autobottrixter

( Yes indeedy. )

So I guess the Lesson Learned is this: Don't kill off a character who has far too much unexplored potential. It'll just lead to awkward resurrections.

So once again I've gone a great big stretch without updating. Woot.

I've been channeling most of my verbosity into my Death Knight blog, Chill of the Grave, though my initial momentum has been winding down. I made a few posts about some topics I found extremely interesting and then petered out a bit, and now I'm settling in to write some more remedial content because I'm realizing that people actually need to be told what I would consider some pretty basic things. It also doesn't help that much of my writing is done at work, where I don't have access to basic resources like WoWHead. I could very easily type out an explaination for when to use which presences right here from the office, but I can't recall off the top of my head exactly what the bonuses for each presence are and I like being specific. Explaining why things are rather than just stating it is part of my vision for the blog, so that's kind of important. Still, I can often get the meat of a post done and bold the parts that I know I'll need to edit later.

Christmas happened. I rented a car that drove me crazy by being a white Chevy Cobalt and drove with Andrew out to my parents' new place in the middle of the woods in Virginia. It was a pretty charming place, and the lack of cell signal was made up for by the actual T1 line. The FPS running WoW on my netbook may have been sad, but the latency was beautiful. I got a Blu-Ray player, and now Andrew and I have debates in Target over whether a particular movie warrants the Blu-Ray treatment or not. It was definitely a Christmas.

My insides have been acting up a bit again, so I finally bit the bullet and went to see my gastroenterologist. I was on medicine for about a month which only helped marginally, so I've been put on a special diet. The biggest part of it is pretending to be lactose intolerant, because even if you can digest lactose just fine it often gives you gas, which tends to cause me quite a bit of pain. (Enough that I woke up last night feeling like I was being stabbed in the gut, because apparently I deviated from the diet somewhere.) It's also low-fat because fat can be tricky to digest, and that's something I should be moving toward anyway. In direct contradiction to anything people would normally think of as a "diet", I'm actually instructed to avoid the vast majority of vegetables. This bothers me not at all. The biggest changes have been the lactose-free and soy milk and cutting back on pizza, but it really does seem to help.

I've been putting off posting about the hamsters because I'm super-lazy about taking pictures of things, and I wanted to post some. Maybe I'll find my camera again and take some tonight once they're up and running around. We ended up going with Magni and Muradin for their names, Magni for the bigger one and Muradin for the smaller one. The vet said that Magni is a full 5 grams bigger than his little brother, so I haven't had much trouble telling them apart. Muradin got used to me pretty quickly, but Magni is still a little jumpy. Both of them will let me pick them up now if I lure them into my hand with seeds, but Magni sometimes changes his mind and jumps off. Being nocturnal, I don't really get to see them all that much, though any time I get up in the middle of the night they're running around like they each had a cup of coffee. I'm making a point to wake them before I go to bed every night and give them some seeds, at least. I know that, unlike my iguana, they don't have to be tame, but I find it helps immensely when animals need to be moved for cleaning and such if they're okay with being handled. And they're really ridiculously cute.

I have a big long WoW RP/character discussion essay that has been welling up, but I think I will make that another post. Yes indeed.

BORING.

Thing One: I have started a new blog for my Death Knight rantings! It is called Chill of the Grave and I will try to keep my general PvE and lore commentaries there. Also I need to write tutorial stuff, like about how DKs don't really have a proper rotation so much as a priority once they get cranked up, because people see how well I do and they're like, "What's your rotation?" and I'm like, "Well, it depends on what's refreshed." The look-into-my-crazy-mind character development stuff will stay here, I'm afraid. Sorry. Andrew forbids me from holding up a character who is not only a zombie Michael Cera but also dating a paladin, even if the paladin is a complete nutjob, as any kind of pinnacle of good Death Knight RP. Though the catch-22 of "Good Death Knight RP" (being, if they're social, they aren't much of an iconic DK, and if they're anti-social all you can do is sit around taverns emoting about how broody you are) is definitely fodder for a future article.

