Sometimes Sinner, Sometimes Saint

(That subject line’s not to say I like it being that way.) Read the rest of this entry »

But I’ll stick it behind one of these “read more” tags for those who care not to hear me whine. Read the rest of this entry »

But before that, I’m just going to toss out there that I think the volume dial on my laptop is possessed. =-p And being the ADD woman that I am, mini-story: last night/this morning was Insomnia Party at South Point Academy in Undercity. I finally logged after 2AM SLT, but at one point, Katsumi/Yaoi, Enz, Kyuui, and myself were in the basement of the Academy talking about demon possession of all things, though we hit other random topics.

Anyway, back to the subject line. RP in UC’s really slowed down for me, personally, as of late. Sunday evening, the story moved into “chapter 1,” and I was selected to be part of that, but I can only do so much RP-wise when no one else is there. =-\ To make things even funner, one of the people I RP with the most is thinking of RPing his character out, due to OOC stuff that I won’t get into here because I doubt he or anyone else involved would want me to. Grrr… I get that summer’s always slower for sims—I’ve been told that plenty, and when I was an RL kid, my family traveled plenty during the summer, and I’ve no doubt UC folks travel, too, but still… Doesn’t make it any easier for folks like me who don’t really have any first lives at the moment. I had a good “groove” going in RP, times where I was really getting “in character,” like totally forgetting that the woman behind the keyboard exists and I AM that character, and I’m worried I’m losing that. The little RP I have gotten to do has been feeling more and more strained, at least for me personally. (If that’s not coming across to anyone I’ve RP’d with…go me? I dunno…) And now someone who was vital at the beginning of UC, but then left, is back again, and I have no idea how that’s going to affect anything, if at all. *Sigh* If this were an RL RP, like DnD or something, schedules are easier to coordinate—at the very least, we’re all in the same bleeding time zone. You can actually say, “OK, we’ll all meet at Joe’s or Starschmucks or whatever at 7PM this Wednesday,” and reasonably expect people to show and be ready to RP. Not so in SL. Rai’s in Europe, and everyone else is scattered throughout the US, most people have “RL” that has to be satiated before SL can be indulged in, etc.

Still looking for a job, but that’s going no where fast. (Thank you, Mr. President, for all your anti-business rhetoric; that’ll drive the economy forward, really. (And before anyone whines, I had my criticisms of President Bush, but I try to avoid waxing politics on here; religion, I’m confident in speaking on, politics not so much.))

I’m due to guest host MnK this weekend, and as I told Koffee, I am somewhat nervous, but I likened it to the nerves I had like in 5th grade before my first band concert. Koffee showed me the MnK studio in K-Grid, and that was pretty neat, though I look funky in K-Grid. I’m not sure how, but I had the K-Grid viewer and SL running at once and my laptop DIDN’T blow up. I’m pretty sure it only held up bandwidth-wise because Dad wasn’t home yet; when he’s home, he streams video like there’s no tomorrow, because silly me introduced him to podcasting, so now he just downloads all his boring politics podcasts, and what he can’t podcast, he streams, which isn’t great for me, either. My ex was in a state 7 hours away from me, and we used to use Skype a lot, and if Dad was video streaming, good luck with us getting Skype to work. Video gets disconnected, voice gets disconnected 5 min. later, text is the only thing reliable at that point. However, this Friday it looks like Dad’ll be working late, (long story; he usually doesn’t on Fridays,) so I should have zero problems with MnK guest-hostage. Host-age….blah English. I remember one time I was talking to someone, my ex, I think, and I meant busy-ness, but I spelled it business, because that’s how English is “supposed” to “work,” and he was rather confused on what I was talking about. Anyway, there I go rambling on again…Friday evening’s going to be, ahem, interesting, so everyone better be in-world at noon SLT on Saturday to hear it. =-p

Almost 2AM SLT, so I should REALLY be getting to sleep. Nini! o.o/

Thinking of putting a playlist together of whatever’s on my compy (since I can’t afford any new musics =-( ) to make a “soundtrack” for my Undercity RP. It’d basically be something for me to listen to as I begin RP for the day, some songs to put my mind “in character,” others to remind me of how she was feeling, what was happening, etc., when I last left UC, etc. Some might even just make sense to the whole of the city itself in my brain. File this post under “Janet thinking aloud.” =-p
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So in UC, Murdoch, the 2nd-in-command “superior” to my character, managed to get himself into another fight tonight (Monday). Being the “I-want-to-protect-everyone” girl that she is, she gets involved. She can now add “poison-knife scar” to her list of battle scars, but the fight wasn’t as eventful as the last. That’s fine, though, really. It had its purpose in the plot, and that’s the important part. Read the rest of this entry »

