A Reflection on Chess

Which piece is my favorite?

Let us start with the king. The seat of power, and an object for all of his servants and inferiors to protect. He is guarded, loved, and protected. The King loves feeling at the center, warm and surrounded, keeping darkness and enemies at bay. I am not the King.

How about the Queen? The Queen is reckless, a player of the board, knowing and cunning but overall resistant and strong. Attack one flank and she guards the other. Everyone loves and admires her, but at the end of the day, if you look past her power, you find boldness and little else. I am not the Queen.

A pawn, then? A Pawn watches silently, more a listener than a speaker, willing to sacrifice himself or herself, an idealist, a compassionate soul who always has the interests of the greater good at heart. Pawns are oddly rare. I am not a Pawn.

A Rook, maybe? Bold and sturdy and an effective point in a any strategy. Wise, not cunning. Resourceful, not quick thinking. And often lost to traps and innovation: archaic and outdated as it is sturdy. No, not a Rook.

A Knight, perhaps? Outspoken and witty and artful, the knight catches his enemies by surprise, pinning them into position when they least expect it. They are knowledgeable. They are patient and knowing and they are ever aware of the battlefield, biding their time for the victory. No, not a Knight.

That leaves us with the Bishop. Who is the bishop? An underloved character, certainly. Strong in some areas but completely incapable in areas. And yet, completely able to make sound strikes out of nowhere, using all resources, making no hasty judgements yet quick of mind. I think that I am a Bishop.

an anonymous letter to a person of confused relation

___________,

Let me start by saying that this is a recent development in the grand scheme of our acquaintanceship and an old development in the grand scheme of our... what, camaraderie? I like you. You are the first person in a long time that I've truly liked. Not for your eyes or your hair or your musculature or your voice or your height or your weight or your smell, not for pheromones; I like you, the person. I like the way you speak and the way you think as far as I can see into your mind. I like your ideas, your mannerisms, and your disposition. I like your niceness and kindness, your laughter and the way you truly exclude nobody. I like how reasonable you are, how you can agree to disagree, how you never get angry at a person for nothing. I like you as a person.

I'm not exactly sure when this started. I do know that in eighth grade, when I was having a lot of trouble making friends and I sort of just drifted along, you were a bright spot in my day. Not because we were best friends. But because you said hello to me after you knew my name and you smiled at me. At Castle smiles directed toward me were rare. It made me so happy, that you were such a happy person. I didn't have a crush on you in eighth grade, mind you. I just made a happy acknowledgment that someone cared enough to toss me a "hi" every now and then.

A really big part of me wants to send this letter to you anonymously and hope that you know who sent it... that I can show you my thoughts and you will recognize my writing style, my voice. I don't know. I think you'd feel complimented if I actually sent this to you. But it wouldn't affect your feelings towards me (such that I'm not aware of what they are in the least) because you aren't an emotional girl like I am.

I'm trying to make this as honest as possible. I hate strong words that sound cliched and... weird. Like the phrase "my heart broke" (totally irrelevant here, by the way; just an example). That is little more than a dramatic exaggeration. And yet there are few ways to say things without those ugly, overused words. For instance: every time you make the heart sign at me, I will admit it, my heart does a little skip and I grin from ear to ear and I do a heart sign back and I don't know why. I just want you to like me, maybe? Maybe you already do, even though it's pretty obvious you have... something with the girl who sits next to me. Maybe just a strong friendship. I don't know. I don't even know if you're single or taken. You do very little to hint at that. With another boy I had a mild crush on - a while ago, and not as... truthfully? It's hard to explain - I just waited and waited until I confirmed that he was going out with someone. (He was such a flirt, too. I hate when you let yourself be led on and then are surprised when it doesn't go anywhere.) I can't see that happening with you.

Are you going out with her? Maybe I'll just give a fuck, and ask. Maybe you will get the hint that I'm interested for a reason, even though I'll do my best to cover it up. You're intelligent like that.

I like that you're intelligent, too, and that you never play stupid, not even to make a point. I like that you express yourself in wonderful, productive ways. I like that you are kind of geeky without being nerdy. I like that we are so very similar. I like... I don't know. You. I like you, period.

And now I feel weird because I haven't said anything about you as a body and that's apparently what I'm supposed to talk about in weird anonymous love letters. I don't know. I like your hair and your height and your eyes and your... quirky? smile. I like your hands. And your nose. I'm an artist by nature; I notice weird things like the shape of people's noses. I have an appreciation for things that I'm not sure you would find complimentary because they're kind of weird. You don't go up to a person, or at least not a guy, and say, "Wow, I really like the shape of your lips!" (I do, by the way.) So understand when I don't say things like that with any passion because I don't consider them separately, I consider a body as a whole thing (it's been trained into me) and not only does talking about your body in general come on way too strong but it's not, for once, the reason I like you. (But there's your obligatory physical compliments. I'm done with that now.)

I have little else to say, except that I'm hopeful.

Sincerely and resignedly,

_____________

P.S. I know a "crush" is "serious" when I can't rationalize it away.

The Sexual Fluidity Project: A Survey

Jessica, 15, Female, Confused

Beliefs:
What does normal mean to you?
When most people think normal, they think "average." As far as I'm concerned, I have no problem with that definition. Being normal isn't something you should strive to be, but it's not something you should strive to get away from, either. You are who you are.

Do you believe sexuality can be fluid?Definitely. I know that personally I can't really put a label on my own sexuality, past "having one," because it changes. Sometimes from moment to moment, and sometimes over the course of years. And that's okay, because the only reason sexuality isn't considered fluid is because most people speak English, and we need words to describe ourselves, and that means labels, which aren't necessarily a bad thing but aren't necessarily a good thing either.

What does sex mean to you?Sex is an intimate act between two (or more) people. To me... I don't know. I wouldn't have sex with someone I didn't love, or at least know very well. That might be how I was raised, or it might be my sexuality. I don't know.

How do you feel about labels?Labels are just words. Like I said earlier, they aren't inherently good or bad. We need ways to describe ourselves, because we can't just transmit our thoughts to each other's brains. Until technology goes that far, labels are a deeply rooted part of our culture and language. I don't have a problem with that, except that I can't find a label to describe myself, so I can't explain myself very well. I'm "Jessicasexual:" a certain set of criteria that apply only to me.

Identity:How would you describe your sexuality?Confused. I don't know. The closest, I would say, is pansexual. I can be attracted to both boys and girls. But with men, I am attracted to them physically, and then warm to their personality, and with women, I'm attracted to them emotionally, and warm to them sexually. There's a psychological theory that we are taught our sexual identities in the womb based on a pheromone that you're given as a fetus: if you're given estrogen, you're attracted to girls, and if you're given testosterone, you're attracted to guys. I'd say that I'm "supposed" to be attracted to guys, because my biological urges make me look at guys first. But if I know a girl, and like her, sometimes I just start seeing her in a different light. I can't help it. And as for transgenders, intergenders, genderqueers, etc., it's all about the personality with me, and I can develop a physical attraction, much like I would with a girl.

Do you feel like you were born with a sexual identity?Yes. I don't disagree with the psychological theory I was talking about earlier. But I also think that there are other factors, because based on that theory bisexuality can't exist. I don't believe that, not at all.

How long have you been aware about your sexuality/sexual feelings? Have they ever changed?I've become confused only very recently. For the longest time, I thought that I was straight. But every now and then, sometimes with my best friends, I'd get crushes on girls. This was, I'd guess, somewhere way back in elementary, when everyone gets crushes but they aren't sure what that even means or how to act on it. And then, recently, I began to take mental notes on when and how I was attracted to someone, either sexually or romantically, and as the scientists would say, the results have been inconclusive.

Are you emotionally attracted to a gender different from the one you’re physically attracted to?I'm emotionally attracted to any and all genders. It's just the order of emotional and sexual attraction that's confusing.

Environment:Do you feel accepted in the community you live in? If not, do you see this changing in the future?Absolutely. I go to a high school where there's an honor code and a general environment of acceptance that basically says, you accept everyone for who they are. My parents have always accepted me and done their research on anything I was or believed or declared myself to be. The rest of my family doesn't need to know, because it'd start up unnecessary drama, and that's okay, because people don't advertise that they're straight to their extended family either. Whenever my friends and I talked about something related to sexuality, I always said things like, "Well, assuming I'm straight, then..." or "If I were to end up a lesbian, I'd..." and I don't think they understand it, but they certainly don't beat me down for it.

Did you have an experience as a child that made you feel like you didn’t fit in?

Growing up, did you feel pressure to stick to certain gender roles?

Can you talk to your parents about your sexual orientation?

Was sex talked about in your household?

Has religion had a positive or negative effect on how you came to terms with your sexual orientation?

Why Google is going to take over the world.

When we go onto the internet, we don't think, "I am going to use a search engine." We think, "I am going to Google it." Google does not own most information; they simply mirror it, redirecting you to the website that will (maybe) have what you need.

Think on this. What happens when some evil CEO gets bribed by... Apple, say? Now you look up "computer" and no PC sites show up on the first page (and who ever goes past the first page?). Or they start making new products which take over the front (and more!) pages. Now Google has their own computer company, and it's all that shows up in the search engine. It's all you can find now!

"Google +: an alternative for Facebook." And you search Facebook and this little ad looks you in the eye.

NO ONE IS SAFE.

/this has been brought to you by the Society for Imaginative Conspiratorial Thinking and Suspicion Towards Large Companies in a Satire-Filled Fashion, But Seriously, This is Kind of Scary.

