It's 1/18/2012, do you know where your [censored] is?

So apparently I go in for testing on the 23rd and 24th to see if I have a thyroid problem. Fun. At least it's more useful than 'sleep more, noob.'


Um. Haven't felt like existing in any meaningful way in the past age. Couple months I guess. Depressed, tired. Mostly just tired. So ... damn ... tired. Oh, then I got sick and didn't recover properly so I saw a real doctor after my insurance kicked in.


It sucks.

This thing, if it passes, will result in me taking down the blog. Too risky, haven't been doing enough with it to want to risk doing time for fanfiction, thanks.

And now to go back to hiding in my hole for the end of the world to happen.


Hope it comes soon.


I can't sleep tonight.

Hm. What to say, what to say.

I should really try and plot these out ahead of time, huh?

Still sick. Not much to report.

Oh, I got a pet rock!

It's actually a cactus and I think that's cool. Well not really a cactus, but a desert-ey kind of plant anyway.

Apparently it's snowing outside. I find that absolutely ridiculous. It's not even October yet!

I have a friend who's plotting out a really kind of awesome looking thing. I have a curiousity as to whether or not it will ever get off the ground, but it still might be interesting to play around with.

Dez is also considering running a D&D group. That would be nice I think.

I hate being sick.

I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't even eat that much really. I don't do any kind of illegal drugs.

I don't even know.

Meh.

Apparently you can't use an ampersand in the tag cloud. Who knew?

Edit: So I guess I was lied to about the snow bit. But it is balls cold outside. :(

Sick Again

Sorry, not much to say.

Apparently I've got a sinus infection and an ear infection. I'm really kinda prone to that sort of thing.

'sgreat. Back at work today though.

Uh. So.

Riven is really fun to play, on LoL. Bouncing everywhere. 's worse than WuKong. 's pretty cool though. Honestly I kinda dig her splash art & model, y'know? Don't see what all the bitching is about. Biggest problem is how easy it is to unintentionally towerdive. She's got an excess of forward momentum at all times.

The dash is cool. Manaless champion is also cool.

Bet she'd be amazing in a lane with Maokai. He gets that passive, where spells cast around him let him heal, right? She is constantly in motion and constantly casting spells.

Her voice sounds kinda ... odd. Girly. Which, y'know, female. But like girlish, rather than ANGRY WOMAN 'KGO. I feel like she's from some shoujo anime - like the tomboy bruiser to Lux's girly girl caster or something. (Amusement, Riven is ex-Noxus ... ish?, and Lux is from Demacia.)

Wonder how they'd do in a lane together, lol.

Things to try later on (assuming I ever get to play her because jeez everyone wants to):

How's triforce on her?
How's Sheen specifically on her? Manaless with no AP ratios at all, but that on-hit with her ability spam might be neat.
What's most effective - more attack speed or more attack damage, and I bet phantoms would be just silly on her for the move speed. Prolly depends on her AD ratios. Very spammable abilities though. Eh.

Oh - Also Minecraft 1.8 went live as opposed to leaked-and-promoted. So that's cool. SMP still has the Endermen bug (they literally can not see you right now on SMP).

Endermen ... I wish they weren't so easy to kill. I like the tie-in with the original mythos that they're affected by water, but really, two hits with a sword? In relation to that, I wish they weren't so common. Instead of one enderman screwing with the landscape, there's basically an army of them.

And they burn in sunlight. I don't really like that part either. One of the bigger scares of the Mythos was the fact that He didn't give a damn if it was day or night, y'know?

Eh.

Creative mode is hella fun.

Some of the lighting is still bugged.

Still waiting for a good, basic texture pack that's 1.8 compliant.

Gonna go try out single player now. Bet they're significantly scarier there when looking at them could actually hurt me. lol.

Oh, I also wish they didn't move around logs, wood, or cobblestone. Dirt, sand, gravel, sure, but random trees all over the landscape missing their middle bits is kinda disconcerting. And messy.

Facebook

Not for social recluses.

I don't fully understand the point of it. If I want to see if someone's online, I check my IM services. If they're not online, I leave an offline instant message. If I want to talk to >1 at a time, I talk with 'em on Vent 'coz dammit, Dez, I bought you a damn mic.

I guess I don't get why you want to have 200 'friends' who you know through other 'friends' who you maybe knew one time in high school ... oh wait, no, that one's a very nice camwhore.

The only use I found for Facebook was to while away hours on the games, which there are better free-to-play games on the market, and most of them don't depend on forging false friendships with random strangers, either.

