The Thessaliad Redux

Well, whaddya know? My Hollow City vampire was approved. Maybe I'll find some merits to playing a Camarilla vamp that weren't obvious to me previously. *shrug* Of course, neither of the people I online-game with on a regular basis play vamps, so I'm going to have to edge my way into things all over again. But then again, the vamp ST has a vested interest in keeping me interested, as I rolled up that character specifically because he was whimpering about needing more social vamps, so yay.

In other news, leopard_lady poked me last night and sent me a link to The Kensington Leopard" in what I think was a subtle, fly-by hint to write something for submission to this gallery of geekiosity. Which, you know, sure. The Games section looks kinda empty, and I've had a few essay ideas limping around in my brain for awhile now so it's probably about time I got something going on this.

In other news, office stuff. Some guy who I think might be on our editorial board has sent us in a paper with 87 references on it. Our limit is 25. Surely he should know better? So I've had to tell him 'no way in hell' as nicely as I can. Watch me get a bollocking. Just watch.

So far, in the games I actually play in (albeit online):

Grace: My Glass Walker Galliard Garou is screwing up an attempt to make nice with San Francisco. I mean abysmally. On the plus side, despite it being about half past one in the morning, managed to make $3.82 busking on a street corner. Not quite what she had in mind, but still. I like the new co-lead Werewolf ST on Hollow City. Must make a point to thank him/her for the chance to do something once this thread is wrapped (don't want to look like I'm sucking up).

Nina: My Dreamspeaker isn't up to much beyond meeting up with the new boy in Charleston (Jericho Hobbes) and, after having spent hours making a peace pipe for the bloody Hermetic yammerer heading up the Spirit seminar, left it on a table in the open chantry (in a spaghetti box) so that he would eventually come by and pick it up. So far he hasn't, and it's been moved from table to kitchen drawer, from kitchen drawer to bottom shelf of the fridge and from bottom shelf of the fridge back to table again by a Verbena fighting the temptation to open it, a stoned Ecstatic and a confused Dreamspeaker respectively. Soon there will be Dreamspeaker confab. Don't know what that's about but will soon find out.

Lorrie: My Corax has just had to explain the White Howlers to an uneducated hick without using any Garou terms or vocabulary above third-grade level, because said uneducated hick was born to Black Spiral Dancer kin and is pretty-shiny-white-pelted while in Crinos. And the Wyrm whispers to him. Lorrie has also told the Wyrm, "You're weak, you're pathetic, you're all mouth and your mother dresses you funny". Yeah, nice to see I'm following a grand and noble tradition of insulting the Wyrm to its face and probably getting squished. But c'mon; she's a Corax and this is what they do. Laugh in the face of evil, peck out one of its eyes and fly like buggery.

I am so bored. I don't want to be here. This is not a day when people should be working. This should be a holiday. It's too damn bright, hot and sunny for work! There ought to be laws against this sort of thing. I suppose I'm just a little narked because some lucky bitches get to go off to MoCCA this weekend while I'm in London sweltering and either building houses or blowing up worms, depending on mood Saturday. Then again, one lucky bitch did offer to get me a sketch of Faye from Questionable Content (J Jacques, Jennie Breeden, John Allison ... and I'm missing it. Why are there never cons in England? Oh, right, because no one comes from here and no one wants to come here. Bah), so it could be worse. Plus Mage on Sunday (extra sessions yay). Still ... comic con...

Right. Back to some work, I suppose.

When the calendar flipped over to 6/6/06, about half the Christian population decided that the End was Nigh, and a fair few of the rest told everyone to "be careful on that day". Apparently, some heavily pregnant women have been going to great lengths to keep from giving birth to their children on that date. And I'm sure various nuts have been watching the skies for rains of toads and such.

However, I say bollocks to rains of toads and other conventional signs of Armageddon. Apocalypse may well be coming, but its signs came, to me at least, in a form that no one expected.

Someone actually paid some attention to me in my Hollow City game.

That's right; after months of ST-free living, I finally have something that might represent plot in that game. On the one hand, I say "woo-hoo!" and celebrate the fact that I'm not just completely ignored on that board. On the other hand, given that I submitted my application in late February, the suddenness of my reintegration as a character in San Fran is ... well, kinda creepy. I really am starting to think I should be looking for rains of toads.

(Oh, and I don't have the heart to tell the evident East Coaster that he's not going to find a CVS in San Francisco and should instead be looking for a Walgreens. Do your research, people; do I play in RPs set in the US and expect to find a Boots?)

In other news, I finished the Dark Tower series at long last. I suppose the LotR comparison's been made before, given that they have similar themes and such, but while it has that epic sense, DT also has similar problems to LotR. Needlessly long descriptive passages, for one. Sometimes, no matter how good a story is, it really does just flounder under its own weight. Still, there are moments (Callahan in the Dixie Pig, the outcome of Susannah's last door) where my heart just sort of fluttered and, as I do with many books, I fell in love a little.