Ritual for the Juno or "Higher Self," based from the Correllian Tradition

Materials

1. lavender or fresh linen incense
2. dull green, bright blue, crimson, black, white, sunny yellow, mild orange, and violet blunt candles (total: 8)
3. a chalice (glass) of pure water or whatever beverage I prefer at the time
4. image of the Higher Self, or a representation (imaginative = artwork or realistic = photograph)

This will require an individual altar which may be temporary (may not take place on the all-purpose altar).

1. Light the candles in the following order, from left to right: white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, black.
2.  With each candle, feel a part of the Self manifesting and attaching. It does not matter which parts signify which colors and vice versa. An example, for concrete assignments, might be:
• White = the Lighter Self
• Red = emotion
• Orange = masculine energy
• Yellow = spirit
• Green = feminine energy
• Blue = mentality
• Violet = magic
• Black = the Darker Self
3. Invoke the Higher Self. ("I call upon the Higher Self, the Juno.")
4. Visualize the Juno. She is me, grown and aged slightly, wise but emotional, pure and white, a girl.
5. Speak to the Juno. This should be akin to conversation. This breaks the Veil between the Self and the Higher Self.
6. Offer and chasten the chalice of water (etc.) to the Juno, dedicating it and purifying it. Then drink it. Imagine the light of the Juno filling the water, the glass. Visualize it moving through your body, passing the Juno's strrength and wisdom into you, reassuring you.
7. Meditate on the Juno, the Higher Self.
8. Complete the offering with words of thanks and devotion.
9. Extinguish the candles in the opposite order in which they were lit.
10. Cleanse the chalice.

Omg I am now a TRUE NEOPAGAN.

I just realized this.

I'm sitting in my room, a candle for my evening ritual glowing and incensing the air of the room with the smell of vanilla-scented wax. I'm listening to the Pagan Radio Network, a song called Secret Garden by Windancer, which hums and throbs pleasantly and mildly in the background through these speakers. I am saving up for a new grimoire. I have a pet rabbit who walks in and out of my circles as she pleases, named after a flower. I have ritual honey sitting on my desk, goddess research lying on my dresser, and an altar by my bed with an offering basket, vase, and pedestal (with aforementioned candle) on it. That aside, I'm doing an eve3ning ritual, in my regimen.

How odd.

The next entry will be a mock-revision for my Juno ritual. LIIIIKKKEEEE a hipster.

omg new skates

New roller skates in neon blue! Sure-Grips! OMG I AM SO EXCITED. Speed-skating practice at the track? YES.

I was called by Hecate last night.

I was just reading my correspondences book (It's called The Wicca Handbook by Eileen Holland and I recommend it) and I just... I think, happened to glance across her name. Earlier that day I had been at Barnes and Noble. The one we have locally has this whole wall dedicated to journals. Half of them are these beautiful (though expensive) leather-bound notebooks, with intricate design...

I was flipping through these today, just casually, and it occurred to me: These would make beautiful grimoires (for a lazy person such as myself who can't and won't bind her own). So I came home later, before I was going to do my nightly meditation/protection (which I have actually been doing... I've decided to go ahead and give Witch School: First Degree by Lewis-Highcorrell a chance, even though I have no intention of following Correllian tradition. It just seems like a good regimen... something I need, religiously). And I'm reading this correspondence book, I think because I'd thought, Hecate. It just popped in my head, I don't remember why, and I was looking her up, and I found she was the goddess of witches and I just heard her, in my ear, saying, It's time for you to make an honest grimoire.

Weird. But true, as far as I believe. So now I'm saving up for a BoS at B&N, instead of a gorgeous custom wand from Etsy. It's alright. This one will be purely for spells and chants that I write myself or need to remember. No correspondences or anything, just useful spells and spell-chants.

So I'm familiarizing myself with the community.

LOLOLOL

No one here, no one home, no one helping: more religious babble

1) I went to a church today for the first time in years, a decade maybe. It was Universalist Unitarian. They sung hymns and shared their life activities and talked. A speaker came to the front and talked about jobs and unions and how we should care for all workers' conditions and lives. A chalice was lit, and then put out.

Everyone was old. Fifties on up, with a few exceptions. I was very misplaced there, only fifteen years old; the next person on up was twenty-three, and another visitor, here with the rest of her (mostly aged) family. But later, when we were discussing things - the labor unions, ethical eating - at a potluck lunch afterwards, I felt like part of a community. For real. My mother didn't know the things I was talking about. I had a genuine, intellectual place in the group. That was nice.

2) I've talked to my mother about paganism again. I told her about a little pagan shop I knew of. I looked on Witchvox again. It's not there anymore.

3) I can't learn any more from books. All there is is Wicca. I now own a Witch School book in the Correllian tradition. I am not sure if I like it.

A Vacation

My family and I are crammed into a car for over eight hours. This isn't so bad. I'm in the back right seat. My little brother is beside me, on the left, and my mother in front of me, in the passenger's seat (my usual seat of choice). My father is in the driver's--driving, obviously.

I occupy my time with my old limited edition DS Lite (my brother the same, with his... what, DSiXL? Something). I'm playing Pokemon. It's a Nuzlocke challenge on Pokemon Black. Everything dies; I have a trainer's touch of death, apparently. I become upset. I write everything down in a notebook so that I can make it into a comic later.

That becomes boring. It's dark outside now. We pass through Atlanta, Georgia. I marvel at the city. It's so alive. Cities fascinate me, having never lived in one. On the road I live on, a car goes by about every two minutes at most. We're in the deep country, our house. But Atlanta breathes. I think about going to college here. There's an art college. Does it have sciences, video game design? I doubt it. I'll look into it.

I fall asleep. When I wake up, our family has found a cheap motel off the side of the road. We park our car by the door and go into our room. It's standard. A bathroom next to a refrigerator (the "kitchen" in these places), and two full-sized beds in front of a television. It's gross, a little too bright; the paint on the wall is a yellow-cream, and is directly over a brick pattern that is fairly obvious. I take a restroom break, brush my teeth, and collapse in bed. The place is fine, except for a permeating smell of... must, but something about it make me wary. I sleep on top of the covers, that is, until I wake up in the middle of the night freezing my ass off.

We set out immediately. I've barely even changed from my unattractive-but-comfortable garb yesterday: from a t-shirt and cotton pants, to the same t-shirt and pajama shorts. We eat at a little hub called the Huddle House. I can't help but compare it to Waffle House (which we've seen tons of on the way down to Florida); worse food, less business, and with an understated sort of fifties theme that doesn't seem to come together just right.

We continue on our voyage. We've crossed the Florida-Georgia border now, and we're closer to Orlando, closer, closer. We can't check in until three, my dad reminds us, so we take a detour to Daytona. We drive by the racetrack (my family are fans; I don't particularly like it, but some of it is mildly interesting) and then down to the beach, where we park, run into the ocean, get our feet wet, and laugh until we have to run back. It wasn't worth it. My shorts are wet thanks to waves of varying size and my legs are covered with sand. "Maybe we can come back sometime this week," my dad suggests. My mom has a stomachache. My brother has gotten carsick twice on this trip today.

When we check in, there are a lot of maids going in and out of our rooms. "We're sorry," they say in Mexican and Korean accents. Why don't any white Americans work here? Is it that kind of job, the kind we don't have in our northern, mostly-white state, the kind that only immigrants do? "This room hasn't been rented out for a while. We're cleaning it now." This room is owned by my grandmother's boss, who lent it to us for a week for free. If he hadn't, it would have cost us over six hundred a night. It's a suite. I've stayed in it once before, with my grandmother.

My family is surprised at the size. When we enter, there's a den to the left, with a futon and a TV. To the right, a kitchen, with a counter, a microwave, an electric stove with four places, a refrigerator and freezer with ice/water dispensers, a pantry. In front of us, a dining room with a chandelier; beyond that, a living room, and a door to the balcony. Off to the right side, a master bedroom with a huge bathroom, which has a large bath and a shower, and a separate room for the toilet, as if to show off how much the owner was spending for this place. Off to the left, the room I'm staying in: a hotel room inside a hotel, the two full-sized beds and the television. I make my brother sleep on the futon. A room to myself is wonderful.

We go to the grocery and stock our kitchen, that first day.

The next day, we just lazed around. We went to the hotel pool and laughed and pushed each other. I tried to teach my brother to swim. It rained.

After that we spent a day at Sea World. "We've done Disney," my mom reasons. "Let's do everything else this time." I agree. Disney was boring. But Sea World is more boring, with all the aquariums that I've seen before, last year with my grandmother, for my birthday. The Kraken is a good roller-coaster, but just a roller-coaster, the kind you find everywhere. The Manta is better, with cool aquariums in the waiting line and a novelty: lying on your stomach, feeling like you're going to fly into everything. Journey to Atlantis is good, but I almost pass out in line because of the heat. I am miserable.

We go home. The next day we go to Universal Studios. That's my favorite. I'm so excited. "It's my third favorite place in the world," I declare to my brother, smiling. "What's the first?" he asks, and I say, "My room." "What's the second?" he says, and I reply, "The internet." He protests. I have to explain how the internet is a place (all of that data has to be somewhere).

Islands of Adventure makes me sigh with glee. The Dr. Suess place is whimsical, but not particularly entrancing. My brother wants to ride something... a "High-in-the-Sky Suess Trolley Train Ride," I believe. Boring, but I humor him. We go to the Lost Continent next. Harry Potter is better at night and we can't get in now anyway, so we go around to the Marvel area... my favorite in the park (maybe tied with Harry Potter). I look in the comic store, do the sky-drop (Dr. Doom's... something) with my brother, take a picture with Cyclops. I miss Rogue, when she's out. It makes me upset.

