I suspect that part of the way I manage to be so emotionally divested in life, and don't mistake this for a lack of anger and passion, just a lack of attachment, is that I throw so much of my emotion into my writing when I can corner the muse and get her to sing for me. Right now I'm working through a difficult part in Diziara's life, what ultimately amounts to her turning point that lead her to the path that landed her in starfleet and as a stone cold lunatic bitch. This character, I've been working with since high school, and as I have mentioned many times in this journal, came to realize she represents my id. My id could have manifested in any universe, in any form, but I suspect part of what lead me to having her manifest in the trek universe was that when I started working with her, I didn't feel secure enough in my writing skills to work outside of a universe that had not been established before I started to play there.

Those of you who play in the game with me where I'm currently running Dizi, or those of you who keep a spare eye on it when you can, I am not talking about the current plot line we're working through... that's fluff, it's giving us excuses to abuse the Andorian Bastard of a chief tactical officer, a way to pull in a new character that's not native to the 24th century, and a chance for Diziara to justify her 20th Century Earth History minor from the Academy. I have a whole folder on my computer with a collection of vignettes of history for Diziara, most of it isn't likely to be seen by much of anyone else other than me, as some of the scenes are ones that I was either hashing out before making a post to a game, or before writing an entry in her journal, and others represent views of events in her life that she doesn't even remember herself, but none the less impact the rest of her life, the rumors spoken about her, and what information may eventually surface from her subconscious.

This important bit, it's the death of the man she loved. She was about a month and a half away from marrying him, she was on cloud nine, and something that is as normal as breathing to her manages to take him away from her. From the creation of the character, Travis has always been a looming figure in her past, unrealized potential, happiness snatched away, and a snapping point for her. However, the fact that I'd never actually written out the events that took him away from her always left the pain their nebulous, intangible, and almost trivial to think about. Sure, certain aspects of her personality, certain motives behind her actions sprung forth from this point in her life, but it still felt intangible. Well, now the muse has seen fit to give me a clearer vision of this event, to allow me to attempt to capture this scene in words, and now it feels painfully real.

A part of me knows that I should not care this much about characters who amount to little more than fiction, but another part knows that it was my choice to do this to them, and it's almost like a double blow, that detail. It makes me wonder what sort of person I am that I have to torture my id with such abuse. What sort of person I am that in order for my id to represent me, I have to justify some aspect of my personality with such a tragic event, something that I have never been through myself.

So the dorkiest awesome thing has had me bouncy for the last couple days. Diziara, my Klingon-Trill red-headed lunatic Star Trek RPG character, the one who I tell people represents my ID, finally got promoted to a full Lieutenant. I created this character back in high school for an RPG a friend of mine was creating, and I made her as a Lieutenant junior grade, one that had held that rank for a couple years already. My friend David had already been talking big about promoting her once the game got rolling, and there was talk of exploring the helpful GM hook I'd provided of her father being MIA in Starfleet. Unfortunately this group died for meta reasons not too far into it, and I moved the character for another game because I liked her that much. That group also stumbled a bit, I moved her to a game I started, and that stagnated quickly also. Then I transferred her to the game she's in now, usstakedashingn and after a year, meta, and two months, in game, I got her promotion rammed through. This makes easily seven to eight years, meta, and nearly seven years, in game, for her promotion to happen. So I'm a little bouncy that it finally happened.

I now own a jump drive that's bigger than half a gig. It's pretty purple and I intend to install kubuntu upon it. Should be a fun project and an interesting challenge. Then I get to lock down my geek cred once and for all, and set Paul up with a working dual boot laptop. He insisted I don't get proper geek cred 'til I run a dual boot system, but since I don't want or need windows, I offered to violate his machine instead. So that'll be a fun project once I get to give it a go.

In other news, flamingchords has been kind enough to drag me along to gaming nights with his friends. While I'll admit that originally I'd mostly gone because he'd asked me, I've found it's been pretty awesome and everyone's crazy. That said, they feel the need to fix my lack of exposure to a nearly infinite number of movies that they consider as required viewing materials. We'll see how far they get into that list before I start trying to kick out the slats. I did earn major points right off the bat between bringing my talking Tribble to use as a projectile (flamingchords' suggestion), various pirated goods and my inappropriate zingers along on the first visit. One of the guys there is a big Doctor Who fan and is making recommendations on how I can best tackle the best of the old Doctor Who. He he will be hooking me up with tasty digital bits on this subject, and has already teased me with one good bit.

The biggest issue in being able to continue going will be my work schedule, since I typically work Fridays. That said, I'd been getting Fridays off the last few weeks straight, so maybe I'll get to do more than pop in for the last hour or so on a reasonable basis. We'll see, usually when my schedule does something unexpected, it changes again once I've learned to accept or benefit from it.

Annoying development in the last 24 hours or so. I hadn't been attention whoring so much, but suddenly now I want all sorts of insane attention. It's frustrating. There are also things I plan to wax poetical in protected entries too, as they're not exactly thing I want to come up on Google when searching me out.

So, in the usstakedashingn game I'm involved in, we've got a mirror universe adventure going. My co-conspirator, fascinoma, though she agrees with me that DS9 is awesome, hasn't seen as much of it as she'd like, so she's a little behind the curve on the mirror 'verse as established in canon. So I've been checking out Memory Alpha for information I can hand to her easy to parse and quick to pick up.

In the process of doing this, I found out about a PS2 game they made that's set in the mirror 'verse, featuring Sulu. I so want it. Star Trek: Shattered Universe. I suppose this means I'm going to have to troll used game stores now, since it's been a while since the game was released. Oh well, should be interesting, and it'll be nice to have a reason to use the ps2 for what it was actually intended for, instead of just an overpriced DVD player.