Then, of course, I read the ending. The worst part about reading these things on public transport is that you can't yell, "Oh, you've got to be fucking kidding me" at the book you're reading for fear of being considered a loony. Not that it was bad; not even that it was unexpected, per se. Just that it wasn't fair. He can say what he likes about it being "the right ending"; it felt like a cheat. Much like King's own role in the series felt like a cheat. I suppose a bit of disappointment after an undertaking of that size is only natural, but this is just ... hate to admit it, but this is me saying, "Yeah, it really is time you hang up your jock, Mr King. I love your work but take a vacation, huh?"

*sigh* Anyway. Work. Feh.

Hmmkay. I got news on board XP expenditure.

First thing I asked about was Primal Urge, which I somehow neglected to buy at character creation. Generally speaking, you need to have a thread on the boards showing where you'd practiced to learn whatever the hell it is you're learning, but they'll make exceptions if it's an obvious background hole. Now here, I had both bases covered; while it wasn't my first XP session, I had at least two threads where Primal Urge had kicked in to detect Garou, which I figured might count as practice. I was right, and can have a dot in Primal Urge shortly.

Then I asked about Spirit Speech, a level 1 Werewolf Gift that lets you talk to spirits and address them on their own level -- good for summonings and such. Now, you can learn this from any spirit, so I thought that the easiest way to learn this was to find a friendly spirit and learn from them. This is actually fairly simple, because the character learning this has a little merit called Machine Affinity. According to the merits listing, this not only gives bonuses when dealing with any technological spirit but means that the spirits of machines tend to spontaneously awaken in the character's presence. The character, being a dancer and a lover of music (Galliard), has a battered old discman that she's been carrying around on her travels and such for the last six years or so. You'd figure that, after six years and more, the spirit of that machine will be a) well and truly awake and b) rather kindly disposed towards my character. So a great spirit to ask for that sort of Gift; after all, she gave it life, in a sense, and has been feeding it batteries and good music and generally keeping it in as much repair as possible for six years, so teaching her to talk and listen to it properly seems a small enough boon.

However, the head ST decided that the call on that one should be made by the Werewolf ST. I have spoken of the Werewolf ST in previous rants. She has decreed that the character must travel to the Umbra (okay...) and deal with the spirit directly (well, duh) and barter goods or services, which apparently will involve some kind of quest.

...Okay. Say what? Look, I get that in general, you don't want to make this shit too easy to learn, but it's a Level 1 Gift that, quite frankly, guarantees nothing. Just because you can talk to them doesn't necessarily mean they're going to listen, after all. If I was asking for Control Complex Machine or Paw of the Newborn Cub, I would understand, but this? Seems overkill. But even still, okay, fine ... if it was anybody else STing. However, I'm not seeing where the ST in question is going to be particularly helpful in running a quest, frankly. The last thread I was involved in with her was with her as that bloody kid mage, and I spent over a week trapped in that thread, waiting for time to tick on so I could actually game at all. And that was when she wasn't doing anything else on the boards at the time. Now, though, she's got three characters involved in two separate threads, one of which is particularly traffic-heavy and important, so given the circumstances and following on trends at this point, I'm thinking I'll pencil my 'quest' in for a three-week time slot somewhere around half-past 2008.

Seriously, come on. No, it shouldn't be phenomenally easy to get Gifts etc all the time. However, if someone wants to spend their XP on one of the simpler Gifts and has a good story to back it up (which you have already stated will result in a good bit of business in a thread somewhere), why not bloody well let them get on with it? What's the point of having XP if you won't let your characters bloody well spend it without going through gods-know-what to even get something simple? Why is there no flexibility here? *sigh* If it weren't for the fact that my Caregiver-natured character is currently associated with an emotionally scarred eclipse-born Ahroun who'd go mental and/or harano if the first real friend she's made in four years went AWOL, I'd be gone like a cool breeze. As it is, I don't know what I'm going to do. If Spirit Speech is this hard to get, requesting answers from the City Father? Probably not gonna happen. Shit.

Those of you on my friends list who know Werewolf are gonna have to help me out here, because I have to admit to being a little stumped on something that's come up recently in the Hollow City game. (Admittedly, it doesn't touch on my character and may never do, given, but I'm soliciting opinions anyway.)

( LJ-cut for your skimming convenience. )

That said, I'm still waiting for some godsdamned plot. dodgyhoodoo is working on his character background, though, so at least there'll be a third person in Grace's little pack at some point, provided he gets accepted.

It's a slow day and I am so bored. Someone save meeeee...

