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.

/me whimpers

So, I'm working on Diziara's journal again, and I have her visiting New York City for this and that reason. She's a lover of Opera, Klingon preferably, but even Earth Opera is enjoyable for her. So I figured she'd visit The Met. I don't know if it's reasonable to assume that it still exists in the 24th century, but I figure that if any city in North America can hang onto it's cultural icons and centers, it would be New York. That said, it's also possible that something did happen to the original, and they built something new to replace it... that sort of stuff happens all the time in Trek.

Doesn't really matter at any rate, I was just popping into their website to get facts, and what do I find? They're doing Der Ring des Nibelungen, more commonly known as The Ring Cycle. The four Opera series doesn't get done very often because it's just so much work, and such a huge commitment of a company. I would love to see it, and The Met mocks me so, since I have no way to get out there to see it.

I will have to take consolation in the fact that I'll get to enjoy some musical theater, though it's Broadway instead of Opera, when I get to see Wicked half way through Feb.

So, as I had been pondering what to name my various virtual desktops, it occurred to me that I had a perfectly serviceable Klingon dictionary sitting on my desk, so why not use it? I now have all 20 virtual desktops names with the Klingon word for their number, and I can expand and contract my number of desktops based upon my needs and KDE seems to remember what I want to name each desktop even if I'm not actually using at the moment. Woo. So I've got three enabled at the moment.

Okay, okay, I really am leaving the computer in the name of heading to bed now. Promise.

So, Hot Topic sent me an email saying that if I enter their contest, I stand the chance of being one of five people to receive my "whole" wishlist (read as up to $500 worth of stuff off my wishlist). Given that sometimes they happen to have cute stuff, even if it's over priced for the quality it is, I'm willing to take a little time, fluff up my wish list and enter the contest. I know it's pretty damn unlikely I'll win anything, but there's no chance if I don't enter, so eh.

At any rate, while doing this, I poked around their other account settings, as they seem to have done a lot of the site since I last actually took the time to nose around. They have space for favorite bands in my account information, so it made me bouncy to put the following list into the space provided: Babyland, Nightwish, Abney Park, BloodWIRE, Blue Oyster Cult, Led Zeppelin, Heart, Orbital, Edge of Etiquette, The Seatbelts. Edge of Etiquette is the one that makes me most happy, because they are just that geeky. The Seatbelts are pretty darn close behind Edge of Etiquette on the geek scale though, but only lose out because Edge of Etiquette is that much more obscure.

Totally unrelated, I am such a dork for pearls. I just bought another pearl necklace at Cost Plus today. I swear that store will be the death of me, especially with there being one literally across the parking lot from my work, but I will die happy of it.

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, by way of snooping through the user profile of this guy from this shiny band I recently found out about (daniel_ap and Abney Park respectively), I came across steamfashion which I've added to my communities friend page filter and started skimming back through the recent posts.

So, how much of a dork does it make me that the first thought I had, upon seeing that someone posted directions on how to make a rosary, was "I should make Spiegel's resistor rosary." I do have a collection of resistors I bought when I still worked at Radio Scrap, though they were intended to be made into a slave bracelet. I haven't gotten around to that project yet. Maybe I should try to do both at the same time. Though, the ones I bought to make the slave bracelet are small, so I might be better off seeking some larger resistors for the rosary project. I'll ponder on this.

And since I'm making an entry on my various craft projects, I suppose I should document my other currently open projects. First there's the bio-hazard wife beater project. I found a good orange wife beater while out shopping for something else, found it for relatively cheap, and decided it was going to get the bio-hazard logo bleached into it, in an attempt to make something that's vaguely similar to this:

The current hold up is cutting the stencil since I don't think I can freehand the curves of the bio-hazard symbol well enough to keep it from looking like ass. I don't have much experience with an x-acto knife, so the actual stencil cutting is requiring much patience on my part. I will get it done eventually though. I really want the shirt.

While at Michael's picking up some of the stencil supplies, I happened across an end cap featuring glow in the dark yarn. I really shouldn't let myself wander that store and browse, as I have a tendency to go "Oooh, shiny!" and buy things I really don't need. That said, I've been meaning to make myself some black and white striped arm warmers for the longest of times, and now I can make 'em with the white yarn being glow in the dark. I'm almost half way done with those, as I'm mostly finished with the first one and it shouldn't take me long to whip out the second one. I love my round knitting looms. They're awesome.