I think it says something of my characters that they seem to have an automated standard operating procedure for when the away mission goes south while there are open glasses of alcohol floating about. 1) empty glass in quick gulp, 2) stow now empty glass in Spiegel's pockets to prevent damage to the glass, or free flying breakable stuff. Clearly the actions of people who are too often drinking on the away mission. Also, for those of you who are new to the program, Spiegel has pockets of infinite holding, thus the ability to shove glassware into them without problem. (link to the entry that sparked this musing)

I'm not looking forward to this week much. I'm scheduled to work the next six days, today was my only day off for the week. We'll see what state my sanity is in when I come out the other side, and how next week's schedule works out. Usually my days off are back to back in the middle of the week. Next week I'm either going to end up with split days off, or I'm going to get stupidmotherfuckered with another day or more to work during the next week, resulting in seven or more days straight. Yeah. That'll be fun.

In better news, my first time back to a movie theater in about a year actually managed to go fairly well. Iron Man was awesome, the people I shared the theater with were well behaved enough, and there were no technical errors. I ended up going at the last minute with some coworkers. It kinda went down like this:

One of my managers walks up to me as I'm helping a customer place a special order.

"Hey, some of us are going to see Iron Man tonight. Do you want to come?"

"Oh, yeah, sure."

"Okay, I'll tell you more later then." Manager walks away, and I blink before going back to my customers.

We ended up going to the theater in the middle of the cluster fuck that is a shopping center that I avoid like the plague and is way far away from our store, but near another of the company's stores. Yeah, that sentence would totally be less awkward if I wasn't dancing around the topic of naming the company I work for. At any rate, despite one person coming from home, and another getting a ride with the above mentioned manager who lives in the area of the theater, I ended up being the first one to arrive. Even though I stopped at home to change out of my work polo and khaki pants. We were planning on going to the 9:30 showing, but since I arrived at the theater at like 8:50ish, they were sold out. I wasn't surprised, so I called up the other people coming (since we were originally just each going to purchase our tickets separately) and ended up purchasing everyone's tickets. That killed my "I'm going to pay cash because that's easier" plan, as I didn't have enough cash on hand to be buying five tickets. Blah. So now I have an assload of cash where I usually try to use my debit card for everything.

As I said above, the movie was awesome, I loved it. One of my coworkers had a nit pick about the last thing said before the credits (being awkwardly vague again due to spoilers), but I thought it was appropreate. I also topped off the evening with a trip to the In'N'Out Burger that was near the theater, where I got stickers and was trying not to be stupid in gawking at the toys on the belts of the two highway patrol officers who ended up at a table near mine while I was there. Also, I couldn't get the Iron Man riff out of my head for the rest of the night, even attempting to dislodge it with Wicked and Nightwish. Oh well.

Also, for the record, I will be so happy when Firefox 3 is out of beta. I miss Deepest Sender, and because of stupidmotherfuckery of the Canonical people with the 8.04 release of *buntu, I don't have Firefox 2 on my computer anymore. They forced everyone using Firefox to the beta, and even though they make a Firefox 2 package available in the repositories, it's kind of annoying to get it all set up again, and sometimes there are conflicts between it and the beta. So for now, I am stuck using the frelling web based LJ update page. Yuck.

I am such a journal whore. I purchased one with pretty koi fish on it at work. I also bought myself a couple of new mechanical pencils, finally having grown frustrated that I no longer had a mechanical pencil having broken the old one. I just finished working out a supplemental piece of background work for kittenofdeath that I need to type up and store aside for when the in game timeline needs this bit of letter writing fluff.

I'm not 100% sure what I think of the new mechanical pencils, but I like their look better than the old one, and the advancement method seems to be better than the old one. Also, having an eraser on the end of the pencil is much better than having to keep one on hand or cross stuff out like I was using pen because I was too worried about keeping the flow to want to switch implements to erase and switch back to keep writing again.

I attempted to draw dragons earlier today, but I wasn't entirely happy with what I produced. Other people might like what I did, but I'm not happy with it. I need to make time to draw more, I am sad that I feel like I'm fighting in order to have happy fun drawing time instead of frustration. Maybe I'll start bringing one of my sketch books with me to work, and see what I can come up with on my entirely too short lunch breaks. I do get stupid shy when people look over my shoulder at my sketch books though, so that might get awkward given that people have a tendency to pop into the break room during my lunch a lot.

Usually I'm all over the new *buntu releases within days of their being released in final version, but I just haven't had time or energy to spend on upgrading lately. I need to upgrade because hopefully they've included the version of xsane that will support my scanner, so that I might be able to scan stuff I draw. I suppose I could do it at work, but I'd have to pay for that, and money to spend on silly things like scanning pictures of artwork really isn't there.

I did draw something I'm relatively happy with though, I did it the other night and just played with it some more tonight. I drew a picture of the dead love of my star trek rpg character, Diziara. He actually didn't turn out half bad, and I'm usually not happy with how males come out when I attempt to draw them. So it makes me happy to have something okay enough come out.

I do need to force myself to draw more, so I can actually stand a chance of getting better, but I worry that if I force myself, I'll only come to hate it. However, I don't doodle enough on my own to improve much. *sigh* I need to get myself involved in a class or something where there are models to work from again, that did wonders for me. Right now, my work schedule is too problematic to schedule a class around though, and I'd still have to come up with the money needed to enroll too. meh.