So Undercity was kinda frustrating today in the getting-everyone-I-need-for-my-character-on-at-once sort of way. Out of the blue, I get an IM from one Koffeekid Smalls. He answered one of the questions I’d posed in this blog before, once again amazing me that anyone actually reads my rambling. (I do this as much to organize my own thoughts as anything else. Most of my RL “world” doesn’t “get” why I like the internet as I do, let alone why I’d even play Second Life, let alone again why I’d do so as a kid, so I can’t just vent on my RL blogs. Ever since I was an RL kid, writing things out helped me process them. ADD = thousands of threads screaming in the brain at once, and writing lets me grab one thread and focus on it.) Anyway. Then he asks me if I want to go visit his SL “home.” He TPd me over and I got to meet his SL-cousin, Adz, who I’ve met before, though not in that “role,” and his SL-mother, who again I’m pretty sure I’ve seen before, I think at a set her SL-husband did when I was a pretty new alt. It was kind of funny to meet someone who’s been in SL even longer than I have. XD Anyway, so I got to see parts of the house, and it’s HUUUUUUUUUUGE!!!!!! I’m continually amazed at the size of builds people pull off in SL. I tried to build a “book” for Mal, a 6-year-old Kitty-Fang in Undercity, to “learn to read” with, and that was, for me, a pain, and it’s just a flat box with a texture from The Cat in the Hat on it. Anyway. So Koffee and Adz showed me the family room, which had RL photos of everyone, and that was cool, though RL pictures in SL confused my brain every now and again, (doesn’t take much =-p ), and then I got to see the boys’ bedroom, which was neater than any RL boy’s room I’ve ever seen. XD (To match some of the guys I went to college with would, I think, involve enough prims to crash the sim. =-p ) Adz had Scouts today, and he must have eaten a lot of cookies, because he was bouncing off the walls, the ceiling, and everything else. It reminded me of Girl Scouts when I was an RL kid (I did that 1st grade through 4th,) and at the end of the day, my Ritalin was always wearing off, so some poor mom got to deal with me unmedicated, and I’ll be the first to admit I was a handful! XD So eventually he crashed off of sugarness, and logged off soon thereafter. Koffee and I talked about random stuffs. Apparently he read one of the same book series as a kid that I did, The Baby-Sitters Club, which I read just about every last book of, I think. Religion even came up at one point, and I normally can be kinda…hmmm…good word…”aggressive” will have to do at almost 2AM, in my “zeal” for my own faith, but the brain-mouth filter showed a random act of…function…please English, stop falling out of my brain, kthxbai! X_X Anyway, it was really cool, but then Koffee crashed because…SL’s Murphy’s Law said he had to, I think…I dunno. Anyway, I think his mom realized he’d logged off, probably because there was this lone green dot, a non-friend, i.e. me, where the yellow dot of her son had been, so she came up to make sure I was “alright,” I guess. I waited about half an hour, since I got tied up in some IMs anyway right after he crashed (actually, I think he might have frozen up before being logged, because he stopped responding kinda out of the blue.)

Oh yeah…Undercity should be interesting this week…Murdoch’s going to declare war yet again, I think, and there’s something at stake this time that means enough to my character that she will likely not argue him. She has her priorities, I guess. That girl basically “lives” on a partition of my own brain, like she’s a virtual machine, kinda. (Yes, I do have to geekify everything.) What’s annoying is when her emotions start to bleed through to me. I had one night I didn’t sleep a wink because the character had about a million thoughts in her brain and I couldn’t turn it “off.” (I also had a cold, but I was pretty much over it by that point.) My character’s like half me at 12, half me now, with a smattering of this, that, and whatever. She’s more contemplative than I was at that age, I think, but the nature of the RP almost dictates that she’d have to be. I also did a bit of “wishful thinking” with her, in that I gave her basically perfect parents, whereas I, the woman behind the keyboard, grew up in a house that would charitably be described as “emotionally abusive.”