Thing Two: OMG HAMS! Last night I took home a pair of shortpacked and maggiemarmalade's baby Roborovski hamsters, the ones nicknamed Littlest and Tubby. This is good, because I was worried I wasn't going to be able to tell them apart, and they're the most visually distinct of the litter. It took me forever to settle into bed last night becasue I kept getting up to see what they were up to. They have a big Habitrail that I'll take pictures of tonight with tubes that are smaller for dwarf hamsters, though they're still a bit small for it so I've arranged everything horizontally for the time being. I'll have to see if I can bribe them into good pictures later. Andrew is strongly in favor of naming them after dwarves, so the big one will likely end up Magni and the little one Muradin. They are cuter than anything has a right to be.

Thing Three: Ahhhhhh I dunno Christmas?

Though parts of the internets are making me think I should give up and just officially celebrate Winter Solstice, it has been brought to my attention that some people might actually want to give me things for Christmas, and some of them might actually additionally have an interest in what I might want to be given rather than just what they wish to bestow upon me, which is in many ways still a concept I struggle to get my head around.

Okay, I need to stop posting things when I'm feeling especially angsty.

As last year, in lieu of gifts I am always happy to recommend donations to Child's Play on my behalf. Seriously, I've reached a point in my life where I can stop asking for car repairs for holiday presents, so I'm more than happy to push some of that good fortune onto others who need it.

I'd also like to note that I love getting presents that in some way represent or remind me of the person who gave them. A book or a game in a genre we share an interest in is always a good gift.

But now! I maked a list.

Wii Games:

• New Super Mario Bros. Wii


• House of the Dead Overkill - because the Wii makes arcade shooters awesome.


• House of the Dead 2&3 - ditto.


• Either of the last two games would go great with a Wiimote pistol add-on.

DS games:

• Phantasy Star 0


• Scribblenauts


• Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

Books, of which I buy myself many so it's all just Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition stuff:

• Player's Handbook 2


• Martial Power


• Eberron Player's Guide


• Rogue Power Cards


• More Rogue Power Cards

T-Shirts* and Random Things:

• Jinx Death Knight hoodie


• And a Death Knight tee...


• A robot tee


• Another robot tee...


• A dirty robot tee


• And a tee with no robots at all!


• Some fuzzy dice


• A Squishable T-Rex!


• A lil' beanbag for my Zune HD


• And gift cards from Jinx, ThinkGeek, or NewEgg are always welcome.

I may come back and edit with other things if I think of them.


*My fat ass is up to a men's M and a ladies' XL. Rar.

I'm feeling this itch to write more Etheris backstory, either something set when he was studying in Dalaran and first falling in with the Cult of the Damned or something from when he was a full-fledged Scourge necromancer. A story with a setting but no plot is hardly a story, however, it is a drawing and I am incapable of expressing myself thusly. (I do have a half-finished story in the latter setting, but it's horribly dirty and not anything I expect anyone to want to read and really just written to purge it from my brain.) (Yes, I fully expect one or two "I TOTALLY want to read that" replies.) So maybe that needs to brew a little longer. I had this perverse urge to bring him back in some way, to make Dariahn magically regurgitate his soul, but dead characters actually staying dead is such a rare and unique thing in this sort of setting. There's also the fact that he's pretty unrepentantly a Scourge loyalist, which would be hard to get around in a playable character. He could start taking a more active role in Dariahn's head, make the whole thing a little MORE Death's Head II* why don't I, but that might just spur on the whole magical regurgitation thing. He doesn't want Etheris talking in his head, and if it got worse than it already is he would likely try to force him out.

I'm also itching to actually try out my idea of playing an Auchenai draenei priest, one of the few who didn't go crazy with the whole Auchindoun blowing up/some naaru getting corrupted in there thing. She would still be kind of crazy by normal draenei standards, of course, but not batshit. It would be a good excuse to actually play through the Alliance side of things before Cataclysm, since my highest-level Alliance character ever is 26. Because I am totally awesome at playing things that are not my Horde mains am I right?

