Posts made by Vorpal

@Insomnia at least your reading comprehension was better than mine...
Sleep deprived me saw this thread header and accidentally read it as 'The Lingerie Chat Notification.'

@Arkandel thank you, Ark.

Not exactly anger. More like grief, which has a part of anger I guess.
Two days ago I get the news that a friend and musician colleague of mine I've known almost all of my life died of cancer back in my home country, he didn't tell anyone about it. Yesterday I got called by my mother to let me know my aunt may be dying within the next few days. This we had been preparing for, she's had cancer for at least two years now.

And then at night I get the news that a very dear friend of mine is now in Hospice and not expected to last the week. At her appointment in January it looked as if the cancer had gone into remission, but over valentine's day weekend she started feeling very wrong, and on the 14th she sent e-mails to everybody to tell them that the cancer was back, had spread, and that there was nothing left to do but check in at the hospice. I didn't find out until last night because I was dealing with rehearsals.

She's taking it like an angel. People we know in common tell me she's mentally prepared, welcoming everybody who visits her with a smile and eager to reminisce and tell stories and say final goodbyes. I'm glad she's mentally prepared, I'm not. People don't think she'll make it to Thursday, so my boss is letting me leave at 2pm with PTO for the rest of the day so I can go see Zoe one last time in case she doesn't make it to tomorrow.

Fuck this week and fuck this year. Seriously, fuck them hard.

My first foray into anything MU- was when I was 16. I found a place called TigerMUCK which was, yes, a furry MUCK, but the owner - someone who is probably one of the most decent people I've ever met- had a very strict policy of enforcing a PG rating and no fooling around anywhere near minors. He was pretty uncompromising about that, too, which resulted in a rather very friendly and non-threatening environment. This didn't exactly prepare me for what other furry places were like- I decided to look at the other MU*s and went straight for FurryMUCK under the assumption that bigger was better.

It went about as well as it could be expected:

... long story short, a few years later I decided to venture out of TigerMUCK again, this time for Discworld MUD, and I absolutely loved it. Having my first taste of full-on RP, I moved quickly to other MU*s- there was an X-Men one I can't really remember the name of, and a few others- but it didn't really last too long. I had to move to another country (this one) to pursue my degree in music, and for many years my social life and past-times were very thin on the ground between rehearsals, classes, lessons, practice room hours, more rehearsals and trying to get a handle on this college thing everybody was talking about.

I didn't stop roleplaying at the time, though, but the pace of RP that I needed was a much slower one than the real-time MU*. So I joined the Napping Cat's Dream forum. The roleplay spun out of the Master Zen Dao Meow webcomic, which was a rather whimsical and trippy comic dealing with eastern philosophy. The place lasted for ten years, outliving the comic by several of those, but it was neat because the comic creator/artist and the admins (who incarnated characters from the comic) would regularly engage the forum members in roleplay and discussions, and members who contributed to the community/rp/discussions in significant ways would eventually be deemed 'psychedelic avatars' and receive avatar cards of their characters, fully illustrated by the comic artists. It was a rather homey place for many of us, and when it closed its doors in 2009 many of us felt a little homeless, RP-wise.

After I graduated and started building up experience before a Masters degree, I got sucked into Second Life- mostly because of its music community at the time. I toodled around SL for years doing the concert thing and hanging out with Mel Cheeky and Frogg and Jaycatt and co, and then I got recruited to be a faction leader for a roleplay sim there. A Final Fantasy VII one. I even did the special effects for their combat system. But after two years of that, I decided to call it quits. It would be a few years later, when I started my Masters degree, that I decided to poke around mudconnector and look for some MUs- and that's how I stumbled upon HeroMU* and, later, CoMUX.

So, long story short...

@Bobotron Good luck to them, I say...

@silentsophia said:

Wow, he's so sexy he gave her a case of wall-eye.

That's Sue's attempt at not staring at his cod... piece.

@Thenomain Thank god, I thought I was the only one.

@silentsophia said:

Yarn.

Playing with yarn!

Sorry, I had to do it.

@Kay ... it just dawned on me that I should tell you who he was I haven't had my caffeine dose today.

He played Surf (aka Dave) over at CC, and currently plays Mike Drakos over at CoMux, he asked me to let you know

@Kay Hi there! I didn't personally know you, but one of my best friends played on Crucible- and he's currently at CoMUX! If you decide to drop by, he's with X-Men: Red, I believe.

See, that's the problem when your uniform consists of just a speedo: every time you pay someone a visit, they think you're pulling a Magic Mike on them.

That moment when the company calls you to let you know that the performance center has double booked the matinee performance for your opera and that now suddenly you have to sing the opera Friday and Saturday in a row instead of Friday/Sunday. But you already had a performance booked for that Saturday, at the same time, for a recital with two other colleagues at a pretty nice venue. If I don't sing both performances (and the understudy has to go on Saturday) I only get paid half as per contract. If I drop out of the recital at least it is two months' warning, but my colleagues will still have to come up with enough music to cover for my third of the performance, and I hate cancelling anything. Raaaaaaa....

@dontpanda Aah, I see. Well, at least it's a lesson learned for them! It just sucks that it came in the shape of time you'll never get back

@dontpanda that sounds... yeah. Where did they fish this guy, the tinfoil hat section of the motivational speaker aisle?

I'm going to give this a whirl

MIKA's latest album... and I've gotten "No Place In Heaven" stuck in my mind as of late.

@saosmash said:

I dunno, I have a friend who is really nice, like sweetest, most generous guy, fun to hang with in real life but somehow on the internet he transposes into the most annoying man alive. Like, he's never a shitdick. It's like online he forgets everything there is to know about social interaction and reverts to the comparative safety of total inanity.

This sort of reminds me of Slavoj Žižek's theory of masks. Terry Pratchett sort of condensed it into Granny Weatherwax's maxim that a mask only hides the face on the outside, but how we behave when we think we're exempt of consequence is who we really are. For many, the online world provides that mask.

I heavily recommend Juliette Noureddine- she's a French singer-songwriter with a very eccentric bend. Her songs run from serious to the humorous , silly and grotesque.

Here's a translation of one of her songs to English:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfqqkc9NZTI

Armello is beautiful! I backed it on Kickstarter and it's one of the projects I feel absolutely no regrets in having thrown money at