Sporatic Rumblings from the Elitist

So, I remembered that I have a Livejournal. Imagine that. This LJ has been around since 2002, so I guess it's always there when I need to scribble some things down and it'll be longer than 140 Characters. I also have a dreamwidth I've never used, I forgot about it I guess. I should poke that too.

In any case, what is this post? This is just a scribbling for myself for a Character that I run on game. His Shadowname is Nimrod. He is a Censor. He's a Thyrsus. And, he's Mysterium. If you aren't interested, then this is pretty much all you gotta read. I felt like writing a revised version of his backstory to make more sense to me. Now,that he's nearly a year old and I know him fairly well.

( Censor )

So, every so often. I get some trickles from the Five Rings Online players who still hate themselves and play there. Every so often it's pretty lulzy and I do post here. Sometimes, I wonder why Alderac allows them to use their game so poorly managed that it borders on Slander on their product.

A friend of mine, who unfortunately doesn't live on the LJ, still posts to an RPG Soap-Box esque board. It, itself is a pit and I refuse to read it. But, he was kind enough to copy and paste to my AIM. I am not going to LJ Cut this because, frankly, you wouldn't read it if I did.

What's amazing, is that this is everything I've ever said about Five Rings Online.com, and it almost feels as though I've written it. Call me a Schadenfreude but I'm telling you, it's all true.

This is originally posted by board user Insomniac

I played a magical samurai, once. I played for a while, and I got annoyed. Eventually, I left. Went back. Considered posting something here, for the lulz. But I was afraid, for I worried that I would be burning bridges if ever I decided to return.

And then I decided that I didn't care, I'm not going back to that place unless everyone I'm worried about pissing off is gone. So fuck it.

The place is a pit. First of all, there's going to be a problem any time you have a big player group trying to play magical samurai. It's a weaboo game, for weaboos, but you'd hope there'd be attempts at super-polite stick-up-my-ass duel-or-suicide-at-the-drop-of-a-hat behavior. There's really no reason to play L5R otherwise, so the GMs would really need to enforce the setting's etiquette to get a good experience. They don't.

They're much too busy running scenes for each other's PCs. The level of favoritism on the chat is really unbearable--at least, I thought so, because I left when I couldn't bear it. The high-ranking positions in the game, one and all, are some GM or former GM on a player skin. They blatantly favor their own Clans, and the other GMs, in everything from scene time, to thread response, to leniency from NPCS, to blatant cheating in the middle of scenes. Part of this is because the GMs keep hiring people from the same little group of friends they know, who they also play blatant favorites for. The other reason is that, since the game has all of two venues, there's every incentive to scratch the back of any GM's PC you can touch. (As far as hiring friends, I realize that they're constantly complaining about being understaffed; there would be less of a problem if the old crowd didn't seem to actively drive away anyone new.) It's not even as though they're good players; their success derives entirely from getting whatever they want, which became obvious the one time someone out of their circle got a position of power.

God help you if you point this out, though. It's blatantly obvious that the player base is there to play supporting cast for the old crowd, but anyone who mentions this gets cut off from the scraps of attention and reward they might otherwise merit. It really is a blackballing, encouraged and championed by the head GM.

Ahh, Cory [Mills]. It's not that I don't appreciate how much time it takes to rewrite the L5R rulebook with his house rule lists. It's not the passive aggressive bullshit he constantly pulls, or the weird, rather random bouts of misogyny he sometimes types up in the entryway. It's the fact that he spends more time doing that than running the game. It's the fact that his scenes are so huge and badly managed that I've walked away to watch an episode of House MD and come back before my turn to act. It's the fact that he gets hugely pissed when people point out the plot holes in his storylines. And it's the fact that he's one of the worst when it comes to favoritism for his friends, and he actually reconnected the ending of one of his major storylines so he could redo the end with a bigger role for his fucking wife.

Who is last and least. Everything there is to hate about queen bee drama queen e-bitches. A miserable terror to anything else with a vagina who dares log onto her chat. Given the job of head ST of the political venue at the start of the game, even though she'd never been so much as an assistant in an online chat before, and having no grasp of politics beyond "screech to my boytoy until I get what I want." She finally "stepped down" after half the game went over Cory's head and complained about her to the admin, and retired to e-fucking the character skin of the head of her venue and bragging about how he gave her PC's fucking horse more attention and goodies than the other players in his venue. She just may have managed to out-Bunnie Bunnie [Ed. Bunnie is a rather infamous person on World of Darkness Chat rooms].