Speaking of that, I'm thinking I may start over with another character or two in Dragon Age before deciding on who I'm going to continue the story with. I'm kind of torn on my Dalish elf warrior, because archery is better for her as a character but I chose a warrior because I wanted to get in there and beat the shit out of things. I've got a female human noble warrior and a male human mage in the queue already. Hopefully I can dedicate some time to that game later this week. I also installed the original Neverwinter Nights on my netbook, but that'll likely end up as more of a lunch break thing than something I actively dedicate time to.

Also I need to actually RP Velthys some so I can establish him as a character before I go having him get all angsty about being a big coward and go Shadow because I can't imagine enjoying endgame healing.

*Have I mentioned recently that I have the original art for "High Noon Tex"? I don't think I have.

In my ongoing campaign to upgrade everything I own, I ordered a new netbook last week. The one I've had for about a year and a half now is EXTREMELY first-gen, and while it showed me how much use I could get out of a netbook it also showed me how much I needed a better one. So I ordered an Asus Eee 1005 from NewEgg, complete with Windows 7 Starter.

Holy shit this thing is awesome.

Conceptually I really liked that the old one ran Linux, but in practice I had trouble doing things that should have been simple, like updating to Firefox 3, because there wasn't a great deal of support for that particular distro. I've thus far installed all manner of crap on my new one, up to and including Ventrilo. (After uninstalling the bloatware, of course. I'll pick my own crap I don't need!) I'm mulling over installing WoW, since technically it will run, but I'm likely going to wait until I get the RAM upgraded to 2GB. I wouldn't try to raid on it, but it'd be fun to have for, say, opening Winter's Veil presents from my parents' house. I'm also thinking of getting Torchlight, since I hear it's both excellent and has netbook-optimized video settings. It feels much more like a small computer than the old one, and Windows 7's boot time is no problem. It's heavier, though, but presumably that's the trade-off for 5 times the battery life of my previous one.

I am digging it.

My immersion in culturally relevant but tragically out-of-print fiction in the form of the previously-mentioned Corum books has inspired a little rant on my problems with digital distribution, but that deserves its own post.

I've been putting off posting for, like, a month and a half not because things have been horrible, but because I've been having kind of an "I can has nice things?" going on and I've felt kind of compelled to wait until I could post pictures of stuff. Except I'm lazy about taking pictures so I've just gotten to a point where I want to post regardless of whether I have pictures of nice things.

I got a Zune HD for my birthday, and not just some stock one but a custom from Zune Originals. It's blue, which is an ideal state for my small electronics and such. I still loved my brown brick of a Zune 30, but the Zune HD was too pretty not to upgrade. It's an awesome little media player, with shiny little details like artist portrait backgrounds on the album screen and screen saver. The sound quality is excellent. I downloaded all of The Guild and a couple movies to take advantage of the video, and I've been watching that on lunch breaks when I can pull myself away from my musty old Michael Moorcock paperbacks.

I also splurged for some RenFest boots last month. I've been wanting to put together a proper full costume, but with my weight in flux I didn't want to shell out that kind of money for something that (ideally) wouldn't fit next year. I got a short pair that remind me a lot of Meridith, with red details and skull lacing-buttons. I've taken to wearing them for D&D like a huge dork to get them broken in, though they're already pretty good and comfy. I'll post pics...sometime.

I have, as mentioned, been diving back into Michael Moorcock after finding collections of the Corum books at Half-Price Books. It finally occurred to me that I enjoy his work so much because of how much he plays with the idea of archetypes. The concept of the Eternal Champion is almost meta, with characters often aware of the role they serve in things as those archetypes. The last of his I read was a rereading of the Elric books, and after that Corum seems almost blessed.

