Michelle's Journal
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Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Friday, November 13, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) l_the_fangirl asked for something about Coming of Age. So I wrote a bunch of vignettes from the Dragonriders of Pern setting because my head happened to be there today. They're all in the slightly disconnected, sparse style I seem to have adopted at the moment which people don't seem to like very much, so apologies for the lack of mass appeal :).
I'm also meant to ask for something in return - so write me something about you as a Bliss Stage Authority Figure, l_the_fangirl :p. If anyone else wants to do that and then make a request of me, please feel free too :).
( Coming of Age )
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The dream I had last night was sufficiently bizarre that I want to write it down. Entertainingly I believe it was at least partially sourced from looking through my wedding photos...
( Nazis, throwing knives and the CARBON call )
A brief digression, probably more interesting than the dream writeup: I noticed while writing up this dream that I don't remember proper nouns from dreams at all. Names of people and organisations in dreams come up in my memory as 'signifier: (properties of organisation or person)' rather than an actual word with a spelling and how to say it (sometimes they come with the ghost of one, e.g. the spy organisation mentioned is tagged 'begins with G, something like Grenadiers but not').
I think this might explain slightly more what I mean when I say 'signifier' (it's like a pointer in my brain which often is labelled to look like a word but doesn't have to be). When I complain about having primary key collisions with names, that's because the words are linked to signifiers (and any mention of the signifier's label fires off the signifier, making me very confused when people share the names I've labelled people-signifiers with).
This is probably still just uninformed and not quite correct babbling though :).
Oh, and the wedding photo link? There's a picture of Inq looking _really_ sarcastic, plenty of pictures of Edith looking avuncular, and relevant pictures of the featured relatives of tienelle, which I think I got the faces for those characters from...
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
10:20AM
Maelstrom was, and I quote, 'awesometastic with awesome sauce on top'.
Now I am re-reading the Mylitta and Nabonidus arc of Hitherby Dragons and breaking my brain with lines like "There is no path from here that leads to happiness. I’m not supposed to be happy. All I can be is pure."
And listening to my character's soundtrack to update it.
My brain has teh broken.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Last Sunday was the Easter 'Interactive Multimedia Experience' at the church I go to (City Church Cambridge). It was a guest service, and there were lots of decorations and an easter egg hunt and children singing and the usual things you get, but there was also a very well-edited and moving video of carefully non-gory bits from The Passion of The Christ, which got me thinking.
While I'm generally willing to accept the standard 'evangelical' line on the meaning and purpose of Jesus' death - 'penal substitutionary atonement', or 'He suffered and died for our sins because it is a property of (the universe + God) that somebody had to, so God made it a part of Him that did it rather than having to do it to us' - I've also always been on the lookout for more meanings. After all, almost every part of the Bible and everything God does is stacked with multiple lessons and meanings that God wants to convey to different people at different times - why would the central event of history be any different?
There are some standard 'other meanings' I've had in my model for a while now:
There's the meaning where God gets to say 'no, no, I *really* understand' to people who are suffering, and especially people who He is asking to do difficult things and give things up, because He suffered (in many ways - this links into the temptation in the desert too), and He sacrificed His only Son (important because parents are often willing to suffer themselves for God but worry about doing God's work if it might cause their children to suffer, which is commendable but sometimes wrong).
There's the meaning where Jesus showed the world that there were different ways to win. That apparent defeat could in fact be spiritual victory. That it was no longer the correct solution to gather an army and defeat the enemies of Israel in the physical world, on the ground, with the sword. And also to show the world that there was life after death, that bodily death was not the end, and to give some small idea of the flavour of that which is eternal within us with His appearances to people after His death.
While watching the video, though, another possible meaning came to me. I haven't heard it so widely from other people who I trust, so I'm not entirely certain in it, but I thought it was worth sharing.
One of the major 'problems' in Christianity is one that Paul addresses in Romans 6:1 - 'What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?'. If forgiveness, if grace is a free gift that God gives us, why should we worry about sinning? God will make everything come right in the end whatever we do, right? There are lots of warnings about being accidentally asleep when the day comes, and getting to Heaven by escaping through the fire rather than having built your house there. But still the question often remains.
People often ask of the Cross, 'Why did God bother?'. If God is all-powerful, why did he choose to have this brutal and traumatic event happen rather than just forgiving us outright? One answer is, of course, that He *can't*, that God does have certain fixed properties and one of them is that He is just and He cannot let wrongdoing go unpunished. But another reason, the reason that came to me while watching the artful evocation of Jesus' suffering, was that God didn't want us to disregard sin. We often find ourselves disregarding our sin, because God forgives us and makes it all better. We ask, 'Is it really a problem if we don't do what God wants, if we embrace this sin just for a moment? How serious is it that we disobey God?'.
And Jesus stretches out His arms on the cross, beaten and bloodied, spiritually and mentally anguished in His sudden removal from the comforting presence of God the Father, and says, "This serious. This is how serious it is."
I don't know about you, but that makes me go, "Oh." And think quite hard about some of the ways that I sin, and how they *are* serious, and that I should do something about them.
