually kind of comical to me how badly she detests him and how much he seems irritated by her. Maybe I’m just weird.

Not much else to say besides that, so….yeah……laters!

3 entries for the click of one! (Undercity + drama, Amazon.com job fair, Mouse World & HappyMood sim)

Janet — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 06:29:56 +0000

May as well come out with the gloves on. I was wandering around Undercity tonight and got to hear this lovely OOC (Out-of-character, as in it’s the person behind the keyboard expressing something,) comment about another player:

I pray to jesus H christ on the cross every night that he has a terrible accident

(Yes, I’m aware I just jerked with LL TOS, but I reeeeeeeeeealy doubt they’re going to care enough to peg me. Moving on.)

OK, I’ve met some people, online and off, who I’ve detested pretty highly. And for the character of the person being talked about in that comment, I can understand not liking him. (An RPO even just tonight had to clean up some “graffiti” at the Academy that was in poor taste in-character, worse taste out, “protesting” this character.) Still, we are ALL ADULTS behind our respective keyboards, but the speaker of that comment was, frankly, showing worse judgement than I would even expect out of their character. (I normally hate using “their” as a neuter third-person singular, but I hate s/he and other such stupid constructs even more, and I figure may as well make a minimal effort to guard the identity of the guilty or just plain stupid.) To wish someone ACCIDENT OR INJURY because you don’t like their CHARACTER in a role-playing GAME? Pardon my French, but what the HELL is the matter with people?! GROW THE FRICK UP! If someone can’t separate a person from their character, they have zero business RPing to begin with. Don’t like the player behind the character, either? Either deal or quit, DON’T START DRAMA!!! Both the person being slandered above and another friend of mine in UC have also had false rumors spread about them by immature schmucks. Again, GROW UP! Yes, we all play as child/teen avatars, but when you’re OUT of character, people have EVERY right to expect you to act like an ADULT! If Undercity ever just collapses, or just fades to nothing, I’d bet my L$ that OOC drama will be the culprit. The RPOs, Rai, and etc., can only do so much; at the end of the day, they have every right to expect us to be able to control ourselves. Gah…OK, enough on that for now. I think (hope) my point’s been made.

Amazon.com had a virtual “job fair” in SL today, and even though the jobs would all require me to relocate, I went anyway, figuring I have zero to lose. Turns out, there’s a position with imdb.com (which Amazon owns,) in Seattle that I’ve got a shot at. I went on my old avatar simply because I didn’t want to wind up with creepers following this av’s Pics and bothering people. Also, that avatar’s been in SL for a long time, so I hoped that might make them look at me more favorably. Seattle’s also about as far from where I live now as I can get without leaving the country. =-p That, my dear readers, means not having to deal with my lunatic relatives from anywhere except maybe at holidays. The recruiter I talked to hinted that, as a “Java person,” it might behoove me to brush up on my Perl before any interview. If anyone’s got any good sites for learning Perl, I’d love to hear it. I already know most of the nomenclature for Perl’s regular expressions, (if I just started speaking Greek, don’t feel bad =-p ) because JavaScript uses the same rules. I heard about this job fair when one of my friends, and former boss, on the old av told me about it and basically coerced me into going (don’t get me wrong, I’m glad she did; she rocks.) So please, if you’re the praying/good-thought-sending type, I’d appreciate anything you’ve got to offer that something comes to me SOON in the area of employment. I need it, BAD.

Due to aforementioned Undercity schmucks, I wound up going into the Showcase and just TPing to places that looked safe to TP to as a kid av, since I was feeling too lazy to relog as an adult or to put an adult av on. Debating if I should just get one adult shape in my inv here, besides the Library starter avs, just for the rare place I might need it. Anyway. I TPd to Mouse World, but a lot of people were there, so it was lagging badly. I went on their take on my FAVORITE childhood coaster, Space Mountain, (seriously, the year I was FINALLY tall enough to get onto it, I was THRILLED!) but it was so laggy I didn’t get to really appreciate it as I would have liked to. Still, I love the idea, and it’s a very nice sim, from what of it I saw. I also hit Grendel’s Children at one point, but it never quite rezzed right, so I left.

Another place in the Showcase list that had caught my attention a while ago, and seemed perfect to visit as a kid, was a sim called HappyMood. The creator is, not so surprisingly, Japanese (Hello Kitty, Tiny Snowfairy Sugar, St. Tail…that culture has mastered cute.) I took some pictures, including my current profile pic. I’m not smiling in that pic because my facial AO, in my braces, only has smiles that look either constipated or high. (The unhappy emotions look less…dumb.) The time stuff on the pics has to do with how long the viewer’s been running…not sure how that “Debug 0″ timer is calculated. I wish SL didn’t include those in pictures. Anyway, the pics:

Sitting by bunnies in the HappyMood sim

Overview of the part of the sim I saw

I looooooved playing on a rocking horse my Grandpa had at his house when I was an RL little girl.