WoW has been WoW. With Caeryn and Kraal back on the server there's a pretty strong impetus to start raiding again, which I certainly have no problems with. I've been having moments of flailing in frustration at feeling too squishy as a tank, but that was soothed a great deal by Blizzard saying that they know that damage mitigation has become far too RNG-based and essentially that the problems that I'm having are hardly unique to me or my class or my playstyle. It doesn't help to be constantly upstaged by paladins, though. I've been considering on and off getting Meg better geared, but every time I start thinking I should go grind some rep for better stuff I remember I have a hunter who's two levels from Outland or hey, Ten and Lain and Die are in Dalaran I should go harass them! I already have a well-geared tank, and there are so much more interesting things I could be doing. Which is sad, because she's still an awesome character. I'm just enjoying DKing so much more than warrioring right now.

I wish I had some deep and insightful things to say about RP and character development at this point, but I don't really. Meh.

Also I bought Dragon Age: Origins, and I will totally play it once I'm past the raid part of my weekday schedule. Elves are hardly my default race but I'm really feeling a Dalish elf warrior woman.

...but fidgety little things I can poke at from behind the work firewall are few and far between.

What? Go on, click the little buggers!

There was a wedding! Any wedding where I don't have to go out and buy some frippy new dress that I never quite feel comfortable in is a winner by default. I didn't take any pictures myself 'cause I figured everybody else, up to and including people hired to do so, would have it covered. So all you get here are well-wishes. Well-wishes!

I also had a birthday. I have not yet received my big birthday present, because apparently when just about the only place to procure a new shiny is a single web site that also customizes them for no additional charge there tend to be "unforseen delays". In fact, as I look at it now the color I got is no longer listed for the size I ordered, so presumably I was lucky to get one while blue was still in stock. I'm willing to be patient, though, because there's nothing strictly wrong with my old Zune30 apart from it not being a ZuneHD, and because Andrew has a Zune that was ordered from there Christmas-before-last and I have seen first-hand that what they are adding to the stock model is pure uncompressed love.

The exercise bike thing seems to be paying off slowly and steadily, which I suppose is a good thing when it comes to something like weight loss. I was satisfied that I was able to go from doing it 15 minutes at a time to 30 in less than a week, considering just how horribly out of shape I've been. It took some trial and error to find the best thing to do while on the bike: Watching TV left me constantly checking how much time I had left, and reading a book was sufficiently distracting but I tended to pedal slower. Earlier this week I tried downloading an old RPG on the Wii Virtual Console, Phantasy Star 4 to be exact, and that seems to be distracting enough to keep my eyes off the clock but not too distracting for me to stop actually doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I need to find a better way to position the handlebars for it, though. I've been meaning to start tracking my progress through Wii Fit, and now that I seem to have fixed a problem I was having with the sensor bar I'll likely start that this week. If it continues working out so well next spring I may have to buy an actual bike.

I'm having this sudden urge lately to play a physically frail male caster in something, and I need to be stopped. Not like a foo-foo gay princess boy, just your sort of typical I-don't-really-get-outside-much low-Strength high-Int type. I may just have to dust off Phantasy Star Online again and make one of their male human casters, because that's about what I have in mind. I suppose a Blood Elf mage might work though. Or an eladrin wizard in D&D?

We've finally officially opened up recruiting for Hand of the Blightcaller, though it's been pretty slow so far. I think it will help the most to get into the habit of throwing out the occasional guild recruitment spam in-game. Hey, now we'll only have to explain that we're an RP guild to people who don't bother reading the message! With Curse we were having to explain both that we were an RP and an all-Forsaken guild when Frostshocklol the Troll shaman responded to our GR tells wanting to know if he cn hv invite. Ironically, right before we finally got that going was when I decided to push Meg those last couple levels to 80, so now I'm spending more time on her than when Dariahn was effectively unguilded. It doesn't help that it's Brewfest, which is for all intents and purposes Her Holiday. I've been running the holiday boss as much as I can trying to get the ram for her. I've done a couple Heroics with her, and I feel mostly confident on that level. It's really just a matter of getting the hang of warrior taking again.