(Note: I'm off to Maelstrom at 10am and won't be back until Monday, so please don't expect comment replies until then if you have any comments...)
Friday, March 27, 2009
Inspired by http://larp-musing.livejournal.com/7649.html, I was thinking about different 'levels' of immersion in LARP.
I find that degree of immersion varies quite widely, and I wanted to expand on my comment there and give some examples of different levels.
At the top end of immersion, there's the place where all that's left of my headspace is a 'background process' checking that the OOC situation is still okay and I don't need to step and re-assert control. The dominant train of thought is the character's thoughts and even several levels of background thoughts are mostly attributable to the character.
Other symptoms of high levels of immersion include revised body image (Tourmaline was especially 'different' like this, but Jessily has ears, tail and fur, Talishae was distinctly wooden, and most of my characters have slightly different balance points and gait / general bearing which I no longer have to impose consciously at this stage) and pretty much direct experience of emotion.
This only seems to work for characters I have spent some time establishing 'common reference points' with - states of mind I can put myself into which slip onwards into states of mind the character is capable of. With characters that are too different from me to do this with, or characters I've just been assigned or otherwise don't have time to establish them with, I get a slightly different form of immersion.
In the second form of immersion, I remain distinctly aware of myself as a seperate person in ultimate control, but can observe the mental state of the character in detail and generally 'pass through' control of the body fluently (but can trivially interrupt any action at any time without actually breaking out of this state). There are two dominant trains of thought, mine and the character's.
Basically all NPCs that I've achieved any form of immersion with have been run in this form with only very occasional dips into the deeper form, and it's the mode that I switch back up into when I need to override a deep-immersion character's actions for OOC reasons (there's been an OOC safety call / someone's OOC injured, I really need to slip on the OOC armband and go to the loo, someone else is asking me something important out of character, we need to 'fade to black' the current scene, I need to react to an OOC system call and need to search my actual OOC memory for how to react properly to it before feeding that back into the character, etc etc).
Levels of playing a character further out than this I generally count as 'not immersed'. This normally occurs when I have lots of OOC concerns to deal with - if I'm hungry, cold and tired, if I'm playing an NPC who needs to deliver plot in exactly the right way, if I'm expected to be using the game system in a tactically competent fashion.
If it's a long-term character I'm dealing with, this is the point they reside at when they bother me during my everyday life, as well. They stand around in my head as a distinct entity whose mental state I can't percieve other than through the usual visual and audio cues that other people give out and talk me through what they want me to be doing. I don't tend to get this with short-term characters because they don't have enough of an independant existance to do this with. This is also the deepest mode I tend to run tabletop characters in, although sometimes I get glimpses of their internal mental model and get to drop down into 'observe their full mental state and pass actions through fluently' for a bit, especially during conversation.
Short-term characters at this point become entirely 'non-interactive' simulations of people, like the mental models I might use to extrapolate what other actual people might do in a certain situation. They aren't running a stream of consciousness and have no meaningful awareness of anything but 'if thing Y is happening, what things a,b,c... would it be reasonable for me to do, considering everything which is known about me?'. This is also the mode I generally run tabletop NPCs in - I can't think of one which has progressed to be enough of an independant entity to run in any other mode. Sometimes I find myself with no mental contact with a long-term character and have to resort to running them in this mode too.
There's a level even further out than that, which generally only happens when I'm 'just monstering' (playing short, woefully underbriefed combat roles) or when I've seriously had enough OOC (i.e. I need food/water/the loo/sleep *now* and for some reason can't actually drop fully OOC to do it by the rules of the game). In this mode I'm actually really only thinking of OOC concerns - I might throw in a couple of characterful noises or ways of moving, but those are only there to serve the OOC goal of maintaining peer respect, not really anything to do with the character I'm meant to be. If I have a pressing OOC goal I'm heading for it as directly as possible; if I'm a fighty encounter I'm treating my role and the system as basically a combat sport / tactical skirmish wargame that I'm playing, rather than a roleplaying opportunity. I run most of my tabletop D&D monsters in this mode :).
I don't know if anyone but me found that interesting, but oh well. If you've done LARP or some other form of roleplaying, do these sound familiar to you? Do you have your own, different 'levels' of immersion which you experience? Or do you just not play for immersion and therefore don't define your roleplaying experiences in these kinds of terms?
Saturday, February 7, 2009
0. First, select your ten fictional characters (from any medium) by whichever method you like best. Then answer the questions below.
(1) Jessily (Maelstrom)
(2) Tourmaline (Maelstrom)
(3) Talishae (Maelstrom)
(4) Mithril (CUTT)
(5) Thea Chalice (CUTT)
(6) Kallestra Lorelai Aeostare (CUTT)
(7) Tesseract (FD)
(8) Ayeena (D&D)
(9) Vasha (Triad Weyrs)
(10) K'sen (Triad Weyrs)
( Read more... )
My life is still dull, so have another meme.