So far, it's been a nice relaxing weekend. Mostly I've spent it watching Buffy DVDs and doing the Hollow City thing. However, we did go out to see Silent Hill again, which was fun, particularly since it was as good as it was the first time. It's always nice to hear, for example, the loud buggers sitting behind you in the audience start shutting up as things get creepy. Though a fair few of the teens / young adults who came out of the cinema were basically saying, "It was really good, but I didn't understand very much of it..." *sigh* It really means nothing to the general populace unless it's the dramatic equivalent of a big neon sign, doesn't it?

In Hollow City news, my character has just become the alpha of her own brand new, very small pack. Which is going to be very interesting, given that she's just been made aware of a rather serious Litany violation in the form of two Garou having a romantic relationship. (Shadow Lord and Bone Gnawer, if you know Werewolf; someone's slumming it...) We can blame Windy for this. We love the kiddie-mage, really. Of course, if Grace hadn't got used to the way Windy talks, she would have missed the whole thing, like Karyn did. White didn't miss it, but that's not really something Grace knows. All Grace knows is that most tribes take that part of the Litany as seriously as she does and she personally doesn't seem like it matters. "Garou shall not mate with Garou" was meant to be a preventative measure against metis, and now we have birth control. Its a Glass Walker thing. So now Grace is a pack alpha with a total stranger's secret, and a whole other pack is talking about silencing her. Possibly by force. Of course, her enforcer is a Uktena Ahroun, so that's helpful. Plus a Dodge pool of seven.

Anyway, tonight I'm cooking prime rib, and then tomorrow is Changeling. I need to sit down and at least give a bit of a think about what's next. I've been too busy trying to sort out a way to get Mage sorted out to really give it a lot of thought. But that, I guess, is what writeups are for. Whee.

Things we are expecting from Amazon soon:

1) Firefly OST
2) Serenity OST
3) Carnivale OST
4) Movies in Fifteen Minutes, by the ever-talented cleolinda. Samples can be found on m15m

And I say *squee*!

Still not king. This is getting irritating. Though Windy/"Dodges Traffic" (OTP) just keeps getting funnier.

Also, I might have found a way to save Mage. Note I said "might". It will involve going back to the three-player setup, but it worked out well enough that way, I guess. But nothing firm, so ... yeah.

There's something I'm not understanding. Gross incompetence in the workplace, particularly where it affects people's safety, generally results in a grand old sacking. So why the hell is it that, when over 1000 foreign prisoners were being released from prison and not deported when they were supposed to be (and, in 16% of cases, were recommended for deportation on release), Clarke's not quitting because Blair told him not to? Good morning, Mr Blair! This is your alarm call! Gross negligence and incompetence calls for a sacking! 20% of those released and not deported were released into society after Clarke was aware of the problem, so he let all those people out on the street when they should have been deported by the government's own rules why? BECAUSE HE IS SCREWING UP. I understand that Blair needs loyal people by him right now, as he's basically hanging on to the last tattered vestiges of his credibility at the moment, but this? Not helping.

Oh, yeah, and his NHS 'reforms'. 'Deforms', more like. I remember a few years ago how I wanted to retrain to be a nurse. Any idea how glad I am I didn't do so now? Seriously; a few years ago, it was all, "We need more nurses. Desperately need more nurses. Let's give them free training and throw money at them because frankly, the Service doesn't run without them. At all." Now it's redundancies a-go-go and hiring freezes, so all these lovely, highly-trained people are now stuck stacking shelves at Tesco. What happened to, "The Service cannot run without the nurses"? News flash, people: it still can't run without the nurses. The only people more indispensible in hospitals are the admin staff, and it's a very narrow margin. The doctors? They barge in once in awhile, prod at people, make diagnoses and occasionally actual administer treatment. Then they go away. Nurses are there all the time. They monitor the patient, ensure their daily needs are met and administer a lot of basic treatment. More to the point, because they're there all the time, patients talk to them more readily than they will a doctor about the little things, and that information is indispensible to a doctor later on when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.

Stupid fucking short-sighted middle management arseholes who don't understand that cuts cannot be made in the perceived "lower rungs" of the NHS because frankly, they're the only people who know what the fuck they're doing! Cut nurses, and you lose a valuable source of information and patient treatment options. Cut admin, and the entire place falls apart in a flurry of missed appointments, unpaid invoices and patient complaint forms. Here's another wake-up call for Tony Blair. If you want to save the NHS some money, and thus save the NHS? Cut the middle management! Or at least make sure it works properly! Let's have fewer of these white-collar arseholes who do little more than run around doing disruptive inspections of staff practice and then setting all kinds of targets that no one can meet because the money they need to meet the targets is being sucked up by this white-collar arsehole's salary. Let's have Health and Safety departments that, rather than flagging up piddling health problems in the staff and hand out bitty pamphlets about how to deal with them in the workplace, ensures that the working environment is safe for everyone. No sitting temps or newbies at ergonomic nightmare desks next to photocopiers, no making secretaries do their typing shtick in darkened rooms for more than an hour at a stretch just because the department got caught off-guard by the long-planned building works in the admin office, no persecuting staff for having previously suffered psychiatric problems. And please, please let's have Human Resources departments who provide for their staff rather than ignoring them until they feel the need to persecute, demote or outright sack them. Honestly, with everything I've seen in the last five years or so, I am not in the least surprised that the NHS is tanking, and I could probably solve the problem a lot better than these government bods. Of course, that's assuming that Blair's not running the NHS into the ground so that private becomes not only the better option but the only option.