I'm such a geek that last weekend I pointed out to Andrew that we can't go to RenFest this weekend because we have D&D.

For anyone who's interested but doesn't follow his journal, I posted a new Dariahn story over there.

I'm super-antsy to get home today because, after hearing that some people on wow_ladies had successfully petitioned GMs to free up the names of inactive alts, I asked if there was any way I could get them to free up a name so I could snag it for my Forsaken hunter. I got to work to find an email from Blizzard Support saying they had determined it was being used by an inactive character and had freed it up for me, and recommended I snag it as soon as possible. OMG awesome! Except...I'm at work. There's server maintenance this morning, which will give me a little more of a grace period (and let me feel less bad about not checking before I left for work), but I'm still going to be antsy all day. Not that I imagine scads of new characters with believable RP names are being rolled on TB immediately after maintenance on a weekday when the kiddies are back in school, but...I want my name. I already deleted Etheris' placeholder to make room.

So yes, I have started planning for Cataclysm, not by getting all worked up about a new worgen or goblin character but by getting excited for the new race/class combinations. I'm planning to go ahead and start my Forsaken hunter up as a low-level "civilian" character, possibly even having him involved with Hand of the Blightcaller in some administrative capacity. I'm not going to poach his name from an inactive alt just to slap it on another alt who'll stay inactive for a year, after all, and I like the idea of establishing him as a little bit of a character ahead of time. Likewise I went ahead and rolled up a placeholder for my Tauren paladin once it really sunk in that this means I can have a Horde paladin without playing an elf. Her name, which was available, is going to be Opelika. (Yes. Har har.) I made her placeholder a warrior but I think I'll have her be a druid for a few levels since the Tauren paladin path seems thus far to be an offshoot of their druids. Maybe she can dip her hoof in the Kalimdor RP scene, too.

I'm so glad I got that second account.

*flails*

So I guess there's a lot to talk about, huh?

I haven't yet gotten my hands on the Allspark Almanac, but the more I hear about it the more I am filled with need. Barnes & Noble said they would call me when it came in, but they also said it shipped on the 15th, so if I don't hear back from them this weekend it will be time to go a'hunting.

Andrew and I decided to take last Friday off and got the Blizzcon live stream from DirectTV. We hooked up his second computer to the TV and watched the big stuff in the living room, which made me realize it wouldn't be that big of an issue to put together a media center PC and cancel the cable. Now that Transformers Animated is cancelled the only things we really watch are Clone Wars and the occasional MSNBC, and I don't think I can say that's worth $40 a month. We may jack up our broadband a little more while we're at it.

The news about Cataclysm pretty firmly answered a question I had been pondering every so often: What's going to happen when WoW2 is released? Apparently the fracturing of the community I feared was forseen by Blizzard as well. In one of the panels they said as much, that they had seen other MMO sequels fragment their communities too much and they preferred something truly game-changing like Cataclysm as an expansion rather than a sequel so there would continue to be one WoW community. I'm really looking forward to it myself, not because I'm all worked up to roll a werewolf like 95% of the rest of the community but because I'm dying to see this little virtual world I know so well get a new coat of paint. I suspect I'll be getting the most out of my two accounts by having space to level at least a couple new alts through the new content. I'll definitely be rolling an undead hunter, and I'll likely use it as an excuse to level one or two of my existing forgotten alts. Maybe I'll even level a paladin like I've been meaning to! Tee hee, Holy Cow.