We leave to actual Universal and do all sorts of things there. We watch shows, ride rides, whatever. Lunch/dinner is at the Nascar restaurant in Citywalk. It's surprisingly good. I have pot roast that's better than what we make at home. I can't fit all of it into my stomach. My dad eats the rest. I laugh a lot. My mom gets another stomachache. She's been picking fights the whole trip; I don't think she's used to all of us being together all of the time.

We go back to Harry Potter. I ride Dragon Challenge with my dad. We wait for the front line, but get pulled to the very front of that line because we're a party of two. Afterwards my dad laughs and high fives me and says, "That's my favorite ride this whole trip."

Our feet hurt so much that I'm hopping from heel to heel and they're starting to go numb, but we still but two Butterbeers and I drink mine. It's sweet, like liquid ice cream, so good, maybe too sugary--my brother can't even finish his, because he gets a stomachache. We go into a Hogsmeade shop. It's great. But I soon find that everything is... expensive. My mother humors me and purchases a Gryffindor scarf for me. I debate between Gryffindor and Slytherin for a long time, holding each one up. "I'm really a Slytherin, according to, you know, the internet," I sigh. But I've been proclaiming myself a Gryffindor my whole life before those online tests, and, well, red and gold look better on me than green and silver, and I decide one test can't change who I've been for my whole fandom career. This is a big decision to me. I get the Gryffindor.

On the way out, our feet hurt so much, so god-fucking-damn much, but I get a poster from the comic shop anyway. It's Spider-Woman. I'm a nerd. It's over twenty dollars less than the scarf.

We go to Daytona Beach and I get a sunburn. I put on so much sunscreen that I look eight shades paler than I really am, but I burn anyway. But I'm naturally dark, so it goes away by the time we go home. We spend one day at the beach before I decide I'm done.

That night, we go crab hunting on the shore. We find one. It makes me smile, and freak out, squealing like the girl I am, when it scuttles toward me. We laugh and go back to the hotel. I eat a Milky Way. That night my mom and dad stay out on the balcony. In the morning, when I drop my wrapper into the trash can, I see nothing but Diet Coke cans and beer bottles. I realize that I never want to drink as much as they do.

We spend one day just relaxing before we go home. I spend all day watching a Let's Play of Silent Hill and looking up the plot on the wiki. I stay up until four in the morning doing this.

The next day, I'm tired. We're in the car. I play Pokemon Black, continue my challenge. Everyone sleeps for two hours then wakes up, not at the same time. I get tired of Pokemon. I try to sleep. I wake up. We go to Starbucks. Wendy's. Over the course of the day, we eat at two gas stations. I drink a melon-berry smoothie and half of my brother's frappe when we go to Starbucks again for my dad, the driver, who needs a pick-me-up. I'm not supposed to drink much caffeine, but I drink half of his. It's a mocha-coconut. Too much coffee for him. He was expecting more chocolate.

On the way back we stop at an outlet mall. "We should do some back to school shopping, maybe," my mom suggests. I end up with more than all of my other family members combined. Since it's an outlet mall, everything's cheaper than a regular store. My mom asks if I like Charlotte Russe. I wouldn't know, I say; I've never been. I get a dress and a belt and a pair of skinny jeans. My mom takes me to the next store and the next. And I see an outlet Fossil store. I freak out so very much that she actually takes me in. I find a purse that I saw in our mall for two hundred bucks... for forty-five. I'm so excited that my mother actually buys it for me. I spend the rest of the trip putting things in it. There's an outlet Rue 21, too; I get a minidress and some leggings and some shoes that I've wanted forever. It's sad, but this was one of my favorite parts of the trip, this side stop at an outdoor outlet mall.

We go home. We sleep on the way. My mom and my brother are asleep, my dad is driving; it's too dark to read my school book by, so I turn on my DS to the main screen, the white one, and hold it to my chest. I need to sleep but I can't put down the book. It's "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Beah. I usually don't like nonfiction, but this is pretty okay. When I finally finish it, I stretch out and sleep on my brother's pillow, which I steal from under his head. My dad's decided to push through the night and go all the way home in one day. I only sleep for an hour before I wake up in the driveway.

Everyone pulls their luggage from the trunk and carries it in. I don't remember much, and when I woke up this morning all of my stuff was still in the car's trunk. But I went to my room that night and collapsed in my bed, my clothes still on, and had the best sleep I'd had in a week.

All the useful things I did this summer

• I had a birthday, making me officially older, which is good I guess.
• I snagged myself a car, a '99 Mustang, red.
• I had a friend who moved out of country over.
• And we watched both Harry Potter musicals.
• I got a tan, though I'm not sure how.
• I figured out how to genuinely love one of my best friends, with whom things have been falling apart for some time now.
• I rediscovered Tumblr. Tumblred forever.
• I started a Nuzlocke comic and quit within the first panel.
• Rediscovered Twitter. Twittered forever.
• Found a bunch of new music I like.
• Kept up on a personal blog for once (this one, to be exact).
• Began and kept up on a gaming blog (Mnemosynister, remember her?).
• Slowly recharged my creative batteries (they're still nowhere near full, but it's better).
• Procrastinated to extremes on the three books I have for classes this coming school year.
• Worked at the zoo.
• Made a friend who had previously hated my guts, on being partnered together one day.
• Made a friend who is male and really cute, and also a nerd like me, but absolutely nothing will happen between us because that is life.
• Attempted to get a job.
• Did not get a job.
• Became addicted to hip-hop and mixed music (dj music).
• Finally became "physical" about practicing for roller derby.
• Scored 20 free admission tickets to the local rink.
• Got really fat, probably.
• Went to the doctor several times, and began to take more pills than the average 70-year-old, including anti-depression medication and three different kinds of vitamins.
• Had to give away my Fiona-turned-Finn (my black mixed-breed rabbit) because of the complications of having a boy rabbit that I thought was a girl.
• My Zinnia did not, in fact, end up having babies, which is both good and so sad (BABY BUNNIES!).
• Played through a lot of games I had wanted to before but didn't have time for (Dragon Age 2, Mass Effect, Pokemon Black Nuzlocke challenge, and lots of flash games, among others).
• Documented them using the free version of FRAPS.
• Learned to effectively use acrylic paints.
• Wasted my time on the computer from when I got up to when I fell asleep, not counting food breaks, on a near daily basis.
• Got some scars on my hands, thighs, legs, and arms from my rabbits. They will be there forever; there's no healing these. Little bloody rascals. Little carnivores.
• Put in gauges, to my parents' chagrin.
• I am currently at size 14 and my mother believes that it is large enough, and that I should not go bigger.
• Acquired a pair of Pokemon boxers, a hand-knit scarf, a purple quilted purse, and a pair of sunglasses.
• Had a child with my best friend, a red rubber bouncy ball that we drew a face on, which we named Carrie Cherry-Cakes (due to her deep blush, which encompasses her whole face).

And this is only a fraction of the INCREDIBLY USEFUL things that I achieved these past two months!

Off on vacation,

So from tonight to the 29th you'll be hearing very little from me. My family and I are going on vacation in Florida. Sooooo yeah. Sea World, and also apparently other places. I don't even know.

Also I've got to convince my mom that we need to drive to the Disney marketplace so that my little brother can see that huge Lego store, because that place is the shiz.

Oh, and Universal Studios. I've been once before... last year, actually, I think, thanks to my grandmother and some other assorted stuff. The comics place. And the Harry Potter place. Seriously, that stuff was awesome. It was like living in HP-land. And when they offered us Butterbeer... and when the choir came out... and when I saw wands for sale! FANGASM. NERDGASM.

Anyway. Off we go.

dreeeeeams

I had the most weird-ass dream last night. A bunch of my friends and I went on a bike-riding spelunking expedition - we biked through a cave. We'd get through one and then have to do another; every once in a while, someone would die, and we'd have to start over, at the very first one. In the bottom of this first one was this... glowy artifact. And then we'd start all over, with everyone back again. Like a video game.

So we get through the caves, and we're tired and suddenly we're going down my street, and I see my house, except it's on the wrong side, and I live right next door to Luna Lovegood. It's the middle of the night and Luna sees us from her porch, which is all lit up. And by Luna I mean that actress. The one with the incredibly blonde hair and pretty voice.

So my mom isn't out here for some reason, but someone's hurt. Luna and her dad (who looks like absolutely nothing at all, like I can't even remember what he said or what he wore) patch them up. Then we spend the next fifteen minutes arguing over who is going to marry who. I say that it's mandatory to marry someone and if my best friend won't marry, I'd totally marry Luna, so I propose to her (I'm a girl, and also straight, or at least as far as I know), and anyway I persuade her to accept and we go biking down the road again, back into a cave.

AND THEN SUDDENLY, I'm in Toys 'R' Us and nobody's there, no friends, no fictional characters from Harry Potter. Except one of my friends from freshman year pops up and is all like, "Why are you in a wedding dress?" And I'm like, "Well, it's my wedding, duh!" And then we go into an aisle and make out. (This one was a guy. Jussayin.)

I AM TWELVE AND WHAT IS THIS. (Not really. I'm actually quite older than that, but still, WHAT IS THIS.)

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Well. I can only hope this is true because that's the kind of guy I'm bound to end up with like eight times in a row. Pfffblthththbt.

