After several years of letting this archive languish while I worked on my own IP, I've hit a milestone. Yesterday I paid off a debt long in coming. A debt in story form. A debt that's been sitting around for... well... longer than my student loans.

I've been waiting for a milestone to reactivate my online presence. As a milestone, finishing this story is as good as any. I'm therefore doing what I often do when I hit such milestones. Time for a relocation.

Anyone who is interested is welcome to peep in over at my new digs: http://teleidoplex.livejournal.com/

You won't find fanfic, but you will find updates on writing, on living in an intentional vegetarian co-op in the Bay Area, on magical thinking, and on the academic subjects I have a fetish for: liminality, gender, identity, post-colonialism, globalization, and whatever else ends up perking my ears.

And, inevitably, there will be foxes.

I may also tell you what a Teleidoplex is.

Cheers!

Alyc

Dragons in WoW are lore appropriate, and dragons hiding out and observing the populace are also lore appropriate. That doesn't mean creating a player character who is secretly a dragon isn't intensely problematic and probably very mockable. As with anything, I suppose it comes down to execution.

I know one person who had achieved good execution on this, so this character concept is partially her fault. My love of Doctor Who is the other culprit; much like the Doctor, Xan is a revolutionary who finds humans fascinating and disagrees with the standing policy of non-interference. Or, as moonandserpent has pointed out: "She'll make a wonderful Infinite someday."

Yeah... well, we all know that Nozdormu hied himself off to become the leader of the Infinite Flight anyways. Xan is just "Vollowink in her Grandvathers vootschtepps!"

Really...


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This is the most brilliant and cracktastic cross-promotion of all time. If I drank soda with high-fructose corn syrup, I'd even think about buying their product. As it is, I'm totally suckered in to the whole promotional schtick because I get

* a free battle-bot pet for all my toons
* the pet counts towards the pet achivement
* free fuel to fill my pet's tanks
* with the fuel, I get to fight my pet in game against battle-bot pets
* the raffle-token thing is free, so there's the extremely slight chance I'll win other shit.


So, yeah. I'll drink that kool-aid!




Whatever marketing guru came up with this idea totally deserves his porsche and his hot chick with cocaine on her ass for him to snort.

Or... I guess that's the 1980's. These days, it's probably a Prius, a yoga instructor, and macrobiotic prozac.

So, this is what I spend all my time doing on WoW. It's called 'RP', and it can be a strange beast...

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Am I the only one who found today's XKCD kinda disturbingly hot? Just those two panels, if you know what I mean, but...

brown chicken brown cow!

also, I really would love to see an XKCD/OotS collaboration and/or crossover.

This is an idea whose time has arrived. Flood the forums of both strips with this suggestion. Go forth, my simply-drawn minions. Go! Go! Bwahahahahhaahahahahaaa!!!

About a decade ago now, the Fox ran a tabletop Changeling game for a small group of us. This was before Tale of Winter, though some of the threads from that early game ran through the larp.

My character, Bryn, was a troll knight who ended up swearing service to (and falling in love with, in the chivalric sense) a knocker inventor/clubber named Violet. Violet was an NPC played by the Fox. She had a whole purple and black industrial goth thing going on, and she was wicked hot! She was the girlfriend/prisoner of a redcap named Mortag the Red, and he was a pretty nasty piece of work. He pretty much just kept her around to make weapons and munitions for his gang.

I woke up one night after a gaming session and wrote this sonnet in a fit of inspired, frenetic passion. Recently, the topic of sonnets has come up on WoW, and it sent me to search out this piece. I think it's rather good for being something I wrote ten years ago.


Violet
What fairest beauties pierce mine eye,
With flashing looks and floating hair,
Can contest thy beauty's symmetry,
Or with thine wisdom doth compare?
Thou'rt fair as black-winged night.
Bright Luna in thy features dwells,
My heart, my soul, mine eye's delight,
Sweet Lady of the urban dells.
Nature's whim hath made thee wild,
Her purple wine thy lips doth stain,
And many a heart hast thou beguiled,
Yet all who love thee love in vain,
For one has chained the wild-grown flower,
Who feels no love, but lusts for power.

--by Dame Bryn Copeland, in service to the Lady Violet

I've been having a rough patch recently, and as many people are wont to do, I have been spinning it into a narrative of how I am an awful person, a failure at life, and this is some kind of cosmic karmic retribution for me being filled with suckitude.

I don't normally post stuff like this on my journal. I hate discussing my problems in public venues... or even in private, because that often feels like whinging rather than trying to find real solutions. But I've been spot-pulling fae cards each morning to ask for help getting through the day, and today I pulled Sylvanius. Here is his description:

Starter Reading: At this time you are discovering new truths about yourself. They are essential for you to know in order to create relationships based on mutual respect, affection, and trust. These things can only work if we see ourselves and others as we are. Currently, both Faery and this world are functioning as a giant mirror in which we see ourselves in many surprising ways. People tend to dread this because we assume that we are worse than we think we are, but this is far from necessarily true. Now is a time for finding out the false and misleading beliefs you have accepted and discovering that you are a better person than you thought--and have the potential to accomplish more than you believed you could. If someone says you are better or simply different than you think you are, don't automatically reject this. Think it over carefully. You have more to give and more to enjoy than you have been giving yourself credit for.


