The Thessaliad Redux

I am now in possession of the following:

* A little container of Season-All Seasoned Salt (a brand of which you can't get here)
* St Hubert BBQ Sauce mix
* Sloppy Joe seasoning
* Multi-pack of oatmeal (apple & cinnamon, cinnamon and spice, and my personal favourite, maple and brown sugar)
* New shampoo, conditioner and shower gel from a nifty new herbal cosmetics, toiletries & sundries shop
* A very pretty white gold bracelet / earrings set
* The complete series of Angel on DVD box set
* An Oyster card that reads me as having unlimited travel between zones 1-4 for the next three months
* A receipt for two pairs of varifocal spectacles, one of which are prescription sunglasses, to be picked up in 7-10 days
* Much shorter hair

Happy belated birthday *squee*! My mother's awesome sometimes. She also wants me to take her shopping more often, because she's finally realised that I have a kind of radar for good places to shop and eat and wants to take full advantage of it as well as spend time with me.

In other news, a "You will be sadly missed" to doccy, whose RL has eaten him to the point that he has now had to retire from the Werewolf ST-ship over on Jus Noctis. Hope you're okay, man, and thanks for all the Doom.

At some point, I'll have to go into detail about the recent developments in Changeling and Mage, but that's rants for another time. For the time being, I'll just enjoy the lack of utter batshit crazy, and look forward to taking dodgyhoodoo's RDM through various bits and pieces of Vana'diel so he can get some more of his stone monument impressions, his Mea crystal and a first-hand look at Windurst. And then go play a sociopathic vampire who tortures people for 'fun' and talks to the dead in her spare time.

My friends are sweeties. Just so you know.

Couldn't sleep last night, so did some faff and checked my LJ comments etc, and found that beepbeep had, as a birthday present, bought me paid time on my LJ. Now this thing doesn't expire until January 2009! Such a sweetheart.

Anyway, morning came ... and went without me noticing, as I was asleep. Afternoon, however, was a different story. I woke up, threw some clothes on, checked my FFXI garden - Taru rice! A whole stack! And lots of fire crystals! And I had rock salt and distilled water and everything! All I needed was some kelp and I could up my cookery skill some more! So now I have four stacks of rice balls on sale at the AH and a cooking skill of 31. Oh, and cleared out some of the stuff cluttering up my MH - a definite bonus. Also, someone was selling packets of vegetable seeds cheap so I bought a stack of those, but I'm going to wait until my garden's empty and my Moogle asks for its first lot of time off before I plant those. I need the space.

Then pre-Mage lunch, which was lovely - they've got a new chef and a whole new restaurant set over at the Heffalump so while my much-abused stomach isn't quite liking the idea of Thai green curry, I thoroughly enjoyed it while I was eating it. And weaselbitch got me a copy of the new Stephen King, Lisey's Story, which sounds really interesting, so yay!

Then Mage - weaselbitch has quotes, but on the whole, they're gearing up for Armageddon. And of course, I'm playing with their heads a bit, but what's a ST for?

So okay - no job, possibly no US trip, and currently a recurrence of hell-migraine, but there are some things to look forward to:

1) Mage-Doom
2) Stuff with darkdanc3r on Thursday
3) Lying in tomorrow (at least there's that...)
4) Getting paid at least some money on Friday
5) Equus in March
6) Three new books
7) Valentine's Day, sort of (I think the best course of action, given my skintness, is to send dodgyhoodoo out for groceries and cook him something really nice, then snuggle up in front of Time Bandits or something)

I try to keep positive. I'm obviously not the pessimist I tend to think I am.

Still ill.

Must go get passport application forms tomorrow. Whoopee. But hey, US trip!

Application for Canadian birth certificates = minimal red tape. Wow.

BST still sucks as a job.

New job Monday. Had better be better.

And angusabranson selling off many Mage: the Awakening books at nice low prices that I still can't afford, mostly due to having been off work this week. Miss sick pay. Still, birthday coming up. Might get lucky.

...In a very belated birthday surprise, I just got a combination TV/DVD player.

Not that I want to sound ungrateful, but WTF? I am not used to my friends buying me anything this ... um ... huge? Expensive? I don't know. It's freaky. Not necessarily bad, but freaky. Meep.

Uh. Yeah.

So real world news first, while my late evening snack-thing (chips) cooks:

1) Mark and Kat said specifically, "Why don't we meet at our place at 2 and nibble stuff there so we can wrap early?" Then were late by dint of collecting sticky buns. Left us standing out there for up to 20 minutes (but that was because nadriel was early). This, people, is why I didn't want them giving me a lift. Thank you.

2) The denizens of Sourcebook Central are so very nice to me. Not so nice to my back, but nice to me. See, as my birthday was all recent and everything, they got me presents! Azumanga Daioh volume 2 and the nWoD sourcebook. Of course, I think there was some ulterior motive in that last, as dodgyhoodoo's comment was "Heh. Heh. Heh", but still, new sourcebook and possible hours of gaming fun! Plus new manga. *squee* Thanks, guys!

3) I think someone ripped off Budgens. There were packets of cigarettes (all different brands and all full) scattered all over the car park. Oh, and one packet of biscuits.

4) Claire rang just before I came in. Something in The Guardian which is apparently right up my street. (Claire knows my street now? Bizarre.) Not really in the mood to talk job shit -- my head still hurts and I'm still goddamn tired -- so I think I'll let her drop whatever it is off with cholten99 at quiz tomorrow. Sorry, but right now I can't even decide if I want to try going into work tomorrow, much less what I'm going to do next. I seem to have hit self-punishment alley for no good reason, if I'm even considering going back to a workplace whose treatment of me has caused migraines, insomnia and general hell on earth.

And now, for the interesting bit: game.

( This house is now a mortuary... )

Work tomorrow? Yes? No? Thought brings headache. Agh.

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.

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.]