(no subject)
Okay, first off, rat updates!
Our test results came back! And the CBC is as useful as I dreamed it would be.
Out of the 11 rats I brought - 1 "ringer" who I knew was sick and Lorax, who I suspected might be (Hobbit's son, Hoop's brother and cagemate) - only 2 tested sick. I want to say first off that I'm glad SOME of them did. Otherwise, what would it have proven? If all of them tested fine, I would have been skeptical. I would have wondered if we'd done something wrong, or if we missed something, or if the tests were actually useful. After all, *I* could look at all the rats and go "They're all healthy except the one with the head tilt," right? I don't need a vet for that.
Snickers came back with exactly the sort of numbers Dr. V expected - in fact, Dr. V double-blinded herself and said she knew right away whose slide it was when she saw it under the microscope. High levels of cortisone reaction, the sort of thing you see with a chronic or ongoing viral/bacterial infection. Exactly, in other words, what you'd expect to see in a rat with a head tilt.
And so the second sick rat... Lorax, right? Wrong. Lorax is fine. On the upper end of "normal," but fine. In fact, the only reason Dr. V let me know he was on the "upper end" was because I'd been concerned about him in particular after what happened with Hobbit and Hooperbloob.
The second sick rat was one I hadn't expected at all - and in fact, one I was planning on breeding. Next, in fact. Zakynthos, who I was so looking forward to breeding to my Fortune Cookie the MOMENT my test results came back. The rats I said numerous times to C and Kirstin that I was tempted to breed before the tests, if I could catch Cookie in heat, but who I just KNEW if I did that, I'd jinx them and one of them would test like crap.
And he really did test like CRAP. He was very heterophilic (5%) and had 15% lymphocytes instead of 50%!! I have no idea what those things mean individually, but Dr. V was fairly alarmed that Zak is harboring something major.
Hmm... something like Hoop was! This is something that could have PREVENTED the whole debacle with Hoop!! And it prevented me from doing it with Zak!! I didn't breed a rat who looked and acted totally healthy but who was really harboring something awful! YAY!!
So instead I'm breeding Cookie to Princess Chicken, that handsome lord of my heart, my darling squishy Russian Blue Satin man. And Cookie went into heat at 3am last night and I caught her, so we should be expecting little Pharoahs out of Cookie around the 14th of July. HOORAY!!
And Dr. V and I are working on some natural immune therapy for Zak and Snickers and re-testing them in a month. I may still get to breed Zak - he's not too old - but I can't wait for Cookie, she's a year old and I won't have room in my breeding schedule to push her back. I'm so excited that the tests WORKED and showed what they were meant to! Sorry I didn't get to breed Zak, but more importantly, I know the two rats I bred weren't sick and weren't harboring anything nasty at the time I bred them. YAY!
On to the not-as-good...
I think we're done with Warcraft, at least for now. This may end up being an extended break... apparently when we "left" City of Heroes it was just an extended break. The thing is... I haven't really felt like part of the game in quite a while now.
Zylona was very intense, but quiet, very personal. She didn't RP with a lot of people, but the RP she had was immensely deep, heartbreakingly true for me.
Tabaqui was like an explosion of being. She was everywhere, she knew so many people, she was "popular" and "famous" (and yes, those words go tongue-in-cheek for the interwebs and one server and one tiny community of that server, but for a while it certainly felt like fame!) and she was involved in what I still think was one of the largest and most arching storylines Hordeside, the Valgasha villainy. She went from highs to lows, to incredibly dark places and incredibly bright places. She murdered, she became a mother. She was raped by dark magic, she learned to make love to a man who couldn't. She almost died and it taught her to live. She was tragically innocent and hopeful and at the same time, immensely dark and sometimes scary. She made me cry and she shared herself unselfishly with so many people that it exhausted ME. I spent more time in physical pain because of Tabi - from heartbreak to ulcers brought on by my raid-leadering and the pricks who made it miserable - and more time laughing until I couldn't breathe.
When Tabi's life fell apart, her friends all became raiders (and yes, there apparently is, in TBC, a point where you can either raid and RP at the same time, or you stop RPing. I hate TBC so much) or quit the game or died and rerolled (RIP Gaark) or began working a shift that no longer allowed them to play with her, whatever... I thought I was pretty much done then.