Instructions:
1. Choose up to five of your own characters.
2. Make them answer the following questions.
* Mithril (CUTT)
* Ayeena (Afterglow - D&D)
* Jessily (Maelstrom)
* Tesseract (FD)
* K'sen (Triad Weyrs)
( Read more... )
Thursday, January 15, 2009
11:24AM
I've done something very similar to this meme before, but now I have 12 actual LARP characters...
(yes, I have teh procrastinate. Which is dumb, because I'm stupidly busy.)
Name 12 characters you have played in RPGs/LRPs, before looking at the questions that follow. List your characters numbered 1 to 12, with the name of the RPG/LRP you played them in. Once you've picked your 12 characters, look at the questions and answer accordingly. (No peeking until you've picked your characters!) Put your answers behind a LJ-cut.
( Warning, excessively long meme ahead. )
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
8:42AM
Lammas Eve Ficathon
Title: People Are Strange
Author Name: Michelle Taylor
Fandom/Original: Original Fiction
Word Count: 2030
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Vaguely disturbing. No dialogue. Cruelty to animals.
( Read more... )
Thursday, July 31, 2008
8:51AM
EDIT: I now have betas, thank you all very much for volunteering :)
Um, I wrote 2k words of unintelligible garbage (read: 'original fiction') for this and now it needs a beta. Today. Anyone feel up to helping me out here? (If so, leave me an email addy or drop me an email and I'll send you the garbage story as soon as I pick up the comment or email.)
(For the uninitiated, 'beta' means 'beta-reader', by analogy with 'beta-tester' for software, and basically entails reading my rubbish and pointing out that I repeatedly and egregiously misspelled 'pigeon' and also several sentences just don't make sense and English Doesn't Work Like That.)
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Um. I may have just written quite long fanfiction about my Warcrack character. *embarrassed face*
( Cut for length. )
Friday, April 18, 2008
Monday, October 22, 2007
As predicted, doctors say 'is probably virus, go away'.
Nicholas did come back in time to give me a lift to the surgery though, which made my life a lot easier.
I am still horribly ill and now paracetamol isn't dealing with it any more. I have been ill in some manner since early September and it is getting irritating now. I would have made a doctor's appointment except their website is down so I need to wait until I can phone them. I thought I was getting better but no, this weekend I have come down with HEAD ASPLODE (I think I am probably running a fever but I can't check because the only thermometer in the house is a big water thermometer covered in leather goo). So I have a headache that paracetamol won't touch, tasty tasty nausea, and when I tried to go to the shops for bread I almost didn't make it back to the house (maybe an exaggeration but it felt rather more like a two-hour hike than a five-minute shopping expedition - not looking forwards to the fifteen-minute trek to the doctors', but how else do I get there?). On top of my general breathing failure from having a stuffy nose.
I was trying to be asleep but lying down with no source of distraction just makes everything worse (although expending enough energy to type makes my fingers feel like I've been lifting weights with them - basically moving / thinking / breathing / everything is much more difficult than it ought to be). I keep thinking there must be something I can do to make myself feel better, but nothing helps.
And Nicholas is still in Lincolnshire :(.
Current mood:  sick
Sunday, October 7, 2007
I am alive. I ought to be asleep, but I feel a lot more brainful now than I did partway through the afternoon.
I wanted to make a LJ post to recommend the following Haibane Renmei fanfiction (if you have not seen Haibane Renmei you should not read this because it contains massive spoilers):
http://cff.ssw.net/fan/fanfic/Nemus_Departure.htm
I will now return you to your regularly scheduled silence.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
My car is broken again. It got broken on the way back from New Forest LARP (a good idea Leo had, spoilt by a general lack of proper follow-through and our numbers halving between when we planned the event and when we ran it (5 dropping out in the last week), which I think people had a good time at anyway), so we got it to a garage and they 'fixed' it. Then it broke down in Northampton on the way to Maelstrom (which got us a walking tour of Northampton, some pictures of dragons and some tea, but was still kind of aggrevating), of exactly the same thing. We failed to get the underlying issue fixed because we are lame. So now it is broken down in Grantchester Meadows. At least it got the kit there, I guess.
Also my head is broken. It hurts and I cannot grammerate properly. And Nicholas is busy being heroic with a van and some sofas, and when he gets home I will have to bother him about the car (I don't know what garage he took it to last time and I think he probably has an opinion on what to do with it) and he will be grumpy and whine. Also there is a sensible solution I could apply if I was less completely lousy when it comes to cars, interacting with shopkeepers, or indeed doing anything.
I ought to have had a fantastic Maelstrom event but instead the start of this lurg or some aspect of not taking care of myself properly meant I spent most of the time running around as myself trying to do what Tourmaline would have done, which wasn't much fun really.
I do not even have any kind of provable lurg, I just have a big invisible iron helmet on my head that I can't take off, and I won't be able to take time off work for it until I am actually exploding with radioactive green goo because that's normally the next stage of this illness and I have to not go into work then in case I gunge my co-workers. Alternatively I might just have become utterly shite and stay like this forever.
In conclusion, wah wah my head is a stupid head.
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