A Peaceable Kingdom

So I let my brainspace-membership to Homestuck lapse, in about April 2010. I missed a couple of weeks and it seemed like a huge amount of work to get back in--it's the only webcomic I ever quit reading because it was too good.

Anyway blah blah blah I have spent much of this weekend catching up. I'm not up to speed yet (I'm on panel 4526 out of 6000ish, i.e. the beginning of Act 5 Act 2), but I'm getting there. God this strip is delightful. This is one of the best comic-y things I've ever read, web- or otherwise; it's . . . ohgodi'mgonnasayit Nabokovian in its layering of brilliantly snotty pastiche and actual moving beautifulness.

I wasn't expecting the latter, actually--at the point where I'd stopped before, it was mostly still just hilarious and silly. But stuff like the revelation of the Wayward Vagabond's past-identity (all those poor little black and white pawns!), or the trolls' epic horrible betrayals and meanness and their unacknowledged aspiration for a kinder reality . . . I gotta say, I've gotten the teeniest bit choked up in places.

(I feel that the above two plot things are foreshadowspoilers rather than actual spoilers, or I'd have blacked them out.)

Anyway, so yeah, it's pretty good, glad I'm back on the Andrew Hussie wagon, etc. Though I still think it's deeply weird that people on bad_rpers_suck can talk about seemingly unironic online roleplaying sessions revolving around troll hemostatus.

Wut up. Below is a very long Aralis story, the one I told at the last session. As usual, I worked it up by talking to myself at great length; what's below is my best attempt at reconstructing something that was never written down in its first form.

(I felt a little . . . I dunno, cheaty? doing storytelling in Aralis. In Madrigal I played a storyteller; in Aralis my character is an amateur writer and musician, which isn't the same thing. But enh, the truth is, I find I really like doing it. And it seemed just-appropriate-enough this session. I have never tried it outside the constraints of someone else's LARP setting, and I dunno if I ever would—those constraints are extremely useful.)

This story doesn't make too much sense if you don't know a certain amount about the setting. Hope it's relatively entertaining anyway! It will give me much dorksome pleasure to explain the background if anybody wants, though I suspect nobody's likely to read this who doesn't know it already . . .

( Place of the Well )

This morning, for some reason, it became necessary to imagine an Edward Gorey–related song by Manowar.

TWEEEED AND TENTACLES—EMBRACE ME
NAAAAMELESS DRAAAEEEYYYED—COME FACE ME

IN THE MIDDLE OF CROQUET
AT THE EEEEYEND OF THE DAY

DAAARK TALONED FRIEND—UNLACE ME

Hello, antediluvian journal site now eclipsed by even-more-social media! I still like you, actually. You and I have a well-established relationship in which I use you to give the (to an extent accurate) impression that all I think about is gaming. Accordingly I will now write ( a post about a game I just played in )

So Aralis: an excellent and fun event, but I find myself in this deep pit of depressingdom in its wake. Entirely thanks to inadvertently-but-still-very-foolishly-destructive stuff I did in-game—with perhaps a soupçon of unexpected real-life reminders. Ah, well, gotta let it pass, I guess.

I am doing some quality-control work on a super-boring collection of peer review comments. There are small round quailoids about me, and indeed somewhat underfoot; ten feet away, there are some amazing lemonlike canaries and some sort of tiny, red-beaked microsparrows. There is rumored to be a sloth overhead somewhere, though I have yet to see it.

. . . I am playing the trial version of EVE Online. An extraordinarily obvious mistake, in retrospect.

I suppose there's an obvious solution to this problem. All I have to do is get so frustrated that I shout and yell and stamp my little feet and uninstall, and EVE being the kind of hardass game it is that's evidently a very easy state to achieve. All I really have to do is jump to a 0.0 system in my shiny new Catalyst, at which point I will be bubbled and then podded in extremely short order—

—but as you can see it's too late. I already know some of the damn lingo. All this because I couldn't just wait until SW:TOR. Well, here's hoping it doesn't last, I guess?

I'm hoping I write like different people in different contexts. Let's find out . . .

OK, Hasmir writes like Charles Dickens, Kurt Vonnegut, Bram Stoker, James Joyce (four poems, four results), or Mark Twain (for a whole bunch of poems jammed into the analyzer all together).

Both Jahanatta and I (when I'm not writing like somebody else on purpose) write like Dan Brown! This fills me with a feeling, the nature of which is left as an exercise for the reader.

. . . but perhaps you do?

It isn't a very exciting one—something on the order of 20 inches, not HD in the slightest, stood me in good stead for some time and seems to work quite well. If it makes any difference, I can check out its various inputs; I know it at least takes component as well as yer basic RCA.

I'm moving in a week and a half, so I'm looking to divest myself of things, and this is certainly a thing.

Please continue to rip off My Bloody Valentine. No, I mean, seriously. Assuming that every bad thing that ever happened to me after 1995 was punishment for not being into all those gorgeous shoegazing bands at the time, I guess the perpetual presence of cool latter-day stuff with MBV DNA is a reward for mending my ways.

Case in point, I guess, Dälek (name no relation to Dr. Who). I only have one album by these guys, and I actually got it years ago, but whenever I listen to them I'm newly impressed. Case in more recent, this-post-prompting point: this dude Ulrich Schnauss, who I'd never heard of until yesterday? He is neat.

What both these bands/dudes have in common is that they have, like, nothing in common—one's a hip-hop outfit from New Jersey and the other's an ambient-ish electronic person from Germany.