So I was confused about the new power today, so I did some digging into the Japanese Mind again.

( Stepping on One's Shadow )

I was sitting in Senior Year Spanish Class.

It was a decently sized room, with a bunch of Juniors. I was promoted to mainstream Spanish - after completely obliterating (starting from Scratch Spanish) that I was in before hand. At my High-School, if you start from scratch Freshman Year - you are in the Roman Numeral'd Classes. Those who were in a foreign language in middle-school are in mainstream language X. Anyway, it was early. Third period.

I was ready for another day of making fun and teasing my Spanish Teacher. He always defended the Castillian Lisp. I didn't, being a Caribbean Hispanic.

He comes into class and he states, "I think someone with a plane hit one of the buildings in New York..." I think, he thought it was a Cessna of some sort. But he didn't really continue on with that, not really. It was only when the class was near over, somewhere near 10 o'clock. That our Principal came on the loudspeaker. They never usually used it, only for Morning Announcements.

Something was up.

You could hear the pin-drop in the room, as he explained that two air planes crashed into the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center. He explained to continue amongst your day, however, and we'll sort it out in the coming days. I had a free period right after that. The Computer Labs, were swamped. Part of the Server Slam on all News Outlets that day. One, by one, by one, we were appraised of what happened. Terrorists have finally pulled off what they tried to do in 1993.

As a nation, we felt violated. The school was despondent. Two weeks, there was just nothing going on but chatting about it. None of us really had people who were lost that day. And the Art Teacher's Husband, was late that day. But as the pictures played and played and played over again in our heads. As we sat and stared at CNN every night - not wanting to do anything; we tried grasping it.

I was a Senior. Every morning, there is a class called Current Issues led by the entirety of the Social Studies Department (nearly). I remember the chat we all had. About it all. Maybe it also brought us face to face with our own mortality. I don't know, but it was a collective gasp. Followed by a mournful wail - even if we didn't quite shed tears.

It's been eight years since. I left High-School, entered College. Rang bells. And moved on. The specter of that day, will hang over the heads of people in my age group, more than people have given it credit for. We came of age with the specter of it. We've had some bad starts at it; but our political efficacy? Perhaps bigger than people give it credit for. How many of us care? How many of us look out and work in politics. No matter what end of the spectrum they find themselves in? How many of us sat up and took notice during Politics and Government 110?

We'll always be disaffected youth no matter the time. But you know now... give it some time.

Do I care that, that title is the longest thing ever? Do I care that we manga readers have been stuck in the same twenty-four hour period for like two-years now? I don't know if I think so. So, I think I figured it out. Bleach that is. Why and How the king of :smug: (aka Aizen) is going to bite it in the end. Read that again, I think I know Kubo's master plan. Of course, others might have figured this out in the back of their mind. And you probably already know it.

But just in case, I think I'll put it under LJ Jump and in White to avoid possible Spoilers:
( SPOILER WARNING )

And there you have it.

Discuss.

So, there's this pipe-dream that I have. A dream where we can get together, and pretend to play Magi in the City of Hartford CT. I've had this off-and on for like a year and I finally decided to at least try to make this pipe dream a reality. So, anyway, if you'd like to join please do. There's also a Facebook Group.

FB Group

The Zero-Sum


Let's see if we can move this farther than a 'pipe-dream.'

Tags: mage the awakening, zero-sum

I has it. It'll be the number I give out willy nilly now. One Phone Number to rule them all. When I start getting invites to give out (and after Mom gets one) I'll pass them out.

Awesome.

Katen Kyokotsu is an Oiryan doing the Oiryan Dance. Also, pregnant. This automatically makes her my favorite of the Zanpakto Avatars. I <3 Oiryan.

Palm is now my hero for life. What a ballsy little company. I love you guys.

I've been desktop tweaking recently, something I hadn't done since my old computer died on me. So, I guess it's been a couple years since I did it last. Anyway, I used to love doing it - a great way to kill a couple hours to get things completely right for like a week or two, before I'd do it again.

LifeHacker which I started reading has others who shared in this one time hobby and rekindled it for me. I found the patcher for Vista, and then began to go to town. There's even an LCARS desktop on LH for you people who know what the hell LCARS is (I'm looking at you Keith).

Anyway, right now my desktop looks like: this lemme know what you think. I already have an idea for the next one I'm going to make. Just gotta pull skins and fonts together and see if it could work.

And now we talk about tweaking our desktop.