Nenuial gave me new life, new hope, a new story, a new character to love. And I did love her, and I do love her. But sadly a LOT of ooc garbage between the little CET group got in the way. Nen became as painful to play as Tabi ever was on the worst days of being raked over Jessa, Jahna and Borel's bullshit - maybe moreso because I still loved everyone involved. Most of us are ok with each other now, but seriously for a while there, I hovered over the delete key every single day because it just hurt so much. It's pretty much why I stopped publishing her story. The points of view, who was right, who was wrong, who was to blame, was so intermingled IC and OC that putting the stories up would have just peeled away what scabs had developed and rubbed salt in it.
I hardly need go into the Realmportal thing, but it was certainly an enormous nail in the coffin. I didn't feel safe, and it happened at the worst possible time. TBC was a huge upheaval. People vanished, people stopped concentrating on their RP, written and IG, people were out doing other things and playing the game in small groups, questing groups. There weren't big gatherings, very few events, the Zhevra vanished, and everything everywhere was all elves elves elves. A lot of us knew we'd get a lot of Alliance "tourists" and then "exptriates," but we figured once they realized we did things a lot differently Hside they'd go back to their own place. We didn't realize they'd BRING their place with them. Silvermoon turned into mini-Stormwind, weird sex and cybering all over the place, and oh the epic, dramatic storylines, the weird catchphrases, and to add to the confusion of everyone we KNEW having rolled a new alt with a new name... a whole flood of people we DIDN'T know showed up and drowned the population. Add the Realmportal upheaval to that, the betrayals, the I-knew-it-was-coming-but-it-doesn't-make-me-happy, and a lot of my desire to have anything to do with the community went bye-bye.
So I played TBC. I got 70s. I got all my 60s into the Outlands. I got my Nen to 63. And I freaking hated what the game turned into. Grind, grind, grind. Everything was about points, about rep, about keying, about building up so you could do that. Groups separated. People who didn't grind their rep and keys and gear quick enough got dumped. People who ground too quickly joined more hardcore groups just to have someone to play with. My old RP group all but vanished, except for the ones I came in with, and a few more, and even we didn't really RP anymore outside of instancing banter.
I was pretty much done with the game, there were thngs I wanted to do, but pretty much knew I wouldn't ever do. I had more fun rerolling Zylona and getting her to 25 than I did getting the patterns that 70-Zy worked so hard for, grinding away at Consortium rep. I got Avi to 70 and 375 tailoring and all the Frozen Shadowweave patterns and mats... and never made them. Bored. Totally bored.
I miss and love a lot of people from the server. Everyone on my friendlist here. A lot of the old ZG group. A lot of the old EP crew. Certainly the old Valgasha-story group, with the exception of a certain lying jackass. But honestly, I hate - I actively dislike - 90% of the server. The forums, the RP sites, the channels in-game, are full of people who literally make me grind my teeth when I see their names. And the amazing two-faced meanness of these people who everyone loves so much drives me to distraction. I may be mean on occasion, even so blunt you might call it cruel, but dammit I'm not two-faced. I say what I think.
When we re-installed CoH, it was just a vacation. Something to do because Fox and Wendy's work schedules were wonky and we could never do instances anymore, and we literally could not stand to grind any more rep just to do it. We ran instances to shard purples and blues, because the stuff we wanted WOULD NOT drop. Everything was an exercise in boredom and frustration. And CoH is wonky and fun and bouncy and silly and yes, it has its own crazy stupid mindless repetitive grind factor, oh yes it does, that's why I left the first time and it hasn't gone away.
But nowhere in WoW are you able to make a character based on something your cat vomited onto your carpet (hooray for The Slightly-Used Moth!) give it a quirky background (what happens when a cat accidently drinks some mutagentic sewer sludge, then eats a moth, and vomits them both up?) a crazy way of talking ("I can't help bugging people, okay? I'm a moth! I get paid in sugar water and light bulbs, okay?") and then actually ROLE PLAY this critter and bring AMUSEMENT to the people around you, who all play along and throw their own weirdness at you, and it doesn't bother anyone, or break any rules of lore, or in any way bend the universe such that they have to tell you that you're implausible. Seriously, have you read any comics? Also, you can make your character LOOK LIKE themselves, no matter what neat rare enhancements they're wearing.
Fear for your linens! I am the Moth!