Why Gamers Make Better Lovers

While gamers may not be portrayed as the most social or physically fit people, there is one area in which we excel at. What area is that exactly? Sex. I believe that the life of a gamer equips them with skills that increase their performance in the bedroom. Here’s why:

- All of those hours spent smashing the buttons of controllers didn’t go to waste. While you’re pulling the right trigger to kill Covenant aliens and figuring out the correct button combination to defeat Bowser, you’re crafting your hands into fine-tuned love machines. Who wouldn’t appreciate their partner being equipped with strong fingers and dexterous hands they can use for hours on end?

- A gamers mind works in high scores and achievements, which transfers over into the bedroom. Their competitiveness will encourage them to get better and better with each play through/session of love making. Combine that with their goals to unlock personal achievements, such as “Last Longer Than Her Ex” and “Do It On His Parents Bed”, and you’ve got yourself quite a determined lover.

- If someone spends their time completing seasons in NBA 2K11 or trying to solo Onyxia in World Of Warcraft, chances are they’re going to have a lot of free time on their hands. Therefore, they’re going to have a lot of free time to get down and dirty with you. That is, of course, if you can tear them away from whatever they’re playing.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnnn

My friend Amani may have gotten me addicted to this

You remember those old songs, and you realize

that even though your mom used to sing them to you, they're fucking horrifyingly sad.

"Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And did I hear you say he was a-meetin' you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky-eye?

She's forty-one and her daddy still calls 'er "baby"
All the folks 'round Brownsville say she's crazy
'cause she walks downtown with her suitcase in her hand
Lookin' for a mysterious dark-haired man

In her younger days they called her Delta Dawn
Prettiest woman you ever laid eyes on
Then a man of low degree stood by her side
Promised her he'd take her for his bride"

Wikipedia says it's about a woman who was cheated out of her virginity, basically. I think it's pretty damn clear that what it really means is her lover died and she went crazy.

Flashfic: Comatose

I like to think that if I were in a coma, it'd be a little something like this.

I'm on my way home from work. My phone buzzes with updates from social networking sites and text messages from the few friends who text me nowadays. I'm such a social recluse that I can barely bring myself to respond to these for fear that my few friends will be surprised I'm awake, or not busy, or not too tired to chat. That's another category of why I don't talk to people much anymore: I don't like talking about how I don't talk.

The subway is a grimy place to be. I'm new to New York, and I'm not used to the inherent ooze that touches everything here, so different from the grassy farm I grew up on. The smell of cows used to be more familiar than the smell of car exhaust and human sweat. Now, I'm not sure which I prefer.

And I miss my dog. He was huge and slobbery and brown and shaggy. My sister had christened him "Pancake" when we'd adopted him, to my dismay, back then. He'd been jovial and comforting up until his premature death one hot July evening as a truck broke three of his ribs and maimed a handful of his internal organs. My sister had cried for hours, hiding in her room until she came out and declared that she wanted chocolate-chip pancakes for dinner, and my mom made them. We painted a gravestone and set it outside over a patch of earth that we liked to pretend the dog was buried in. In reality, we had no idea where his body had gone. Landfill? Museum of domestic animals? Medical waste? Had he donated his remaining organs to science, or to needy dogs around the world? As children, we could only speculate.

In this city there are no real dogs, no big dogs who leap up to greet you and give you slobbery kisses when you walked through the door. Just annoying lapdogs, bred for show and not personality or usefulness.

This was usually what I thought about when I was on the subway. As I stepped off, I wondered why. I thought about myself more than other people thought about themselves, or at least more than others cared to admit that they thought about themselves. I thought about my memories, mostly, of what it was like before I wandered this deathless gray city on a mission that seemed to consist of "work, eat, sleep, rinse and repeat." I remembered more colorful things that seemed vaguely surreal in their colorfulness, as if they were almost too real.

I bump into a couple people on my way onto the street. I used to be paranoid that everyone who touched me was a pickpocket or a homeless drunk with contagious diseases. Now... well, I'm not sure. Those things do exist, unsurprisingly, but now that I live in it, so to speak, I'm not sure what I think of it, or even that I think of it at all. My sister, I'm sure, would be offended by every other person she saw on the street. "That woman is too well dressed for the sidewalk... it's like she's showing off." "It seems like every dumpster in every alleyway on this street has a hobo living in it!" I remember thinking her comments used to be funny, her tiny prejudices about everything from taste in belt buckles to the way a person smiled, but I can't actually recall that feeling of being amused. Maybe because it was so long ago, or maybe because I've grown (figurative) gray hairs since then.

I think about my mother and father too. My father was never around much, but I can vaguely remember superficial details about him: his sandy brown hair, his clear blue eyes, his dazzling white smile when he was pleased because you'd done something right. He was a banker... or maybe he was a lawyer. I couldn't remember. In retrospect, it seemed unimportant. My mother, on the other hand, seemed omnipresent in my memory. She was always bandaging something or hugging someone or scolding you or making dinner for you.

I absentmindedly run into someone, a scrape of shoulders, and I mutter an apology as I try to elude eye contact. It's a girl, about my age, maybe a little older. She looks like she's an artist for a living, maybe illustrates children's books, maybe paints murals on restaurant walls. My "sorry" comes out stuttered and strange, as awkward as I really am deep down inside, a bit stilted and a bit off-center. I'm not sure if it sounds authentic.

"You have to wake up," she says with an expression that seems to accept my apology. She keeps walking. I don't understand. I've never felt a connection with another person, not once that I can remember in my whole life; I haven't developed those subconscious skills that help you read a person, derive what they're thinking from their face. Even if I had I doubt I'd understand what that meant. She was probably an existentialist: live each day as if it might be your last, a penchant against monotony. I'd take the advice to heart. I'd also probably secretly admire her for the next year of my life, long after her face had faded from my memory, for her will to help a random stranger who looked a little lost in his own mind: I have to wake up.

My apartment building was a little red, but only a little. It was also rather brown, and overall not very standoffish but not very subtle either. It stood, in stark contrast to the dead sidewalk in front of it, but in boring unison with the brick buildings surrounding it. Glancing through the glass front door to the doorman at his desk, I found that I didn't want to enter yet, didn't want to fall back into my daily and nightly routine of wake up, go to work, come home, fall asleep. I wanted to break free. I wanted to go somewhere else and do something new.

I passed a small bookstore, an 18+ shop with neon lights in the display, an outdoor cafe. The cafe is one I've never been to before, despite its closeness to my place of residence. I act on a whim and walk under the trellis of roses that marks its entrance from the street. A sign to the side says "seat yourself," and I do so at a table for two to the side. I wonder who sat here before. A couple who would never work out because the girl was too picky and the boy wasn't ready for commitment? A washed-out grad student with a cheap laptop, blogging about the unnecessary evil of money and post-secondary education?

Judging by the pigeons plucking pastry crumbs from the ground near my feet, I would have guessed the latter. Grad students like their pastries.

A waitress passes by with nothing but a menu and a smile. The former, she sets nonchalantly on the table in front of me; the latter, she tosses to me like a child's toy, neglected and superficially cheerful. I finger through the menu and pick out a nice dinner for myself. A vegetarian salad with portobello mushrooms and onion dressing, a small serving of potato soup, and a chilled turkey-and-spinach salad. I know right off the bat that I'm not going to be able to eat it all, but I want to spoil myself with the idea of variety. There was no sampler platter on the menu. This was my equivalent, my way of telling myself to find something that I enjoyed, and to enjoy it.

The waitress returned, retrieving the menu as I held it out to her. "You're in a coma," she said cheerfully, in that sociable manner all waitresses seem perpetually locked into. Her smile doesn't falter as she nods like I've just told her something important and walks off again without taking my order. I am confused, more confused than I feel inside my own thoughts sometimes. What's happened here? What sort of social dynamic is taking place that random strangers are telling me things that make no sense?

She returns shortly with the exact meal I'd picked out, like I'd told her my order after all. "Enjoy," she says, the last syllable falling off the rest of the word, as if it takes energy for her to be happy. I understand her completely. In that moment, I want to reach out and say, I know what you mean. I don't want to be human either.

This city is so dirty.

I ate more than I thought I would and now it's getting late. But I want more, I want to go somewhere I've never been. Without a bike, with no money for a taxi or a trip on the subway, and in such a small neighborhood, my options are limited. But I end up wandering toward the river. There's a little children's park nearby, which despite the late hour and the orange sunlight fading into purple and blue is still not empty. I'm sure the nearby parents won't approve if I sit on one of the swings like I did when I was a child, looking into the sky and dreaming about growing soft, feathery wings and flying away, to somewhere where nobody could ever touch me, where evil and wrongness and error hadn't stuck their grimy taloned fingers and polluted everything there was to touch.

So I watch from a park bench. There's a little girl with blonde pigtails who repeatedly tries and fails to cross the monkey bars, her feet flailing as she struggles to propel herself to the opposite side. A female teenager who is what I can only presume to be a babysitter smiles and chats to another girl with mismatched socks while simultaenously carefully watching a daredevil little boy from across the gravel playground. He yells "watch me!" as he jumps from an upper story of the fort.

There are other children too, some without watchers, maybe stragglers who haven't noticed the time or who don't have parents who care where they are. Everything seems to coalesce into a choking haze - the air, the smell of the city, the buzz of everything and anything that makes noise here, the footsteps of the cautious and the confident as they progress toward their apartments and their houses, eager to find a warm bed to collapse into so that they can sleep the night.

Like a fog, a sense of intense wrongness settles down onto me and everything around me. Infecting. Polluting.

A boy walks over and stares at me with wide, anxious eyes. I notice that a green ball has rolled to the ground outside the playground gravel and it right up against my elbow. Understanding the child's shyness, I lift the ball from its resting place at my feet and stand to walk it over to him. He takes a few steps forward until he can snatch it out of my hands, which are far older, far more callused.