Wow, do I suck at this. I'm fairly convinced that I have the whole world fooled, including my nearest and dearest. At the same time, I often bemoan how misinformed my nearest and dearest are about 'who I really am'. So, my request to the world at large is this: would you be willing to tell me a truth you've observed about me, so that I can challenge the way I reject other people's perspectives about myself? I'm not asking for sunshine up my ass, just a bit of an outside-myself reality check from the folks who have met me in a variety of permutations.

Too bad for all of us that I didn't pull the Dark Lady, huh? That would have been a *much* more interesting set of requests...

Heh.


::Edit::

Bwahahahaha! Well, if nothing else, one thing this demonstrates to me is how well people know that I'm not one for public spectacle of personal stuff. So, yes, sending me a private email would be my preferred format: kitsune (dawt) alyc (ratta-tat-tat) gmail. Cause, y'know, crying at work multiple times a day is *fun*.

I love you all. Seriously. And I will make an exception and *attempt* to answer my phone this weekend.

I don't know how the other writers on my list get warmed up before a session, but here's an example from yesterday of what I tend to do:


Writer's block is just the act of not writing. This pithy observation doesn't offer a solution, but it sure sounds nifty. A blocked writer could get a lot of mileage out of it, repeating it like a mantra—not writing, not writing, not writing.

Interruptions are another rich source to mine. A thought or a sentence only flows as freely as the empty course of the page laid before it. Interruptions—be they momentary interjections from coffee shop servers as you're trying to get your daily writing engine started or larger digressions brought by life wrenching your head around and forcing your concentration away from the free flow of ink across a paper landscape—these are the pebbles and boulders and Hoover-fricken Dams that stopper all that inspiration and muck up your headwaters something fierce.

I must pause now, for a big plate of bacon has been set before me. One must always pause for bacon.

Mmm. Bacon.

Right. Where was I? Oh yeah—the distractions that keep a writer from writing…

Mmm. More bacon.

There are other things: research, editing, re-reading, world-building. The business side of writing. But none of these are as tasty as bacon, so I don't feel any great need to ruminate on them

Eggs and potatoes, they're interesting enough, but even with hot sauce, they are what they are. There's no sublime excess drawing me away from everything except devouring them mindlessly, and getting my fingers all greasy in the process.

No, bacon is my writers pitfall. Fatty, greasy, salty, unhealthy bacon. You just keep devouring it until it's gone.

WoW… is kinda like a never-ending plate of bacon for me. I need to figure out ways to put a few pieces on my plate and then step away from the table.

Complete non-sequitor in response to the stimuli of my environment: I totally want to write a Lost/Gilligan's Island crossover fanfic.

Right (Write? Wright?), back on track.

Tea.

It all comes back to tea with me. Tea does not distract. It centers. It soothes. It focuses. It warms the hands and the head, puts fire in the belly, and readies and steadies me for the work. I need to remember and apply this: bacon in moderation, tea in ubiquity.

Alright. Enough with the omphalaskepsicism. Time to segue into my fiction writing.

I know a few people who have a book like this, the book that they buy and give to others. It's the book that is so amazing, that you think has so much to recommend it to *anyone* who reads it, that you'll put your money on the table, betting for the book's cross-audience appeal.

My partner's "Book-I-buy-for-others" is _Ghostwritten_, by David Mitchell. It's an amazing book, probably in my top-five favorites that I'm not embarrassed about, and something that inspires me anew every time I read it. Mitchell is obscure enough that many people haven't discovered this amazing author, or have only read his later _Cloud Atlas_ if they have (and for some reason, everyone I've met who read _Cloud Atlas_ raves about it, but has never gone back to read Mitchell's earlier works. I don't get this at all). Mitchell crosses a lot of genres in a way that genre enthusiasts usually love and mainstream lit enthusiasts aren't put off by. _Ghostwritten_ is a good "Book-to-buy-for-others".

Mine is _Impossible Things_, by Connie Willis. It's a collection of her short stories, and Willis is hand's down one of the best short story writers I've read. The tales are by turns hilarious, heart-wrenching, romantic, and horrific--sometimes all in the same story. She meditates on everything from quantum physics to academic obsolescence, using forms like the screwball comedy and settings like the London Blitz to bring out the themes she's working with. There's very little hard science in this science fiction, but there's a whole lot of humanity.

I've gone through many copies of _Impossible Things_. So many copies--giving my copy away and replacing it, handing them out as gifts, etc. I'm probably a cottage industry for Willis just on my own. I'm happy to be so. This is an amazing book by an amazing author, and one that anyone interested in--well, *anything*--should read.

So, am I unusual in this? Do others have a book or books that are their "Buy-for-others" book? I'm not talking books you recommend. I mean, seriously, you have bought several copies of this book because you keep giving it away. If so, what is it, and why?

Cheers!

PRESIDENT Barack Obama = Best Birthday Present EVAR!!!!!