Question of the moment (week, month, whatever I feel like): for those who do any kind of RP in SL (i.e. it’s not just a 3D chatroom for you, like it mainly is for me with my other avatar,) what kind of “limits” do you have, and why? I’ll start with one example: I would never consent to an RP situation, even in a place as grisly as Undercity, that involved my character, or any other character, being raped or anything like that. Besides the LL rules against child avatars and things sexual, there’s just some things that I think aren’t…appropriate, proper, something like that, to RP. I have 2 friends IRL who have been raped and one more sexually assaulted (that I know of,) and I went to high school with a schmuck who sexually harassed every girl in our instrument’s section except for me, (thanks be to God,) so that, to me, is just too serious to “trivialize” by using it in RP. Still, that’s my personal RP limit; what anyone else does is between them and whatever divinity they worship, even if that divinity is nothing more than themselves. I can only pray and do what I think is right, “lead by example,” I guess.

OK, I’m starting to make more and more mistakes, so I think it’s time for me to stop rambling and just post the dang thing.

(One aspect of this post reflective of how I wrote as an RL kid: paragraphs were my enemy, especially when typing! XD )

Nini!

*Shifty eyes* I know someone is reading this, because this blog was quoted at the Milk ‘N’ Kookies exhibit at SL6B. (I’d provide a SLurl, but I’m not in-world right now.) Whee!

Quotes regarding the Milk 'N' Kookies show from its exhibit at SL6B

As I presume is wide public knowledge by now, (for starters, it was talked about on The Milk ‘N’ Kookies Show,) Plinker Blinker {sp?} was permabaned from SL. I knew yesterday that her stores in Undercity had been banlined, but since they’d been just that, I thought it’d all work out. I didn’t realize at that point that she’d been banned for good. Rai, the Underground (aka Undercity,) sim’s owner and bill-payer, was naturally not thrilled that Linden Labs just put up ban lines and didn’t even tell him. Plinker’s now on K-Grid and supposedly is planning on moving her operations over there.

So how’d the ban happen, one may ask? Read the rest of this entry »

OK, I stand corrected that Undercity for Wednesday was a bust. After I finished an IC-conversation with Josh, (which gives my character some context for other stuff going on; before she was in the dark,) I notice traffic gathering around rAg tower. I hit the elevator, go down there, and see a fight going on. A launch on the de-ruthing rocket later, where I can actually SEE avatars, my character joins in. Murdoch was being beaten up on some bad info, (long story,) but my character’s young brain doesn’t process much beyond, “Friend being beaten up, idiots standing by watching, must do something.” Well, she manages to keep Lars and Enz distracted, which worked well for the fight. OH MY GOSH it had my heart pounding for REAL! I mean I was PUMPED in my real-world body, adrenaline kicking, all that. The adrenaline, though, I think did really help with getting into my character’s “mindset,” because she’s going to have a lot more of it going through her, since the guns pointed at her can kill. (Got a shot though Lars’ arm and got a bullet to buzz just by Enz’s ear! Epic awesome win! XD)

So yeah, uber-excited for tomorrow. Sooooo glad I got involved with Undercity. ^_^ I get why games like DnD are always so popular. (Though having to do combat totally in text does have its drawbacks, but oh well.)

OK, 3AM I really should be asleep…must calm down…*deep breath*

Oyasuminasai! [Good night!]

Blah…after last night’s mess, plus some drama this afternoon, darn near no one’s in Undercity period, let alone wanting to RP. RP’d with Luneris (”Koji”) and Tearroar (”Sebastian”) some, but I’m not terribly important to the story line of either, (and I don’t mean that in a bad way or to be complaining—just a simple statement of fact,) so it didn’t really go anywhere. Folks important to my storylines were mostly MIA, though I did get some good RP out of Koji and Sebastian. (Basically, some little-voice-in-the-back-of-the-head doubts my character had were put to rest.)

I REALLY hope things are back to normal by tomorrow. =-(

Alright, this’ll probably be borderline ranting, but here goes.

So Undercity got “griefed” Tuesday night, the 16th of June. Some random lady comes into rAg tower, while I was AFK, (but I got the chatlog,) takes a shot of a picture in there, and ARs it. OK, whatever. If she’d done what I’ve done on the RARE (seriously, like 3 times since I joined in 2005,) occasions I’ve ARd something, TPed out and let the Lindens handle it, would have been a normal evening and I could have had some fun RP. We all could have. But nope, apparently that wasn’t good enough for her or the guy she was with.
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