Where do I work again?

I hand it to him carefully, gently, as if he is a deer or moth to be frightened away at sudden movements, and he grabs it and a smile lights his face. I am reminded of the people waiting for me to get home back at my apartment, their smiles and their worries and their laughter...

Who are they? Am I married, do I have children? Where is my family? I don't have a family...

I try to remember my mother, my sister, my father, but they fall apart like wooden dolls crudely fashioned of twigs and loosely-tied string. I can remember that my father was strong, though I can't see him in my mind, powering through his work or pulling his weight at home. I can remember my mother was kind, though I can't recall her ever explaining a grandfather's death to us or comforting us after a traumatizing first day of school. I can remember my sister was witty, though I can't remember ever bantering with her or any of the jokes I'd thought she'd told.

If I have a wife, I don't remember her. Yet there is a masculine diamond ring around a finger on my left hand... I don't remember putting it there, kissing anyone - ever, or seeing a woman I loved in a white dress as she paraded proudly down a wedding aisle to the tune of the marriage songs churches are so fond of.

I am brought back to the present as the boy smiles, green ball in hand, and says thankfully, "This isn't real."

I stand as he gallops away. He has all of the energy that I lack, that this place drained me of. I meander back to the cold sidewalk and make my way home, but all the while, I purposefully meet the empty, glassy stares of every stranger I meet on the street, and I search them for the answer to a question I'm not sure that I know how to ask.

The doorman greets me as I enter the building. His lips move but I can't hear anything he says.

The elevator lights but makes no noise as I climb in. All there is is the sound of my footsteps, and that gets fainter and fainter as I head toward my gray refuge from the life outside home and work.

I have a ring but there's no wife or child to greet me when I open the door. Just silence. Just grayness, blending all of the world together into a sad ocean of empty fog. There is nothing here. There is only grayness. There is only emptiness. There is only patience, and waiting. There is only an entrance to the emptiness, no exit, or at least not one that I can see.

How did I get here?

How do I get back?

So I have this virus on my laptop.

This old girl (her name is Florencine) is just too clunky. This has gotta be the eighth virus she's gotten. This one's well made (is it bad that I have an appreciation for nice viruses?) but unfortunately for me, that means it's clingy and persistent. It's this one.

I am so irritated.

Dear virus creators, stop modeling your visual viruses after virus prevention programs. It was creative at first, but now everyone and anyone can see them coming. This one is good, well made... few to no typos. But you overdo it just a little. Also no virus creator names their viruses "email worm" or "secret trojan." Nobody. Think: if you're naming your virus "XP Antispyware 2012," why would they name theirs something totally obvious? Pfft. You guys don't think.

Also why aren't people hiring me to help them build and write viruses and help with terrorism and stuff. I mean I do this stuff better than they can. Not that I've ever written a virus. Ahem, hem. 

I have also been tumblring all night. I've renamed, resloganed, and reskinned Rebellious Rockette. Same URL for convenience, but now the tumblrblog is called "Space Rebel."

I've been reading pettyartist's Nuzlocke challenge comics all night and watchin' stuff like this. And now I'm convinced I want to erase my save on Black (good-bye, Darmanitan! ;-; I loved you so...) and start a Nuzlocke Challenge. If so I'd like to learn how to record DS gameplay but I haven't watched this video yet so I'm not sure I can do it on my budget.

Also I am addicted to Odalisquia, and my new favorite (barring Extraordinary, which is her only non-oneshot) my new favorite is Truth and Lies, which is kind of quick and feel-good with just enough darkness and reality to make me really feel the story. Oops, happy!rant...

This is just about everything up in my tabs right now. An update on what I'm doing, and also reminders/links that I'll want again, because I suspect this virus is about to take down my Firefox.

(God I love Firefox. It's nigh invulnerable to virus interference. But I'm not taking any risks here.)

I am so mad

So I got onto 4chan for the first time in my life.

And I get a message like this:

"You have been permanently banned from all boards for the following reason:

Being underage.

Your ban was filed on April 16th, 2011. This ban will not expire.

According to our server, your IP is: 74.112.212.15. The name you were posting with was ReimuHakurei!!jfioGdYT+nh.

Your appeal was reviewed and denied. You may not appeal this ban again."

What the hell?!

I've never used that username, never even been on 4chan, never appealed a ban, never been banned (by anything, ever). Do I sound like the kind of person who'd name themselves something animeish like "Reimu Hakurei"?

I am so mad. And so confused.

GAME FEATURE :D

You gotta go play Rush.

Man, this is addictive.

I have a full quickie #flashreview over at Mnemosynister.

Gauges

Slid in some 14G tapers yesterday. My first gauges.

They really ache. I'm trying not to touch them.

So I was at the store

looking at a rack of hoodies, and there's a guy standing there next to me looking at the same rack, and it's awkward and we end up striking up a conversation. He says purple looks good on me and I laugh and we talk about my pet rabbits and how he can make grilled cheese. He's really pretty for a boy and he has a green pen in his pocket and I draw a picture on his hand and he compliments my art skills and asks for my number. His phone is in this case that looks like a Crayola green crayon and he says green used to be his favorite color, which is why he's got all green stuff. So I put my number in and we go home, and I just know he's actually going to call me for once. And then--

I WAKE UP

ASDFGHJKL:LKJHGFDSASDFGHJKLLLLL;;;

Over at Mnemosynister

Recent posts about Dragon Age: Origins:

DAO: Return after a while.
DAO: Origin stories pt. 1
DAO: Origin stories pt. 2
I'm going to maybe replay DA:O.

Recent posts about Rift:


Rift: Level 30 + Healer Spec + Guild

No more sick!

I took my final antibiotic tonight. I skipped a few accidentally but I've finally finished the whole horrid-tasting bottle. And now I'm supposedly strep-throat-less. Thing is, I never actually feel like I have strep throat. The doctor tests me for it and tells me I have it, but I feel fine. It's only after I take the pills that I start to feel horrible. Headache, stomachache, muscle cramps... ugh.

Medicine is not for me. I prefer remedial ice cream.

Game blog

I talk too much about games so now you can just go over to Mnemosynister, my new blog, and read that stuff there. Not here anymore, unless I feel like it. So that'll cut down gamer entries. 'Kay?

So I was going to give City of Heroes a try.

And that's when I realized that I only wanted to create a superhero, not actually play it.

So never mind on that.

In the meantime

When I'm not dealing with my grandparents or working, I'm writing, drawing/painting, or playing games. Obviously Rift has been sucking my time, but with that (temporarily?!) out of commission, I need something new. The answer: Project Zomboid.

But no PayPal option means no game for me. As soon as there is one, however, it's Rock Paper Scizzorz for me! Or perhaps Stand On Top of the Other Guy But Be Bigger.

Rift, again: Crafting, questing, lag.

Sup, homies.

Just kidding. Anyway, I've recently figured something out: teenagers aren't supposed to play MMOs, apparently. There was a guild conversation today where age came up. Some kid said he was thirteen, and got laughed at. Apparently, "Healers should be 30, tanks should be 20, dps should be 13." I'm mostly a tank and sometimes a healer, and I'm fourteen.

Lucky me. Am I very mature, or very misplaced?

That aside, Rift has been going well. I might as well make this into a gamer blog with the way I'm going. :B

I leveled up a whopping ton. I got the level 20 achievement and I'm level 27 as I type. Level 30 will be a milestone for me, because in MMOs I usually don't get to level 30, sometimes even level 20. It just goes to show that Rift has my attention for the time being. It probably helps that my summer break just started (well, two weeks ago, but that's about how long I've been playing).

So I'm level 27, and I realize that I need to complete this quest in the Saga of the Endless chain, which involves going into a dungeon that I won't be able to go into after level 31 again until level 50. I get worried, so I go and spend my time farming mining mats and pumping up that skill, then working my armorsmith so it's actually useful before I get to level 50 (assuming I reach 50). It's not really a noticeable kind of armor upgrade from the quest rewards I get, but it's still useful to train the skill while I have the mats in my quest hub area.

I'm an Expert Miner and an Expert Armorsmith now. I wish there was a title there with those so that I could have a different title than "Champion of Freemarch." Oh, well. And I didn't bother to farm rams for my Butchering skill, so that's going to come back and bite me in the ass. Actually, it already did when I had to buy linen cloth rather than make it. But that's another story.

Anyway, I quested all the way through Stonefield, and finally got to go to Scarlet Gorge, the official third zone. (I say official because I accidentally took a brief sojourn into Scarwood, but it doesn't matter.) I'm pretty far in that chain as well, though lately I haven't been doing EVERY SINGLE QUEST like it's so tempting to do. I keep rerealizing, oh, yeah, this quest isn't necessary. Why am I going this far out of my way to accomplish it?! It's totally healthy, ha.

All this was going perfectly well, and I was slaughtering miners, you know, same old, same old, when suddenly the LAG MONSTER APPEARS AND EATS MY FACE and two minutes later my computer/the server/whatever catches up and I am dead, hurray.


But it's really awful. Constant, horrid spikes of latency, making the game basically unplayable. When something that I can't escape aggro'd on me, I'd have to hope that I could beat it with the few shots I could get in, because I certainly couldn't play very well. I was stuck running up and down the main Scarlet Gorge road looking for chromite so that I could go craft instead. That would have been great, except that lagged and I disconnected an endless amount of times and I died an endless amount of times and shops took ages to open and once the soul resurrection technician's speech box wouldn't open so I was trapped in soul walk mode... Then, while crafting chromite bars, one bar took eight minutes and all the while was that highly irritating crafting noise for armorsmith and a bar that appeared to be full.