For those waiting with bated breath for an update on my Death Knight's post-patch status (so nobody):

I haven't gotten a chance to specifically run with Hekimi again yet but I did Heroic AN with Andrew's shiny probably-undergeared just-80 healadin and Heroic ToC with a shaman friend and now that I actually have my tanking set optimized for, you know, tanking I seem to be back up to if not above my pre-patch durability level. There was a little trouble on Heroic ToC but I hear that last fight is a nightmare for healers so I'm chalking it up to the instance itself and not a failing on anyone in particular's behalf. We did get him down after a few tries, at least. So I'm feeling a lot better about continuing to tank with him than I was a week ago. Which is good if I'm likely about to be MT for Hand of the Blightcaller. DPS is still fun and I worked on optimizing that set too, and if I got to a point of deciding between him and Meg being my tank I would probably go with Meg just because I like DK DPS more than warrior DPS, but I am feeling much more secure in my tankhood.

I tend to lay off the patch notes until right about when a new patch goes live to avoid getting too excited/upset about any changes that don't even end up making it live, but in with the much more interesting talk of dual-wielding becoming more viable for Death Knights and fun Engineering changes there were murmurings of an overall passive mitigation nerf for my new favorite class. I wasn't too worried - How bad could it be? - until I asked a friend who regularly heals for me (Hi Hekimi/Sam!) in the middle of a Culling of Stratholme run and he said I was significantly squishier. Ugh. So because I am unreasonably tempermental lately I spent the rest of the week swearing off tanking, running the new Heroic instead with Tendaros and a shiny new secondary DW Frost DPS spec. And I continued to make Andrew curse at me for pushing close to his DPS in unenchanted, ungemmed half-PvP castoffs, though I actually put a little effort into gemming some and replacing others with gear from the non-Heroic ToC. But last night I ended up getting pulled into a Naxx-10 roflstomp with some friends, and I offtanked most of it alongside Ten, and it actually wasn't quite as bad as I feared. And as I stood there in the armor shop with my shiny Tier 7 head token pondering which to get I decided to spend this week digging into my roflcycle savings to get my tank gear absolutely optimized and get back on top of that game. I realized part of my post-patch problem was that my innate class OPness had allowed me to do crazy shit things like filling nearly all my gem slots with Hit/Stam gems to help my DW fixation and put Nitro Boosts on my tanking boots. All of that's gonna get cleaned up, then we'll see how squishy I am. I love the class enough to work for it.

At this point we're staying the course on TB and trying the new guild thing. Andrew's in the process of kicking everyone out of Curse and dividing up the bank stuff between people who have been actively participating for the last few months. We'll probably move our own characters over to the new guild this week and I need to write up some recruitment posts. Also he wants to get Tyrelys through that last push to level 80 so he can have a raid healer for the new group. We already have some friends interested in either joining the guild or joining us on guild runs from outside the guild, so hopefully we can at least start looking at 10-mans soon. We'll probably forgo regular open RP events for the time being, but a fortnightly guild meeting is likely in the cards. Hopefully this will renew a little bit of that faith in the server as a whole. Since I gave up trying to run Brill it's significantly better already.

I've started to realize - and I realized it before Andrew pointed it out to me last night - that lately if I'm RPing Dariahn then Tendaros is around, and if Tendaros is around Dariahn's being kind of a mushy doofus, and so it seems like that's the end-all be-all of his characterization when it's just that I don't tend to RP out the 99% of the time when he's being a hardass Death Knight out killin' stuff at Plagos' command while his player is, like, at work. I should probably make a point to actually have him be social sometime when Ten isn't around, but often if Ten isn't around I just go do dailies or level a troll or something.

The troll's name is Yayana, incidentally, and she's the result of me thinking the other day when I was home sick due to my immune system's entrenched campaign against my lower intestine that I have all these hunter alts that have never made it past the mid-50s, likely because they've never had dedicated leveling-and-more-importantly-RP partners, and Andrew has been yearning for a troll priest, so there we go. I've never really had a troll character, probably because I rightly suspected I would end up just RPing them as hut trash, but I'm enjoying her so far. ("So far" being to level 10.) She's lazy but she's clever, in a "I'm gonna tame me a beastie to do all my fightin' for me!" way. She's going out into the world because her momma kicked her out of the hut and told her to get her sorry ass a job. If I do stick to leveling her I think there's going to have to be some major character development to get her to the point of facing down actual serious threats, because as she is now you'd have to drag her kicking and screaming to Northrend. It's cold up there!