Also, it was nice to slip into the skins of some of my older, more serious characters. Trillium, Eidy, Opal, Lauros... I missed them, and it was nice to be them again. It's great to be in a world where people like Opal, the ultra-serious sorceress of Amber, can exist alongside the Slightly-Used Moth and no one bats an eye at either of them.
And since we started this "vacation" two weeks ago... I havne't logged onto WoW once. Not even once. I have reason to, after all. My accounts paid through next month. I'm sure I have mail to deal with. I really should at least fold my characters up for storage, arrange their banks, make sure they don't have mail, put them someplace safe, if I'm on a break. But I just have no interest in logging in. None.
And I still log onto RP Haven daily, I still browse, I still check over if anyone needs moderate-y stuff. But after what happened with Shan, and the fact NOTHING was done to him about it, he got to say whatever the hell he wanted about me, publically, and nothing got done to him - not even a single person publically sticking up for me and saying "Hey, Tabi's a good person, why don't you shut up," nothing... I don't feel like I'm a part of it anymore. I don't feel like I'm WANTED as a part of it, I think most people probably agree with Shan's snippy little comment about what an unfit moderator - and peer - I am. And increasingly, aside from the moderators and a few others like Veri, Aldred, Meau, I don't KNOW who these people are. I honestly have no idea where they came from, what their stories are. It's all strangers.
So... I guess, at least for now, I'm done with WoW. It scares me to think that. I've invested a lot into WoW, and my girls, and my friends... but I just don't like it anymore. Most of the people I still got to play with regularly - Nasanniz/Andramalech, Siwili/Kipe, Zuelaji/Zyrhan, Uzil, Soucie/Fatila, Olm/Malvina, and Rendolph - swapped as well. Mostly bored and burned out on WoW themselves, though Wendy wasn't quite as ready as the rest of us, and I'm not sure if Olm is still playing WoW or not.
And almost as scary as leaving WoW... my first serious character in a long time decided to be born in my head. Not a character based on an old character - like Opal and Lauros and Trillium - or something fluffy and silly like the Moth, but a real person type character. Up there with Eidolon and Zylona and Tabi. The first one since Nenuial.
Meet Alexis Summer, also known as Summer Moon the Kheldian.
Her story's just starting, and it's sweeping me in for the ride. I've missed that feeling, so much.
Our test results came back! And the CBC is as useful as I dreamed it would be.
Out of the 11 rats I brought - 1 "ringer" who I knew was sick and Lorax, who I suspected might be (Hobbit's son, Hoop's brother and cagemate) - only 2 tested sick. I want to say first off that I'm glad SOME of them did. Otherwise, what would it have proven? If all of them tested fine, I would have been skeptical. I would have wondered if we'd done something wrong, or if we missed something, or if the tests were actually useful. After all, *I* could look at all the rats and go "They're all healthy except the one with the head tilt," right? I don't need a vet for that.
Snickers came back with exactly the sort of numbers Dr. V expected - in fact, Dr. V double-blinded herself and said she knew right away whose slide it was when she saw it under the microscope. High levels of cortisone reaction, the sort of thing you see with a chronic or ongoing viral/bacterial infection. Exactly, in other words, what you'd expect to see in a rat with a head tilt.
And so the second sick rat... Lorax, right? Wrong. Lorax is fine. On the upper end of "normal," but fine. In fact, the only reason Dr. V let me know he was on the "upper end" was because I'd been concerned about him in particular after what happened with Hobbit and Hooperbloob.
The second sick rat was one I hadn't expected at all - and in fact, one I was planning on breeding. Next, in fact. Zakynthos, who I was so looking forward to breeding to my Fortune Cookie the MOMENT my test results came back. The rats I said numerous times to C and Kirstin that I was tempted to breed before the tests, if I could catch Cookie in heat, but who I just KNEW if I did that, I'd jinx them and one of them would test like crap.
And he really did test like CRAP. He was very heterophilic (5%) and had 15% lymphocytes instead of 50%!! I have no idea what those things mean individually, but Dr. V was fairly alarmed that Zak is harboring something major.
Hmm... something like Hoop was! This is something that could have PREVENTED the whole debacle with Hoop!! And it prevented me from doing it with Zak!! I didn't breed a rat who looked and acted totally healthy but who was really harboring something awful! YAY!!
So instead I'm breeding Cookie to Princess Chicken, that handsome lord of my heart, my darling squishy Russian Blue Satin man. And Cookie went into heat at 3am last night and I caught her, so we should be expecting little Pharoahs out of Cookie around the 14th of July. HOORAY!!