I just don't really get the point.

Sorry for the late post, I'm feeling very under the weather.

Not that anyone particularly cares.

Expect a review on Guild Wars 1 sometime after I've formulated a distinct impression of it. I'm trying it out in anticipation of GW2 which looks fuckin' badass.

Yes, I do live under a rock.

Why do you ask?

Oh! And apparently WoW is jumping on the bandwagon for armor recustomization. Fuckin' finally, doodz.

Fucking Hell

I'm running on three hours' sleep and a shitload of caffeine, I'm tired, my giant gaping wound on my cheek hurts (and it'll feel so much better when I go apply peroxide to it, I'm sure), people suck, circumstances suck, fuck everything.

Drew the Death card as my card of the day. lololololol.

What are we transitioning to, eh? What major change is coming? I'd like to know. Would you like to know? I'd like to know.

Honestly nothing's been especially stable since I started this glorified, publicized journal, just in various states of disarray.

My car broke down. Key won't turn in the ignition switch. Like, at all, either copy. It's just stuck. Which means we can't turn the car on. Already spent money on getting it towed to the repair shop. Going to spend more money one way or the other to get it repaired, assuming they get their heads out of their asses and actually diagnose the goddamn problem.

We had to leave the car in a Wal-Mart parking lot for a day and a half (and oh, walking home in all that heat with a fever of my own was so much fun don'tcha know) because it got to the store just fine but it failed at existence when we tried to go home. Which meant in practice that at 7 AM Monday morning, Mom was dragging my ass (that went to bed at 3) out of bed and into the other car, in order to get it towed and I've already covered this part so let me just say that 8 AM is not a civil hour to be awake at, and most of the local businesses that aren't the repair places agree with me; they weren't open until 10.

I bought myself a LoL card with my paycheck money, and a pair of shoes because my old ones basically fell apart the other day, too.

I'm goin' to bed six hours before I normally would because I'm dead fuckin' exhausted (like, think queasy, about-to-throw-up, dead-eyed, caffeine-crash exhausted) and I get to do something I've missed so much since getting my own car - wait no, there's a reason I wanted one. Fucking public transit. I don't like busses. They reek, they're noisy, and one of them was involved in my hasty departure from public education. Oh, and you have to get up even earlier than you normally would in order to get there on time - it'll be prolly an hour bus ride to get where I'm going.

And I don't even know if the old 10-ride pass still works.

Oh, and all of these pens are dead. What, am I exuding an entropy field today? Fuck my life.

(And I feel bad for bitching, because no matter how much it sucks, someone else has it worse.)

Headache

Brain is dull and headachey and dammit I think I've caught a thing. Sick.

No post today I think. So many damn typos, thank you backspace key.

Bleargh.

"Real" Encounters With Mysticism

The melody of mermaids
keeps me awake at night
The eyes of starlit heavens
following me secretly

So I'm going to preface this post with the admission that I - like so many others in this world - was very, very stupid as a child. So that's out of the way. Now, I've hinted obliquely and outright stated most of the content in this post in other places on this blog, as well (yes that's me, yes I know what I'm saying, writing backwards isn't that hard until e starts looking like it's supposed to be ɘ).

TL;DR: Jibber-jabber about crazy metaphysical stuff. Wall of text inbound, though there are pictures at the end.
Let's get started. Alpha, hon, you'll probably want to stop reading about here. (I know, you don't use that name anymore.)

Tarot

So some of my first experiences with any kind of mystical, magical stuff, other than the rites and rituals associated with organized religion, came from tarot cards. Innocent, easy tarot cards. Even hardcore anti-pagan Christians will sometimes get a tarot reading, or their horoscope did. It varies from case to case.

I tend to have about a 75% accuracy, I'd ... wager, anyway, though I'm horrible at answering questions with it. But then, that's partly the kind of spread I prefer - the standard Celtic Cross 10-card spread seems to generally assess the entire situation and give a full breakdown of the entire life, up to the moment in question. Mom is better, and that's part of the reason I never have her do a reading on me.

There are such stories there.

Nowadays I do a simple one-card draw almost every day, for general guidance. Since getting obsessed with the Slender Man mythos I tend to draw the Nine of Swords with alarming regularity - which is kind of fitting: this is the card of fear and nightmares.

When I was younger, I had a tarot reading at a local Renaissance fair, done at cost from a professional. My question was fairly simple: what is my power/strength/ability?