And this leads kind of neatly into thoughts about the guild. After discussing things with our officers and friends we've decided pretty solidly at this point to spin off into a new guild under the banner [Hand of the Blightcaller]. The niche guild idea is a good one, but it's very limiting and we've reached a point where it's kept us from having more than a handful of serious active members. And very few members means very little in-guild RP. There's also talk of wanting to get some raiding in for level-capped members, and we can't rely on only Forsaken to do that. It was decided pretty unanimously, though, that Curse was so at its core an all-Forsaken guild that it would be better to spin off into a new guild than open up Curse itself. The guild will still be very much an RP in-character organization, and while Andrew is interested in putting together the raiding side of things I'll likely be putting my efforts into drumming up RP and keeping the story and theme going. I like to think of it as a darker version of the "military" guilds that are popular right now, a serious unit but one that isn't afraid to use warlocks and Apothecaries and Death Knights and such to get things done, that fights the Scourge not for honor or goodness or the Light but for vengeance. Membership will be open to any character who doesn't balk at the idea of being led by a warlock or fighting alongside others with questionable morals - or who will at least tolerate them for the overall goal. We should be making the transition within the next week or two. And hopefully it'll give me more of a chance to RP Dariahn's more soldiery side.

It still needs some detailing, and Andrew and I are still working on sculpting the helmet, and it's not a great photo, but here's an in-progress pic of Umbra, the Acherus Deathpony!

Step 1: Move Java Monster from the fridge to the freezer about half an hour before drinking it.

Step 2: Chug deliciously frosty Java Monster.

Step 3: ???

Step 4: PROFIT!

So stuff. My car seems to have developed an oil leak on top of the slow coolant leak it already had, so I'll have to be keeping an eye on that. The funny thing was every time I took it in for anything they swore up and down it had an oil leak, and they never ever mentioned a coolant leak, but it was always the coolant that I had to refill and the oil level was right where it was supposed to be. Now the oil is actually pretty unquestionably leaking. It's not the quart-a-day hemmoraging that my Neon was doing late in its life, so I should be able to keep on top of it. I'll need to get it fixed eventually, but right now Andrew's car is looking at much, much worse problems, so I'll just let it be an excuse to tinker with it every weekend.

I like pretending anybody but me cares about my car.

Yesterday I decided to finally go ahead and order a blank My Little Pony from Hasbro Toy Shop to make into an Acherus Deathpony. I want to get back into painting projects, and I think this would be an excellent start. I'll likely end up buying a new air compressor and airbrush set for it as well, to get the whole glowy blue-white flame effect right. I don't know if there's enough cross-audience to tell me how well Citadel Colours work on MLP bodies, though. Maybe I should have ordered two...

After some debate with Andrew over the weekend about RP characters and some following half-serious talk with Sam about my own outlook on things I came to the rather depressing conclusion (at least before I started chugging Java Monster, making myself immune to depression) that whereas some people like RPing assholes because they're nice people in real life, I seem to RP nice, idealistic people because I like to pretend to be someone whose faith in humanity has not been crushed into powder under the weight of everyday interactions. Self-psychoanalysis through analyzing my own creative output has been a hobby of mine since high school, probably a grossly misguided one, but one I stick to nonetheless. This is probably why I'm such a wuss about tackling terrible, abusive relationship stories, because I don't like what I think they say about me, even if it's entirely my own judgement. And by that I mean why I pulled so many punches with Dariahn's backstory. Also because I like to pretend in my own little world that even terrible people have sincere if disturbed and misguided motivations.

And that's my caffiene-induced navel-gazing for this week. Cheers!

I am now on Steam as AutobotTrixter. Be my friend.