If this doesn't get better, I'm cancelling my subscription, and I am taking my money somewhere else. This is ridiculous, and I'm not paying for a game I can't play.

Rift: Rogue and Cleric

Now that I've posted a long, dramatic entry about my life, I'll actually get to the good stuff.

As I said, Rift is my game right now. In my parting with mage (ranged dps, oh how I have come to dislike you), obviously it was a choice between warrior, cleric, and rogue. And I've never been a person for warrior... I don't know, but it just doesn't appeal to me, plus warrior doesn't have that flexibility I want to expect from this game. It's pretty much just dps and tanking.

So it was a choice between cleric or rogue. I went rogue.

On the Alsbeth server, which was medium popularity when I started but now has a huge-ass queue (supposedly - I guess the times that I get on just aren't popular times), I began playing as Vaethereal (hey! that name sure sounds familiar), a Defiant Bahmi rogue. I'm a Defiant through and through, story and attitude (and race) wise, and the Bahmi are awesome, so it was a given.

Anyway, I started with Assassin, added on Bladedancer, and much to my chagrin finally nabbed... Ranger. Oops. Stuck with that horrid choice for the rest of the tutorial, I even eventually had to get rid of my pet tank pig (ahem, I mean, RAZORBEAST) because he stopped following me. A glitch? An inopportune button-press that I didn't know how to reverse? Whatever it was, I never found out. End ranger career.

I finally got out and chose something else, I don't even know, and those solo dps days were fun, sure, but I had just discovered bard when I finally cracked and figured out that rogue was simply not for me. As a dps Assassin I was vulnerable and didn't think my damage was quite up to par with what I wanted, plus melee dps isn't my thing. (All this talk of dps! What have I become, a scientist?!) At least, not here, in this game. And as a Bard (support), I just felt too un-useful, especially at early levels. I got to level 18 before quitting.

Also on the Alsbeth server, I began a cleric character (look me up; my username is Mnemosyne, another alias of mine. I'm elusive like that). This went much smoother, much better. I decided early on that I was gonna be a fucking tank for once. Cleric in Rift has healing of course, but also tank with the Justicar soul, and dps if I wanted cruise control. I like tanking. I like healing. So here I was.

I pumped my Justicar full of steroids AHEM I meant points. Eventually reset it because I had points in Sentinel that I didn't really need, so I tossed those over to Shaman for extra defense and damage. When I finally got up in the Justicar soul enough that I had the AoE attack Even Justice, I considered myself ready to tank. Add that to another attack whose name I forget that forces monsters to aggro to me, and I'm not the best tank ever, but still half viable at least.

I messed with a healing role (alternate build), but haven't put it into practice yet. I just wanted it just in case it was the only way to get into a group.

Speaking of groups, on Vae I got invited to the cross-MMO guild Suspiria, but since I dropped that character for now, I was getting lonely in the middle of my kill quests with no one talking. I don't talk much, so it was good when I finally got invited to Dragonheart. I'm not sure if I like the guild yet - too much social, not enough help or events or dungeon runs, etc. - but it's better than listening to battle chat all day. "3 hit points! 17 hit points! Critical hit!" Ugh.

When a quest finally required it, I did my first real instanced dungeon, ever. (I never do level caps, remember?) But this was only level 20 or so, so I jumped right in and tanked as best as I could. Again, the only problem with cleric tanks that I can see is the aggro, but Mein of Leadership helps with that. It's the best possible thing they could have done for the Justicar tank, I think, because it gives 300% threat, 100% more armor and 90% more endurance. I messed up a few times... but it was my first instance! And the people were nice, considering my newness, and the two "veterans" helped a lot and didn't let the three newbies, including me, down. All in all, I thought I did pretty well, but I didn't ask them. (I only had to apologize once, and apparently people wipe often in these instances, so I have no complaints!)

I now play primarily as a level 22 Defiant Kelari Cleric named Mnemosyne on the US Alsbeth server. Find me and chat me up. :)

Inky's MMORPG History: An EPIC TALE!111!1

Writing stuff about Rift makes me think about the days when I tried to be a game blogger. It never worked out. Either I stopped playing or liking the game, didn't have enough time, or couldn't think of anything to blog about.

I've looked around a lot, poking and pulling and tugging here and there, and found that Rift fanmade content is 20% critical acclaim, 5% denouncements, 10% beginner's guides and 65% soul guides (AKA guides to the class system). Oh, and there was one website about the lore, not counting Telarapedia, so I guess take about 5% out of somewhere and put it in lore. Probably out of beginner's guides.

Here's why I don't make a good MMO blogger. I don't do MMOs.

What's that I hear? "But Inky, you've been all over the MMO genre! You've done derpy games no one likes and glorious games everyone likes! That's a lie, you hear me? A lie!"

The sad thing is, I have in fact. I have beaten around the brush so many times I have practically ripped all of the leaves off and ruined my lawn. I've become jaded about MMOs, completely jaded, and it kinda hurts.

MMOs used to be my stock game. They were free (well... the free ones, anyway) and they let me have a character. Suddenly I became anyone I wanted. I was a badass mage who incinerated my enemies alive, summoned demons from horrible alternate planes of existence, and electrified the skeletons out of huge wild dogs. I was always a mage in those early days. I loved the idea of magic, and hurting monsters with it.

And I was only seven or eight at the time, I believe. But I've always been a mature writer, always spelled correctly, always been a grammar Nazi - a little perfectionist child too smart for her own good - and no one suspected any the wiser. I was never called out for being a kid, and always got offended when people would say things like "get thes kids off teh internts! D:<<" because I was (and still am) one of the heavy majority.

It was like that for a long time. I'd choose the mage class without even thinking about it. I went through acres and acres of MMOs. Each fell before me, so quickly that I can't even remember their names. There was one with horrid graphics, a minigame crafting system, and an "epic quest chain" that even I, at my fertile young age (ha ha ha), recognized as "go here, kill level one monster ten times, go back, go here, kill level two monster fifteen times, go back" repetition. That stuck in my head because it was actually later in this chain, after I'd figured out that graphics weren't everything. Still, after walking around in a world where everything looked like a version of the Linux penguin, I figured out that I did actually care.

There was another one that was outrageously difficult that I never got past level eleven on; I don't know how it's doing now, and though I never deleted it from my laptop, I still don't plan on going back. Not now, probably not ever. And another, where I learned to really love the races because they were equivalent to classes, only to find out that - after the really long download that my computer kept rejecting - the game sucked.

Then I met MapleStory.

Oh, it was love at first sight. After going through the tedious tutorial and finally figuring out how to work the damn thing, I was in graphics heaven. Sure, I looked like a generic chick alongside a sea of other generic chicks, but the colors kept me going. The first time I played MS, it was early on in my MMO career; I got to level 2 and stopped. I don't remember why...

Between a horde of other MMOs, I tried it again, and got further as a mage (as usual). I learned to hate it. The community, the graphics, the quests, the advertisements, the attacks, the classes, the options, the "customization," the cookie cutter enemies. God, how I hated all of it. I stopped playing again. Until I returned again maybe a year later, thinking, "I should give MS a chance then, see if I like it now that I'm older." Nothing doing. If anything, I hated it even more. This was my most outstanding experience, in my life thus far, of online douchebags. When I finally came back the last time, they'd JUST added new classes. I tried the "Hard" difficulty one and, wow, it was fun (again)! I knew it wasn't meant to be. And I was two hours into playing it when I threw up. It was the flu. And every time I think of MS now, I feel sick, and for that I'm grateful, because MapleStory is a horrible game. I still don't know why I kept going back to it. Power in advertising?

That terrible relationship over, I was on the lookout for a rebound, and there probably were a few. But soon after that, I found Dream of Mirror Online, or DOMO. I got in, made my character, learned to love the graphics. Typical of me.

But what was great about DOMO was the plot, at first, though I never got that far into it. It was quick 'n' easy, a drive-by plot, but I still had a REASON for everything I was doing. And there was a dungeon early on, one that I came to be an expert at and understand. After that it only got better. I discovered the class system - you could change it whenever you liked, to whatever class you had, as long as you'd unlocked it. It was great, and it helped me discover non-magic classes. I actually never played a mage class, strictly. I played Fencer briefly (which I regret not doing more PvP with, because in retrospect it was a marvelous PvP class) as a transition class so I could get other classes unlocked. I got Doctor, and - WHAT? I was decent at healing?

And then I got Dancer and discovered the wonders of AoE attacks, and sure, I loved that to death, but I discovered other marvelous things too, like Musician, which I loved and still love. It was the main support class, and maintaining buffs became a pastime. Speccing and training my Musician class helped me learn about buffs, stats, etc. which I hadn't understood for a very long time. Not to mention that I was doing something very useful without being in the line of fire, which was great.

And finally, just before I took a long DOMO break, I explored the Mercenary class. And it was all about... tanking.

Oh, could I tank. I had a talent for it, I think, maybe. A knack for beating the living shit out of people who aggro'd onto my teammates without even thinking about it and keeping the aggro on me. I loved it. I loved never dying because people would always keep the tank healed at ALL COSTS. You know what happens if the tank dies? Everyone wipes, that's what. The feeling of power that came with tanking was great. For once people got panicked if I had to leave the group in the middle of a grind. AoEs like Dancer and pullers like Thief were a penny a dozen, but Merc tanks were rare and precious. If you didn't have a tank you were done.