And Dr. V and I are working on some natural immune therapy for Zak and Snickers and re-testing them in a month. I may still get to breed Zak - he's not too old - but I can't wait for Cookie, she's a year old and I won't have room in my breeding schedule to push her back. I'm so excited that the tests WORKED and showed what they were meant to! Sorry I didn't get to breed Zak, but more importantly, I know the two rats I bred weren't sick and weren't harboring anything nasty at the time I bred them. YAY!
On to the not-as-good...
I think we're done with Warcraft, at least for now. This may end up being an extended break... apparently when we "left" City of Heroes it was just an extended break. The thing is... I haven't really felt like part of the game in quite a while now.
Zylona was very intense, but quiet, very personal. She didn't RP with a lot of people, but the RP she had was immensely deep, heartbreakingly true for me.
Tabaqui was like an explosion of being. She was everywhere, she knew so many people, she was "popular" and "famous" (and yes, those words go tongue-in-cheek for the interwebs and one server and one tiny community of that server, but for a while it certainly felt like fame!) and she was involved in what I still think was one of the largest and most arching storylines Hordeside, the Valgasha villainy. She went from highs to lows, to incredibly dark places and incredibly bright places. She murdered, she became a mother. She was raped by dark magic, she learned to make love to a man who couldn't. She almost died and it taught her to live. She was tragically innocent and hopeful and at the same time, immensely dark and sometimes scary. She made me cry and she shared herself unselfishly with so many people that it exhausted ME. I spent more time in physical pain because of Tabi - from heartbreak to ulcers brought on by my raid-leadering and the pricks who made it miserable - and more time laughing until I couldn't breathe.
When Tabi's life fell apart, her friends all became raiders (and yes, there apparently is, in TBC, a point where you can either raid and RP at the same time, or you stop RPing. I hate TBC so much) or quit the game or died and rerolled (RIP Gaark) or began working a shift that no longer allowed them to play with her, whatever... I thought I was pretty much done then.
Nenuial gave me new life, new hope, a new story, a new character to love. And I did love her, and I do love her. But sadly a LOT of ooc garbage between the little CET group got in the way. Nen became as painful to play as Tabi ever was on the worst days of being raked over Jessa, Jahna and Borel's bullshit - maybe moreso because I still loved everyone involved. Most of us are ok with each other now, but seriously for a while there, I hovered over the delete key every single day because it just hurt so much. It's pretty much why I stopped publishing her story. The points of view, who was right, who was wrong, who was to blame, was so intermingled IC and OC that putting the stories up would have just peeled away what scabs had developed and rubbed salt in it.
I hardly need go into the Realmportal thing, but it was certainly an enormous nail in the coffin. I didn't feel safe, and it happened at the worst possible time. TBC was a huge upheaval. People vanished, people stopped concentrating on their RP, written and IG, people were out doing other things and playing the game in small groups, questing groups. There weren't big gatherings, very few events, the Zhevra vanished, and everything everywhere was all elves elves elves. A lot of us knew we'd get a lot of Alliance "tourists" and then "exptriates," but we figured once they realized we did things a lot differently Hside they'd go back to their own place. We didn't realize they'd BRING their place with them. Silvermoon turned into mini-Stormwind, weird sex and cybering all over the place, and oh the epic, dramatic storylines, the weird catchphrases, and to add to the confusion of everyone we KNEW having rolled a new alt with a new name... a whole flood of people we DIDN'T know showed up and drowned the population. Add the Realmportal upheaval to that, the betrayals, the I-knew-it-was-coming-but-it-doesn't-make-me-happy, and a lot of my desire to have anything to do with the community went bye-bye.
So I played TBC. I got 70s. I got all my 60s into the Outlands. I got my Nen to 63. And I freaking hated what the game turned into. Grind, grind, grind. Everything was about points, about rep, about keying, about building up so you could do that. Groups separated. People who didn't grind their rep and keys and gear quick enough got dumped. People who ground too quickly joined more hardcore groups just to have someone to play with. My old RP group all but vanished, except for the ones I came in with, and a few more, and even we didn't really RP anymore outside of instancing banter.