Rocking horse chairs

You can also buy stuff to…um…be cute with:

Items for sale

This one’s my current profile pic.

Closeup of the other rabbit picture

BUNNIES!!!!

I definitely intend to return to that sim to poke around some more.

SLim fail

Janet — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:04:17 +0000

Before I created this avatar, Linden Labs released what I thought was a long-overdue “supplement” to Second Life, the SLim messenger. (Yes, I know calling it the “SLim messenger” is redundant. Tough.) I was ecstatic, because it meant a way to IM and keep contact with people, even during the times I don’t feel like logging into SL. Even now, if I’m logged in on one av in-world, the other’s in on SLim. Because of this, I found a rather irritating aspect of SLim, the topic of this post. I don’t expect LL to do a dang thing about it, but if anyone else is noticing what I did, this might explain to them why.

For an avatar to have access to SLim, they have to log in to SL at least once on voice, then “register” with Vivox, and all that. Supposedly that was the only time one needed to use voice, but at that point, I had voice on all the time anyway, so I didn’t think anything of it.

More recently, however, I’d turned off voice in SL. Voice works fine for me so long as no one has the audacity to, I dunno, TALK on it; if they do, it’s lag-city. Besides that, the SLvoice.exe application, while not a system pig like SL is, needs RAM and all that like anything else and I didn’t feel like wasting resources on something I couldn’t really use. Disabled voice, didn’t think much of it. Then I was looking at the SLim window for my alt, looked at my own in-world buddy list on this av, and realized these two avs were no longer showing up for each other. This, naturally, irritated me; all I want SLim for anyway is text IMs, so voice/no voice doesn’t matter to me. Turned voice back on in SL, and sure enough, that fixed it, but it annoys me that I have to activate that both a) to see SLim users on my friend list in-world, and b) to see in-world avatars on my SLim friend list. LL needs to make it so that’s not the case. Do I think they will? Of course not; somewhere between me taking a major hiatus from SL in 2006 and most of 2007, (suffice to say you know I’m seriously psychologically-not-well depressed when I’m too depressed to even log my butt into SL,) LL stopped being useful or helpful for much else besides keeping the grid online (mostly; I actually don’t have any beefs with them on that, but crud happens like everywhere else in life.)

So that’s that rant. I’m also throwing out two other tidbits from my weekend: the lawnmower hates me as much as I hate it, and apparently the “new rule” of the house is that I have to now be suspicious when Mom’s nice to me. Like, “OK, what is she going to try and manipulate me into doing?” suspicious. My mother. Yeah.

Been kicking around DJing a bit in SL, but my major concerns are bandwidth and other system-resource concerns, and whether I have enough songs that everyone would like to “keep it up” for very long. Most of the music I have is at least by Christian artists, even if not every last song is, “Hallelujah, Jesus r0×0rz” kind of thing. Genre-wise I’m actually pretty open, since lyrics are the important bit for me. There’s also the same problem I had while recording MnK on Friday: as far as my family’s concerned, SL’s just a 3D chatroom. That I’d talk to anyone from it besides text is something that would horrify them if they knew. (So anyone who heard my guest-host on MnK (downloadable here,) that was a ramped-DOWN version of my personality. Normally I’m even louder and more obnoxious, but everything hinged on my family NOT having any reason to pop their head in and ask who I was talking to. =-S ) So I’d probably not be able to talk on mic at all, and, say I’m doing a 2-hour set, I’d have to set it up so that I can step AFK as if I wasn’t doing anything at all. Also, I don’t pirate music, so what’s on my hard drive is the entire music library, so the odds of someone requesting something I have is seriously slim-to-nil, so I can’t take requests, which I know is a bummer for some people.

Blah…SL’s empty and I’m still annoyed about the mess with Mom that I blogged about yesterday. (Sorry again to everyone who read that. =-\ ) Current mood = frustrated.

Moving on to RL, Theology on Tap started for the summer at my parish tonight, but I didn’t go; topic looked dumb, speaker looked generic, figured, “Screw it.” The “social-warm-fuzzy” kind of religion doesn’t do a dang thing for me anyway (and I seriously question its power to “save” anyone.) I’m the youngest person in the young adult group there by ~5 years; no one from the high school youth group even goes to church anymore, and if Facebook’s any indication, most are no longer even Catholic, which confuses Dad, even though I spotted that one coming from a mile away…blindfolded. (Oh, and for those who actually read the link, no ours doesn’t include alcohol; it takes place in the same building Catechism classes are done in. I hate alcohol anyway, so I’d be drinking Sprite either way. =-p ) Add to that my general lack of desire to be social period anymore…yeah. (Seriously, about the only times I’m ever “social” IRL it’s either church or something to do with job hunting, such as a career fair or whatever.)

Anyway…I think I’m out of things to say for now…unless something monumental goes down before I go to bed. =-p Laters!