That's how it is with all games, I guess, but DOMO taught me how much I like the exact roles that I WASN'T playing back then: support and tank. I took a break from DOMO and still am, but I haven't permanently quit it and I might yet return one day.

Guild Wars was great, too. I wish other pay-to-play games were pay-once-and-you're-done. And bringing partners who weren't people was fun, until I realized that this WASN'T an mmo. It was... something else, a video game I was playing while talking to other people on occasion, if at all.

But eventually I did discover several things about GW that made it so great. For one, it was plot intensive. A lot less kill-and-grab quests than most, though of course there were those too. Complex classes that required skill to master, not just thoughtless button-mashing (well, at least at first). The ability to create level-cap characters for PvP purposes taught me to love PvP for the first time. When we'd get a really good random group together and all would go smoothly, we'd string together two, three, eight victories before we met the rare better random team and would be taken down. And of course I loved the ambiance, the music and scenery. Nightfall was my favorite. And I loved how everywhere outside of the towns was an instance. Must've been VERY costly to run on a server... but for once, there was no one parading around taking my mobs and loot and just generally kicking my ass.

Somewhere in there I tried World of Warcraft like everyone does. I loved it when I opened the box. I read through the manual anxiously on the way home as my mom drove me to our house (I'm still not sure if she knows what an MMO is, or if she'd have approved back then, but I was antisocial and didn't talk to anyone anyway). I was a Night Elf Druid. But oh, the grind. It hurt. Wow, it hurt.

I barely made it to the level where I got to be a cat. So stupid. Didn't even train the skill. I expect if I went back and tried again, I'd be a lot more efficient, but hey. Maybe WoW and I just weren't meant to be.

Oh, plus there was this other elf who came onto me and told me to take my armor off. Mark of maturity, right there, for me: I laughed and ignored him. A year before I'd have freaked out. Go, me.

Anyway, there've been others. Now I'm at Rift.

Tl;dr MMOs are not for Inky. But she tries anyway.

Hey nonexistent readers, you just raeg at my long self-centered post nonexistently, k? I'll care so hard.

Niche

This is kind of a... niche blog, isn't it? With no real purpose? Teenaged female with psychological issues talks about the internet, said issues, games, books, movies, friends, psychology, science, writing, art, and her life? It's too broad to be of a specific purpose and too specific to appeal to... well, anyone, really. I take heart in the idea that I can't be totally unique, though.

Pills

Been having a lot of psychological issues lately, and I finally got my doctor to put me on pills. Prozac - for depression. I'm frank here because I won't be with anyone else.

I take them once daily. They usually aren't prescribed to teenagers because they work so well... that is, they work very well in comparison to others, with fewer side effects.

Make sense? I thought not.

My mother, a psychologist and also on depression meds for a heck of a lot of years, explained it like this: when you're depressed, all anyone ever cares about it whether or not you're suicidal, right? So most people think that if you're not, it's not serious, or at least not very. But a lot of times it's because people hit that low. The psychological low that means you can barely function, if at all; the feeling where you want to lie in bed and let things get worse because you don't have the energy to counteract it, to do anything. And that can be good too (though, having experienced it, I'd never call it "good"): if you don't have the energy to get up in the morning, you don't have the energy to commit suicide.

So the pills start working, better than most other pills. And you're right in that transitory stage, right in that place where you're still feeling horrible but you've come up with some energy to do something about it.

And so you do.

I don't feel that many people have... the right, honestly, to tell us about or diagnose depression. I watched a movie in the eighth grade in Health class - it was mandatory - called "Silence of the Heart." I felt offended at the movie, frankly. The way it depicted depression... well. For starters, the main character at the beginning, the one who commits suicide, named Skip - he's apparently depressed because of all of the hardships he's been going through, because he didn't pass a test and his daddy doesn't love him or something (I'm serious). And so he drives his car off of a cliff.

And the rest of the movie was all of the characters dealing with the aftermath, trying to pick up the pieces of their lives. A guilt trip for me because at one point that year I had been mildly suicidal (can you be mildly suicidal?) and it only made me feel worse.

It's awful because movies like this perpetually give "normal people" a reason to differentiate depressed people between themselves, to make them feel worse about themselves. The people who think this kind of movie are right, completely right, are making things worse by using guilt tactics to coerce depressed/suicidal people and trying to find a reason for a person's depression, or obvious warning signs just before they commit suicide. That's all total bullshit. Some people don't have warning signs, or at least not ones you'll recognize. Some people don't have reasons... that's me; sometimes I realize I've just looked for any excuse to be angry or depressed, even one as stupid as getting the cold, a friend taking too long to reply, or getting a paper-cut. Mentally I know that's all very stupid, but sometimes my brain uses it as a horrible excuse to go on a downward spiral, just like that. And then sometimes there are no reasons at all.

Depression is an illness. An illness caused by defects in the processes in your brain involving "happy chemicals" and "mood balancing chemicals" called serotonin and norepinephrine* in your brain.

And I'm tired of it being treated like it's just me complaining all day, because goddammit, I've been diagnosed and I'm obviously not using it as an excuse - I can talk coherently and politely, can't I? If anything, I need to complain more. Because you know what other people think of me, even my closest friends? That I'm confident, that I have a brilliant sense of humor, that I always give stuff my best shot, that I'm an overachiever, that I'm a good artist and writer, that I'm a shoulder to cry on and a good friend, sometimes a truthfully selfish person and sometimes an altruist.

Normal person, confident in her abilities and in her life, right? Right?

That's what everyone sees, but on the inside, I'm just a vulnerable little five-year-old girl, and every hit doled out to me like someone would hit a person of my apparent strength and resilience just goes straight through the facade and beats that little girl.

I'm not saying that I hate critique, or something (it helps you improve, so I enjoy it, mostly, in fact), but... there are some hits I have trouble taking. And most people out there will never tell the difference. All I know is how to dish back what I just took, harder, faster, stronger, more accurately. My only defense is an offense, and guess how well that works out? Which is why I never did like arguments with friends (or "frenemies," for that matter). There are always sharp barbs in your words, always something asinine. There hasn't been an argument in the past two years that didn't involve an angry someone calling someone else "honey" or "sweetie" or "sugar." Because those names are like powdered sugar, sweetening you up before they cut you open and making it oh, so much easier to wound and bite and hurt.

I am very... something right now. It's a dull feeling, kind of numb, where talking hurts, moving is impossible and thinking is all you can do, and so you think a lot.

When it's really difficult to keep a straight opinion.

I've realized lately how much other people affect my opinions. When I'm talking about a game or a book or a movie that I like and someone mentions that someone I dislike loves it sooooooo much, immediately I feel my like for the game slipping away...

...or when my best friend plays it and critiques things I love about the game... or loves things I hate...

No. I'm done letting other people affect me. From here on out, I am a loner as much as I have to be in order to keep my opinions whole. Because if that can happen with something I look at or study or use a lot, and on a frequent basis... I can only imagine how it affects my lifestyle choices, my actions and decisions, my political stance, my personality as a whole. Do I want to know?

No, I don't.

So here's my oath of mental traffic: that there will be none.

Dialect

Choose Redneck, then type in my blog's URL.

It gives me memories of home...

Just kidding.

Or am I?

Mass Effect 2

IS THE AWESOMEST THING EVER.

I like it even more than Dragon Age: Origins. I've been playing it NONSTOP. I thought I loved Bioware before - I want to work there when I grow up - but WOW, this just is brilliance incarnate.

It's reestablished my confidence with shooters - I used to hate them, but now I see that I can play them pretty damn well with a decent interface (James Bond, I hate you so). And the default key layouts are extremely intuitive. I love it.

I must say that I don't like the character conversational options as much as in Dragon Age, because there aren't many. I realized halfway through the game how important getting Renegade (and its good equivalent with the blue because I can't remember what it was called) scores is. Especially during that Morinth mission. Which was the best/most hilarious thing ever, thank you very much.

I knew Garrus was a romance option from some conversations with another chick on dA, just in passing. Then, in game, I figured out that he was awesome, and I was like HECK YES LET'S BE THE AWKWARD INTERSPECIES COUPLE BECAUSE YOU ARE AWESOMENESS INCARNATE. Then I found out that for some reason the only way to initiate that is through casual sex? What?

Anyway, I don't even know. I can't wait for ME3. But in the meantime, I'm going to download and play the first. I thought I wouldn't have enough time to play the first before the third came out, but evidence says otherwise: I've just about cleared this game in two days. (Granted, they were two long, twenty-four-hour-periods-of-sleeplessness days, but who cares? In the summer, that's how I roll). I might even have time to load that character onto this one and play it again .___. Wow, that'd be... signs of being an addict.

But also rewarding. In the long run.

I love this game, I love third-person shooters (WHY did I decide I hated ALL shooters after all those first-persons?!), I love these characters (I know Jack probably pisses the rest of the world off, but I like her), I love being an intergalactic space badass who could chop Samus Aran in half with her pinky fingernail. I love it.

My regular team is Garrus and Jack, I'm an Adept, my favorite weapon is the Collector Particle Beam followed by the M-6c Carnifex Hand Cannon. I'm doing all of the various missions, loyalty and otherwise, before I pick up that IFF.

And then, IT'S PLOT GO-TIME. WOOOOOOO.

This has been a fangirl, fangirling out like a fangirl. FANGIRL OUT.

Rift Time!

I be playin' it. Twenty-four seven.

Seriously, that's ALL.

Catch me on my stream, maybe?

School is almost GONE

Thank the gods because I hate it to DEATH. To bloody, fiery, doomy death.

ATE HATE HATE HATE HAT.