Did I mention I want to live in a sane country again?

We got a phone call from the agency that got me this job. They asked to speak to Michael. The bit of the conversation I heard after that was essentially, "No, we're all fine here. No, settled in well. No, we really don't need anyone else right now." I think this means that I have 'improved' (read: got better at navigating Ham-Fisted Editor's bullshit) and I can keep my job. Good. We couldn't afford me being unemployed.

I went out shopping for more herbs yesterday. I haven't organised or even thought about how to use 'em yet, but I've got 'em. Whee. Incidentally, Golden Seal? A total bitch, thank you. Over £17 for 25g! Ack!

STILL NOT KING. Talon and I wound up amusing ourselves (due to extraordinary lack of RP opportunity, as still not king) by having our respective characters having something of a meta-bit of IM RP. It ended up with a pillow fight in which we were using our Gifts to cheat (both Garou). It basically went like this:

KARYN: I could so totally cheat.
GRACE: Yeah, I know. So could I.
KARYN: How?
GRACE: Persuasion. "Stand still a minute..." *tickle* *whump*
KARYN: ACK! Oof! *drops shroud* (which means to drop isolated bit of darkness to which the caster is immune on the scene) *whump*
GRACE: Ah. It's all gone--OOF! [[Mindspeak]] ...you dirty little cheat.

Which is why, I suppose, you don't get into a fight with a Garou. Any kind of fight. Particularly not with dizzy Galliard bimbos and Uktena Ahrouns who are learning how to do the fun goofball thing.

It's been another one of those days where there's been next to nothing to do except sort out stuff and take shit from people. Then I go home and cook dinner (but fajitas, yay). I am so. Unbelievably. BORED.

I have discovered that the Hollow City is all booked up with Ravnos. So no Ravnos-bitch. HOWEVER. They are having a serious shortage of Nosferatu, Toreador, Ventrue and, unless things have changed, Malkavians. In fact, they haven't rescinded this yet, so you actually get five extra freebies if you play a Malk, Toreador or Nos. I don't really want to play a Nos, Ventrue would bore me to death and my favourite Toreador concept is too close to my Glass Walker Galliard. So I'm thinking, Malkavian. I think I'll wait until I get home and have the books in front of me to properly roll it up, but I do have something in mind...

Moo. Hoo. Ha. Ha.

The fun I could have with Dementation.

I have been having a genuinely good time on Hollow City thus far. Not only did that one stupid Coffeeshop Mindscape Juvie Marauder thing (okay, not really, but it sounds cool) actually move a bit, but my character has actually got to know people yay! Fine, helping someone unload a U-Haul does not generally make for the most exciting roleplaying in the world, but for the "getting-to-know-you" bit, it's quite fun. I've been talking to the character's mun for awhile now, and we'd mentioned how it'd be neat if our characters met up; I just took the opportunity as it was presented. So now our characters have done the full-on 'formal introductions' deal ("Grace Curran. One Ragabash in DC refuses to call me anything but 'Dances-Skyclad-for-Singles', but I don't think that counts. Galliard. Glasswalker. Homid, or Monkey, depending on who you're hanging out with. And pretty much bottom of the totem pole, rank-wise" meets "Karyn Oliver Whispering Inferno, Cliath Ahroun Uktena". Guess who takes their life more seriously...) and are hauling a sofa with Grace asking how Karyn feels about cheesy 80s romantic comedies as an aside to 'do you have any hobbies?' Well, it's better than, while asking for directions to where the pack hangs out, adding an aside to the effect of, "Oh, and I'm also looking for a good ballet studio, a dojo and a reasonably upmarket strip club..."

Well, she is.

On the subject of roleplaying, looks like we're giving Changeling a miss this weekend. It's a small enough group that we can't really afford to lose anyone, and the set-up means that neonchameleon's character would be rather missed if neonchameleon was absent. I know the rule is generally, "One player down, we're still on" but I think that only works for a) really well established groups or set-ups and/or b) set-ups with more than three players in them. Oh well. Lie-in on Sunday.

I'm so glad this is a short week. I don't want to go to work today. I want to stay home in bed. Having to come back to work for the full five days after all that holiday would just be too cruel.