I have a tendency to attract cards from the Major Arcana. Of the entire spread, I only remember one of the cards now, and that one The Magician. The answer, as the tarot reader interpereted it, was that my power was the ability to change others' perception - to effectively appear how I want to other people.

The "Spirit" and the Rain

So this next bit is going to be from the gullible mind of an impressionable, sensitive child. Take it for what it is.

I've known Alpha most of my life, though we've only really met face to face the one time. At one point (I was in college, I remember), he got caught up in this ... pseudo-cult thing. It was headed by a girl who I spoke to once over the Internet and then never again, really. He's since stopped talking to her, and he requested not to talk about it with him ever again. She was rather persuasive, and they had this belief that he was some sort of angel-knight to protect her. (Emphasis on the first part.) She was some kind of figurehead magic-woman. I'm fuzzy on the details, partly because he didn't really talk about it much to me at the time, other than to suggest I was supposed to be some kind of seer, and powerful besides.

He wanted a taste of power, of better control, himself, and told me he had contacted a dark creature in order to get the training he wanted. (He gave it a specific name, but I don't remember.)

This is all relevant to a couple of specific incidents. One: he challenged me to try and develop the power he believed I had and use it.

He did this ... well, let me transcribe the conversation as well as I remember it.

Him: "I want you to picture someone. Anyone, really."

Me: "All right I've got something ... " It was a man-boy, a teenager or young adult, maybe, with dark hair and a denim jacket, seen from behind. Like a photograph.

Him: "All right. Now what I want you to do is I want you to make it rain. The [spirit] will know if you're successful. If you don't manage it within three days, that person, whoever it is, will die."

Me: "What."

In all honesty, in perfect honesty, I didn't care about the boy/man. I should have, but I didn't. It was an affront to my pride that he thought I couldn't accomplish this impossibility he presented me with, that there was some kind of condition for failure in this agreement. So I set out to do it, without the first inkling of how I should begin.

I'm fairly confident I did it wrong.

I'll admit, I was angry, a little, and prideful, and stubborn.

I took what I knew of how storms were born, how water is drug up from the river (and other bodies of water, but seriously, I live right on a river) to the clouds, gathering there until it becomes too heavy and falls. I took that knowledge, and I tried to force it along, to grow a storm as organically as possible. I had a pad of paper, and I like to draw, I focused my will through that, scratching dark circles with an ink pen onto the paper, representative of the storm's mass. From above, all storms make spirals, so I made spirals, concentric rings made up entirely of smaller rings, ink like water.

And then I focused all my will, and ... nothing happened.

A great big nothing, no storm clouds blocked the sky, though it was humid and there were some clouds. They just weren't right.

I kept at it, persistent.

It rained, a light sprinkle from an almost clear sky. Not enough to be serious, but enough to let me know I did something.

Maybe.

For the next week or so after whatever-I-did, I was laid low with some kind of illness, Mother Nature's fond "Fuck you," for tampering with her. I'm given to understand that whatever it was I did, I probably shouldn't have tried it.

Or, y'know, I could be crazy and caught a weird summer flu.

About Cat

This was actually when I met Alpha's friend Cat.

Cat and I talked over the internet, after the incident. She suggested that I'm a new soul, with only a couple of reincarnations to my name. She didn't like what I told her about the [spirit], or about Alpha's bargain.

She also said I had a dark green aura which ... might be a difference in perception, or she might be a manipulative bitch, I'll get to that in a minute. At the time, I had this belief that I had a black soul, black energy and that there was something horribly, terribly wrong with me. She also suggested that the [spirit] took advantage of me while I was working my 'spell,' that it ripped a chunk out of me, but she was going to heal it. I felt a weird, stabbing pain/tingle on my arm for the duration of her 'healing.' It was weird.

Energy Flow

The second major experience that I had with this kind of mysticism, before Alpha got out of it and I stopped really thinking about it much, came one night after a series of bad decisions. It was before talking with Cat, but after the rain incident.

Alpha was operating under the belief he was some kind of angel or higher-plane spirit, coloring his soul a brilliant white in contrast to my 'black.'

He said that he was able to change how his 'soul' felt and appeared, and that I should try it, since I was supposed to be this 'seer.' But that I wasn't supposed to try to imitate his energy, since he was an angel and that wouldn't work at all, with consequences.

You can probably imagine how that suggestion went.

I tried to mimic what I felt when I reached for my dear friend's energy, but I never quite succeeded. I determined that the issue was one of proximity - he was too distant, and the power I was reaching for was too vague and indistinct.

So I formed a lance of mental energy, with barbs in it, and I pierced the core of that fiery ball, telling myself I'd take only a small bit, for comparison.