Anyway, it's Geometry finals tomorrow, then Biology the next day, and that is it. That's all. I'm done. It's over. Kaput.

I shall stand and rejoice and praise not only the gods of THANK FUCKING GOD, but also the gods of FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFINALLY.

School likes to kill me slowly with a stake and a pitchfork. It's funny like that.

Meet my baby, Carrie.

She is a round red bouncy-ball that Kate and I purchased from Toys 'R' Us on Saturday. We drew a face on her and named her (it's Carrie Cherrycakes, then our combined surnames) and now we have joint custody of her. As we speak (ahem, I write), she sits on the desk, looking up with that adorable sultry expression of hers. If she looks like this as a child, she is going to have to be either a supermodel or a porn star when she grows up.

Anyway, she's wearing my glasses and looks odd, because her left eye is SUPER MAGNIFIED! because I'm blind on the left side. Which is bad anyway because her left eye is bigger than the right anyway, haha.

Typing this because my Rift download failed so many times that it took my entire seven-day trial just to download it, and now I have to buy it off Steam. :B

Well, that's all. Maybe pictures of Carrie and her two mommies later :)

I see you driving 'round town with the girl I love

and I'm like FUCK YOU, LADY AT THE PET SHOP. FUCK YOU.

Yes, it seems that my intuition was correct and the woman at the pet store when we first bought the rabbits was completely INcorrect. She told me Fiona (Finn?) was a girl, and now I have a pregnant rabbit. Thanks a lot, you stupid girl. Thanks a LOT.

On another note, does anyone want rabbit babies?

I might be jumping the gun here, but I'm pretty sure that when a mammal is getting fat and has nipples showing, that means babies. Going to see the vet soon, and going to never trust a pet store employee again. Dear karma, I've learned my lesson: learn how to sex rabbits and then sex them yourself. At least then it's MY fault.

I'm just... SO ANGRY right now. Angry enough that I'm not going to do any more than mention my illness, how I had to have blood drawn this morning, how finals are encroaching evilly, how my Rift download and my Mass Effect 2 download fucked up and now I have to start ALL OVER, or how I figured out how to draw rabbits. I am just so ANGRY.

_{You know what's good for anger management? Guitar Hero. Man, I am gonna go wreck that shit up.}

YAY: Rift LPs, homework (yay?!) and tech

Gonna download the week-long free trial of Rift, then stream it on my usteam channel (look me up :D "MMORPGs with Skee :o", and my username is scenis) and record it and put it on Youtube, finally do some let's plays, you know... I'm just... in a good mood.

Now, let's see what happens when I open my homework agenda...

...

WHOA. No homework. That always happens when I think I have a lot... (and vice versa, which is bad).

Shit... 54 more hours on the Rift updates. Ugghhhhhhhhhh.

Maybe I'll try The Path?!

...

Ugh, never mind. I keep forgetting the (in my humble opinion) outdated graphics.

I need a new indie game :o This is horrible.

NYAN

FUCK YEAH NYAN CAT.

Angry pt. 2

Unrelated note to pt. 1:

When I think bad things lately, such as

Maybe my best friend is romantically interested in me... I should reciprocate.

or

I don't like this person, and they've really hurt me in the past... I should "lose" these important papers of theirs.

or

I'll never get a straight A in all of these classes. I should stop trying now - finals will be a breeze.

or

I'm not terribly pretty, so maybe it doesn't matter if I brush my hair and take a shower today.
When I leave the room, everyone looks at each other and snickers.
No one really cares what I say.
It doesn't matter if I eat badly - it's not like I ever gain any weight.
I don't have to clean the pet cage today, even though it stinks pretty bad and the pets are unhappy.
My friends don't truly care about me - they just don't want to have to make new friends.
All of life is politics, and I'll never fit in anywhere.
It is physically impossible to desire me - I am undesirable.
I take things far too seriously.
I take things far too lightly.
Everything I've done is going to bite me in the ass when karma finds me.
My family doesn't like it when I talk.
There's nobody who can truly help me.

Then I slap myself, because I have to stop thinking those things if I want to be happy.

I am declining. My mood is like a roller-coaster that I'm driving, and sometimes I can make it slow down, if I try really hard. But there's still only one track, and the only way off it is to turn the thing into the empty air and hope I land right. So all I can do is clutch the bars as we go down those huge dips, and convince myself that there's another hill upwards just around the bend. In the meantime, my mind is in a shit condition, and everything is really hard to deal with. When I last visited my social worker for psychological therapy, she caught me on a "happy" day. So we talked about how I was managing. We talked about how physical activity would help, how eating right and sleeping well would help, how my friends could help, how I dealt with school and people.

I think I'm afraid of people. I don't want to face their rejection, and I don't want to face their approval, because I know I can lose it. Sometimes it surprises me when people that I consider only the vaguest of acquaintances call me a friend. I don't make "friends" easily. In fact, I would consider myself almost friendless, with one, maybe two friends that I really trust with myself. And the others, I am constantly suspicious of. Is she thinking I shouldn't be sitting here with them? Is he secretly angry at me for infringing on some strange friendship-related "rule"? And the worst part is that I can't help it. I need help. I need to beat my head into the table and feel someone tell me that I am right.

Angry

Because things don't go my way. Because people like looking down their nose at me. Because this is literally a game, and the more I get mad because of a game, the more angry I get at myself.

Because games aren't supposed to be taken seriously. There's supposed to be no real loss, besides time. There's supposed to be a fun way to come back, to play again. Loss shouldn't equal permanent loss. Loss should be fun, a "try again next time." Not a "now I can't allow you to play because you're a jerk, I misunderstood your instructions, I didn't do what you wanted me to do, and I won't take it back because you're being a bitch."

My overreactions do not mean you need to look down your nose at me. I fixed it, didn't I?

This is like tabletop RPGs, where the admin says "Rocks fall everyone dies." Except it's really just, "rocks fall, you die and everyone else picks all of your stuff off of your slowly chilling body."

Except this isn't a tabletop RPG.

I don't even know. This is complicated and difficult to explain.

Think of it as long-term Risk, where your country is a pet that you love fervently. And then someone kills it.

Actually, never mind, because this is too hard to explain without loads of backstory.

I AM RESOLVED FOR THIS TO BE A GOOD DAY, SO I WILL APPEASE MYSELF WITH THE KNOWLEDGE THAT I GET TO WATCH TV NOW THAT I'M DONE WITH MY ARTS HOMEWORK. Even if nothing good is on...

stop it stop it stop it no negative thoughts shut up stop it stop it stop it

Testimonials

For Skechers Shape-ups:

"I have never found more comfortable shoes than Shape-ups. I can feel the burn in my legs and buttocks almost immediately." -Monica, Wyoming

Do people even actually read these things?

Writing romance.

There's only so much to add. The way he smells. The way he moves. The way he looks. The way he walks. Where they put their hands and feet and where. The devastatingly beautiful look in their eyes (what?) or the way the protagonist shivers as his fingers touch her shoulder (or something). I can't do it. I'm hopeless. High fantasy and science fiction are my genres. Not... romance. But what would a book-length story be without it? Oh, screw this. I'm going to go back to writing epic battle scenes with wizardry/plasma guns and cyborgs/shapeshifters.

HEAR THAT, GENRE CONVENTIONS? SCREW YOU FOR AS LONG AS I CAN AVOID IT.

Silicone. Saline.

Here's a list of my recent favorite songs. No particular genre favoritism. I'm unbiased like that.

1. Beep - The Pussycat Dolls
2. Skelling - Loreena Mckennit
3. Dance in the Dark (Monarchy 'Stylites' Remix) - Lady Gaga (Silicone... saline...)
4. The Cave - Mumford and Sons
5. Ireland - Tori Amos
6. Phenomena - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
7. Paradise Circus - Massive Attack
8. SexSlaveShip - Flying Lotus
9. Rhinestone Eyes - Gorillaz
10. That's Not My Name - The Ting Tings

Get Out. Of. My. Plans.

Dear Unfriend,

I am sick and tired of your constant "woe-is-me," I'm-going-to-come-to-your-plans-too whinemongering. Shut up. Shut up about me, shut up about your own sorry-ass self. Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.

I am so tired of your shit. You wonder why I hate you so much, why I am a " TOTAL BITCH to EVERYONE that tries to befriend SOMEONE" and think that "obviously, if you would have matured, we wouldn´t be having this conversation."

I am through with your fucking assholery. Kiss my ass.

I still believe in fairy-tale love.

I am the only teenager who still believes that there is a man out there who's nice when you want him to be, protective when you want him to be, mean when you want him to be, smart, funny, good-looking, with a good job, wonderful parents, no fear of marriage/a family but still no urge to procreate right that instant, a good kisser, good in bed, likes pets, doesn't think what you do for a living is stupid, supports your hobbies, understands, and has a last name that won't get you ridiculed. E.g., the perfect guy.

In reality, one of my friends says, that is impossible. That's all fairy-tale bullshit because no one can be perfect. You might as well wish that he also be the Prince of Britain.

But someone can be perfect, for you. So I choose to believe in fairy-tale love, because if I don't then no one will, and that'd be sad. Everyone tries too hard to be a cynic. Don't get me wrong - I'm among the most cynical of the cynical, but I'm still an idealist. Sounds impossible... might be, depending on the definitions you assign them. But while I have a bleak, rather realistic look on the world, I also know that it can and should be changed for the better.

So when I find a guy who is almost perfect, I'm not going to drive him off and wait for Prince Charming (to invoke a cliche). I'm not going to change him either - because we should appreciate people for who they are, not who they could be.