This is the excellent foppery of the world

My muse list has been updated to take account of what muses currently have DW journals (they're at the top). I need to update the LJ section of it sometime, but it may just end up with that section getting deleted if all my games move off of LJ.

Also, last chance to ask me to move a specific muse over and have it honored immediately! Others will have to wait on account of DW going back to needing invite codes.

This is crossposted to LJ for those of my friends who haven't made the move and/or don't have me friended on DW.

I'm... not really sure how to feel right now.

I've just given my mother permission to donate my cello to the high school in Joplin - the town that got hit really badly with a tornado last spring. They lost all their instruments in the storm.

On the one hand, I'm not really likely to ever play it again. I don't have the time management skills to arrange to play it now in college, and I honestly don't really think I have the motivation to do so after I graduate. The kids in Joplin will definitely get more use out of it than I do.

On the other, well... I've played the cello since fifth grade, and I've had that cello since... god, I think since eighth or ninth grade. All through high school, definitely - ever since I got tall enough to play a full-sized cello. We rented it pretty much until we'd paid enough to buy it outright, and it's gotten fixed up a lot over time, to the point that I think half the parts of the instrument were ones we got replaced - new bridge, new endpin, new fingerboard, bunch of cracks closed up. I think we may even have replaced the soundpost at one point. It's gone from a crappy rental cello to a really good instrument. And, well, I've had it for a long time.

I only really started to enjoy music once I got the chance to make it; I know I enjoyed it a lot better than I ever really did any sort of visual art. A lot of my friends in high school were ones I knew through orchestra.

I think it started out as a school cello, so I guess it's really only fitting that it ends up as one again. So long, Woody. Hopefully you'll make the kids in Joplin as happy as you've made me.

Hokay, massive stuff post - have been back at college and busy recently.

( Part 1: Love for my CS 125 lecturer )

( Part 2: LARP troubles )

( Part 3: Dieses gottverdammte Wetter! )

Final note: I really think it's rather inconsiderate of them to have the Super Bowl on my birthday.

These last couple days have actually been pretty good.

( Cut because I can't shut up )

The Tea Party movement has apparently reached new levels of stupid. The Oregon branch appropriated Anonymous' slogan (the general name for the near-hivemind that trollers originating from the /b/ boards on 4chan sometimes show). Unchanged. And then Anonymous spammed their Facebook page until they took down the slogan and had to blank out their wall completely.

As I remarked (it should be at the very end of the comments at time of posting, somewhere on page 4):

Re: the "How could they do this?" comments - I'm assuming sabotage. Someone suggested the slogan without explaining what it meant.

Of course, that doesn't address the fact that the slogan has absolutely nothing to do with the Tea Party, or how they apparently failed to notice that Anonymous is capitalized. Or the fact that, as someone pointed out, Legion (capitalized) was the name of a group of demons. That were exorcised and put into pigs. Which immediately drowned themselves.

On second thought, that's a great name for them, considering what they've just done XD

 Have just been to see the new Alice in Wonderland movie with someone from the Changeling game I'm in. And it is awesome.

( Cut for tl;dr-ing )

 I still haven't managed to find the textbook for one of my courses. I'm about to the point where I'm ready to just reserve the thing online so they'll tell me when the shipment gets in. It's just that one of the bookstores said it would be in "any day now" and that was a week ago - a week after they said it was ordered.

In related news, I am still frustrated by my inability to find the later two books in the Larklight trilogy. One of the college bookstores here had the first one, but that's because they order random assortments of books to arrange into nice displays and there is no printing of Larklight, to my knowledge, that does not have a red cover (which appears to have been the theme for this display). However, the nice man upstairs running the counter for General Books offered to order them for me, so I might take them up on that offer at some point if I don't just bite the bullet and try to find them online.

Also, I have just seen a wonderful comment on fanficrants about a continuity snarl in Marvel - Captain America is alive again in most of the main continuity, but the series where he gets resurrected isn't quite finished. Therefore, it is amusingly remarked that he is suffering "a slight case of Schroedingeritis" .

 I'm kind of vaguely terrified of going back to school, because I wasn't able to avoid having early classes and I know I don't wake up to alarms anymore. And I have a freaking electromagnetics lab at eight in the morning.

The Persona plot that's starting at DDD made me realize two things. The first is an interesting parallel - Shadows in P4 have yellow eyes. Yellow eyes are also used to indicate Darkness in Kingdom Hearts - all Heartless have yellow eyes, and apparently travel in the Dark Corridors causes it if you aren't protected (by the Organization's cloaks, apparently - there's supposedly a scene in Re: Chain of Memories that says this). That gives us DiZ, Xemnas, Xigbar, and Saïx that have done so, though Saïx's eyes might just be for more werewolf parallels.

The other is that Gourry Gabriev is badass. Seriously. This is a guy with absolutely no magical power - the only one of the main characters that doesn't - who stood up to the Lord of Nightmares. A being who is one step above God. For those of you familiar with Dr. Who (which is how I figured this out, Zelgadiss was talking to Ten), think of the Eternals. For anybody who speaks D&D, think something at Overdeity levels. Ao, or the Lady of Pain, or something from the Far Realm.

Completely unrelated to the rest of the post: I has a new icon. It is Latin for "All your base are belong to us." Literally: All-citadel-yours (pl)-are-by us-owned.

Also, anyone know what a good fandom to transplant someone from FFIV would be? Cecil's been hanging around my brain and I need a male character at permanent_way ...

I've discovered a fanmade World of Darkness game called Genius: the Transgression. Which is about mad scientists. And there's a PDF set up like a typical setting book. And it is generally awesomeness. I should see if there are any others like that...

Okay, this is interesting. I came across an article (while doing the requisite archive trawl of Digger, since a main character's background involves a version of the story incorporated in) about a variant of the La Llorona and Bloody Mary myths created by homeless children in Miami. And naturally I was thinking that this would be a good thing to port into the World of Darkness setting, because urban legends, especially the scary evil kind, are delightful things to use as inspiration in the WoD and I've been on a kick for the setting recently.

Then I remembered something: each of the new World of Darkness gamelines has a signature setting. Much of the game's framing fiction is set there, and it's described in the sample setting in one of the appendices to the main book for the gameline. Vampire has New Orleans, Werewolf has the Rocky Mountains, Mage has Boston, Promethian has Chicago, Hunter has Philadelphia, Geist has the Bronx...

And Changeling: the Lost? Changeling's signature setting is Miami.

Even though I know we're not in the World of Darkness (especially since according to my ST there are no extant maps of my college's steam tunnels in the World of Darkness), I don't think I'll ever be able to go to Miami without looking over my shoulder. If not for the changelings warring over Grandfather Thunder's endless summer, then for Bloody Mary running through the streets.

Yes, I can separate fiction from reality if I want to. Just because it isn't real doesn't mean it can't give me the screaming heebie-jeebies.

... Somehow my frustration at being able to find the second and third Larklight books and the D: at the Temeraire fic on fanficrants have combined into a desire to write a Temeraire/Larklight crossover.

I'm not sure how this would even work, considering they're set in two very different alternate histories - Larklight nearly fifty years later - and neither has shown a propensity for negative space wedgies. But I'm sure we can squeeze one into Larklight somewhere...

Though it really would be nice to find the other two Larklight books.