I was pretty much done with the game, there were thngs I wanted to do, but pretty much knew I wouldn't ever do. I had more fun rerolling Zylona and getting her to 25 than I did getting the patterns that 70-Zy worked so hard for, grinding away at Consortium rep. I got Avi to 70 and 375 tailoring and all the Frozen Shadowweave patterns and mats... and never made them. Bored. Totally bored.
I miss and love a lot of people from the server. Everyone on my friendlist here. A lot of the old ZG group. A lot of the old EP crew. Certainly the old Valgasha-story group, with the exception of a certain lying jackass. But honestly, I hate - I actively dislike - 90% of the server. The forums, the RP sites, the channels in-game, are full of people who literally make me grind my teeth when I see their names. And the amazing two-faced meanness of these people who everyone loves so much drives me to distraction. I may be mean on occasion, even so blunt you might call it cruel, but dammit I'm not two-faced. I say what I think.
When we re-installed CoH, it was just a vacation. Something to do because Fox and Wendy's work schedules were wonky and we could never do instances anymore, and we literally could not stand to grind any more rep just to do it. We ran instances to shard purples and blues, because the stuff we wanted WOULD NOT drop. Everything was an exercise in boredom and frustration. And CoH is wonky and fun and bouncy and silly and yes, it has its own crazy stupid mindless repetitive grind factor, oh yes it does, that's why I left the first time and it hasn't gone away.
But nowhere in WoW are you able to make a character based on something your cat vomited onto your carpet (hooray for The Slightly-Used Moth!) give it a quirky background (what happens when a cat accidently drinks some mutagentic sewer sludge, then eats a moth, and vomits them both up?) a crazy way of talking ("I can't help bugging people, okay? I'm a moth! I get paid in sugar water and light bulbs, okay?") and then actually ROLE PLAY this critter and bring AMUSEMENT to the people around you, who all play along and throw their own weirdness at you, and it doesn't bother anyone, or break any rules of lore, or in any way bend the universe such that they have to tell you that you're implausible. Seriously, have you read any comics? Also, you can make your character LOOK LIKE themselves, no matter what neat rare enhancements they're wearing.
Fear for your linens! I am the Moth!
Also, it was nice to slip into the skins of some of my older, more serious characters. Trillium, Eidy, Opal, Lauros... I missed them, and it was nice to be them again. It's great to be in a world where people like Opal, the ultra-serious sorceress of Amber, can exist alongside the Slightly-Used Moth and no one bats an eye at either of them.
And since we started this "vacation" two weeks ago... I havne't logged onto WoW once. Not even once. I have reason to, after all. My accounts paid through next month. I'm sure I have mail to deal with. I really should at least fold my characters up for storage, arrange their banks, make sure they don't have mail, put them someplace safe, if I'm on a break. But I just have no interest in logging in. None.
And I still log onto RP Haven daily, I still browse, I still check over if anyone needs moderate-y stuff. But after what happened with Shan, and the fact NOTHING was done to him about it, he got to say whatever the hell he wanted about me, publically, and nothing got done to him - not even a single person publically sticking up for me and saying "Hey, Tabi's a good person, why don't you shut up," nothing... I don't feel like I'm a part of it anymore. I don't feel like I'm WANTED as a part of it, I think most people probably agree with Shan's snippy little comment about what an unfit moderator - and peer - I am. And increasingly, aside from the moderators and a few others like Veri, Aldred, Meau, I don't KNOW who these people are. I honestly have no idea where they came from, what their stories are. It's all strangers.
So... I guess, at least for now, I'm done with WoW. It scares me to think that. I've invested a lot into WoW, and my girls, and my friends... but I just don't like it anymore. Most of the people I still got to play with regularly - Nasanniz/Andramalech, Siwili/Kipe, Zuelaji/Zyrhan, Uzil, Soucie/Fatila, Olm/Malvina, and Rendolph - swapped as well. Mostly bored and burned out on WoW themselves, though Wendy wasn't quite as ready as the rest of us, and I'm not sure if Olm is still playing WoW or not.
And almost as scary as leaving WoW... my first serious character in a long time decided to be born in my head. Not a character based on an old character - like Opal and Lauros and Trillium - or something fluffy and silly like the Moth, but a real person type character. Up there with Eidolon and Zylona and Tabi. The first one since Nenuial.
Meet Alexis Summer, also known as Summer Moon the Kheldian.
Her story's just starting, and it's sweeping me in for the ride. I've missed that feeling, so much.