Twisted Firestarter

I will be updating infernalfencer shortly (I only got in a half-hour ago and was telling cholten99 all about it for the rest of it), but I think as a player I'd like to mention the following couple of things:

1) Being the Child of Fire sucks rocks -- apparently there's one in every generation, just like Slayers, and they have an equally short shelf life because they wind up consumed by their powers. Apparently one of them caused the Great Fire of London. Whoopee.

2) Some goombahs (Time Lords of Atlantis, apparently) were setting up a weapon on the roof of a car. I wanted to torch the gas tank and take it out -- people were scattering anyway so I thought it was safe enough. I have four levels of pyrokinesis and a Willpower of four. This gives me an automatic eight starting score for any pyrokinetic roll I make. I added a drama point to make sure I didn't fuck up -- that adds ten to your score, making my starting score eighteen. Then I had to add the roll of a d10 -- and tens explode, meaning you keep the ten and roll again. So I started with eighteen. Then rolled a ten. Then rolled another ten. Then rolled a four. Which gave me an end score of 42. Which, as well as being the Wholly Number, is also ten points (or three success levels) above the highest named success level in the game, the one called "God-Like". Which means that, as well as car, occupants and weapon, I took out most of Liverpool Street. However, because it was a time weapon, the destruction of this weapon threw everything back in time a few hours, negating the damage I did. Needless to say, history did not repeat.

3) Never smoke marijuana supplied by demons. It causes some serious hell.

I got my first two birthday presents. One was from Kat -- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which she kept insisting I would love. I guess I find out Friday; while cholten99 is out with his girlfriend, I'll cozy up to the TV with Chinese food leftovers (there are always Chinese food leftovers) and my new DVD.

The other was the "crap present" from cholten99 (the other one, he says, is being delivered and will be late): this.

Hee.

Thing is, people, it's still just under seven hours before my official birthday! 8:53 a.m. in this time zone.

[Edit: there can be no infernalfencer update until the bloody server stops being in read-only mode. Suck.]

Recall it's one year closer to my being dead

Practice time (it's the same as getting used to writing down the right year after 31 Dec):

How old are you?: 28.

(No, the gaming group, I am not rubbing it in.)

Five birthday LJ comments, three LJ entries in which I am wished a happy birthday, one birthday e-mail (my mother -- ack) ... and a birthday text message. This is new. Nice, but ... new. Modern technology seems to have phased out the whole messy tree-killing card thing. Thanks, all -- nice to wake up to.

(Edited more for a discovered spelling mistake, but for content while I was about it.)

Yeah, I haven't been up all that long. I went to bed at 4 a.m. and was awake on and off for an hour or so after that, so still kind of fuzzy. Bloody headache still has not gone away. One should not be ill on special occasions. It is sacrilege. On the other hand, at least I got my infernalfencer update done during the bout of insomnia, and it's not as if I have anything desperately urgent to do this morning. Afternoon. Whatever.

Except, of course, minding the cat and putting the final tweaks on Sunday's session notes and NPCs therein. Heeheehee.

Too Much To Think

So there was Chinese food and Kai Doh Maru. Which I really liked, and I think cholten99 liked as well. Well, he was really impressed by the artwork, anyway. It was actually really good -- facial features from Ghost in the Shell, background CGI stuff from Blood: The Last Vampire with that washed-out light colour scheme that you tend to get in medieval Japanese art. According to cholten99, it had something else in common with B:TLV; "it's very pretty and made fuck all sense". Which launched yet another conversation on the subject of good art v. enjoyable art. Apparently there's a lot out there that's good -- meritorious, anyway -- but isn't, in his opinion, particularly enjoyable.

Which led us on to American Beauty. He said that a lot of people said that it was uplifting but that he found it singularly depressing, so (being me) I tried to explain why I didn't find it depressing in the slightest. What I liked about it on the whole was that they didn't vilify death, and that they showed the true nature of the tragedy of death. It's not the victim that we should feel bad for, the film tells us -- not if he's lived well and ends well with no regrets to speak of. It's the survivors who suffer, not the dead. The dead are beyond that. It's an interesting outlook for a culture that, for the most part, believes in eternal bliss after death (if you were good) and divine forgiveness and then wails, "Oh, poor [so-n-so] is dead! Woe! Wooooooooe unto him!" If we were honest, and secure in our faith (should we have one), we would stop bloody well projecting our own suffering and loss on someone who's beyond caring what happens on this plane, whether there's a next one or not.

So maybe not uplifting, but definitely food for thought.

Which is where "good" art vs "enjoyable" art comes into play. It's just a variation on the meaning of the word "entertainment", I suppose -- some people just don't really enjoy thinking all that much. They'd prefer something that can let them coast along, taking in the pretty pictures or the funny one-liners and not tax them overmuch, intellectually speaking. I don't get that. As I've often said, I think too much; in fact, it's my natural state. I would suck at meditation, frankly, because the "no-mind" state just could not happen with me. Which means that for me, entertainment is something that stretches my natural tendency to think too much in new and interesting directions. So I listen to music and mull over meanings of lyrics, chord structure, harmonies and melodies that make the piece feel a certain way and so forth. I read and think of language, sentence structure, reasoning behind the use of specific words, how paragraphs are arranged, metre and tone. I look at art and think about use of colour, brush strokes, canvas size and how it all affects the mood of the piece -- well, that and how it fits into the two main categories of art, as discussed with ninja_arzt so long ago: Sex or Death? Theatre -- well, that's just Theatre Studies in voluntary application -- director's view of the piece v actor's view of character v writer's view of the whole thing, set and costume, blocking, lighting, SFX, line delivery, etc. And then there's the cinematic and televisual side of things, where you take all of that and add camera angles, mise en scene, target audience and so forth. I think too much but I enjoy it, most of the time. Of course, that's something to do with the fact that, while all that's going on in one level of my head, the rest of it can go, "Ha! He's funny!" or "Oooooooh. Pretty" or "This track rocks!" or what have you. Just, if I like it or hate it, I'd like to know why. Partly that's so that I know so I can use it as a benchmark for what to avoid next time, and the other reason is that it makes for good conversational topics later on.

Unfortunately, while you can do it with American Beauty or Kai Doh Maru or Amadeus (with the added bonus of the theatrical version versus the cinematic version), you can't really do it with, for example, Van Helsing. Of course, not even something like that is a conversational dead end because you can discuss, for example, the fact that the hideous overacting is a dead giveaway that the thing's a freakin' parody of the genre anyway and why on earth they settled for such hideously cheap-looking special effects in this day and age.

In short, to end this rambling diatribe, thinking too much means never having to say "I have nothing of interest to say". Of course, it also tends to mean annoying people who would rather just watch embryonic vampires explode into green goo without any of the commentary about how cheap, fake and senseless it all is, complete with logical reasons why.