Well, to my perception anyway, I succeeded well enough at bringing it closer, to examine it.

Now, this wouldn't be something I'd list here if there weren't at least a little evidence something happened, so this is that: while I was 'examining' my trophy, Alpha asked me what the hell I just did, saying that it hurt and he had no idea I was capable of anything like that and to never, ever do it again because it hurt.

But since I had a chunk anyway, I figured I'd try the other forbidden thing, to warp my energy to cause it to read like his.

My own power rolled under my examination, thrashing and twisting, never settled or still as I focused, fighting it to make it clean, a ball of milky white, rather than the black waters I normally envisioned. I burned off a lot of my black 'ball' of energy trying to perform this transmutation, but I succeeded ... for a moment or two, anyway.

Predictably, I got sick and nothing else came of it.

Aura Picture

I mentioned also that I was going to cover the 'aura color' a bit more thoroughly, and so I shall.

After college, I went to this psychic convention Mom had been invited to. It was in a small room, and I had a buzzing in my head, like all eyes were on me, picking at me and trying to make me give up my secrets. Among other things I looked into there, there was a little photo booth thing.

It took pictures of auras. Now, I've always believed in auras. People give off energy, especially electrical energy (which is how your iPhone works, by the way - capacitative touchscreens work off of the electrical energy and heat your fingers give off, not pressure. That's why it's nearly impossible to purse-dial with a touchscreen). A cloud of imperceptible energy surrounding everyine is plausible to me, because of that.

There've been studies on this matter - the aura is part of why amputees have phantom limb pains, in theory. An aura-reading machine took a picture of the aura of a leaf that had been cut in half before - and after - it was cut in half. The leaf retained its full-sized aura after the cutting.

Another important thing to note is that the pictures were all different. There were about six taken of different people, lying on the table by the machine's booth. Some were less intense in color, some more intense in color, with all kinds of different swirling hues overlaying the image of the person captured underneath. It was about $10 to get a picture taken with an interperetation attached, and mine didn't match anyone else's either. I think the woman doing the pictures was a little surprised at how intense it was.

The Aura Picture - exactly as it is in real life, more or less.

My computer doesn't know my scanner anymore, so I took a picture of it -

it's so glossy I can see a reflection of my phone and my thumb.

Most of the other pictures I saw were less intense, and I remember them with a lot more greens and blues and such.

The color interperetations attached to the image follow:

Center: orange, creative, artistic
My left: yellow; sunny, exhilaration

My right: red, force of will.


(My) Left side: Future Influences; yellow


Your future is bound to be thought provoking. Like the rising sun, yellow brings warmth. Yellows are representative of the intellect. Each shade or tint of yellow expresses a type of function, ability, or expression of the intellect, from the craftiness of a mustard yellow to the high thought of a golden yellow. You approach the future with a sense of excitement and joy.


Center: orange represents energy with mental direction. You are ALIVE, artistic, perceptive, creative. Constructive self-expression is important to you.


(My) Right side: Expressed Energy; red


You work hard at what you do. Intensity of experience and fulness of living. Conquest, energy-expanding, you put the energy out. The world sees you as alive, outgoing, sexual, and powerful.


Other colors:


Violet: intuition, art, creativity, supernatural abilities, faith, imagination, incorporeality, reticence, mysteriousness.
Lavender: mysticism, magic, profundity, obsession, intolerance
(I can't tell the difference between violet and lavender. I'm sure there is one, but I can't, so I threw them both in.)



White: developed intellectuality, spirituality, vision of God, higher consciousness, dreaming, energy build-up, pain.

So that's interesting, and seems fairly accurate, too.

Assuming Cat wasn't entirely full of crap - which is a huge factor to consider - my only theory as to why she thought 'dark green' goes thus: A) these things change. The first half of the machine reading was 'incoming' or 'future' energy, after all.

As for B) ...

The original aura picture, with inverted colors.

Sure it's mostly blue, but there's some dark green there.

Remember to ignore that top spot - it's a

reflection from the overhead light.

Reality

I want to get this off my metaphorical chest before anyone comes here for the wrong reasons:

I started this blog on a whim, with the off hope that I might scrounge up some additional cashflow while writing it. Hence the ads (which have become increasingly more depressing, I might add), and the donate button, especially.

This is not another ARG.

This is not a blog specifically started up to document the Slender Man wandering around my house being all spooky and demanding my twenty dollars (I don't even carry around cash ffs).

This is just me writing about whatever happens to be in my head, and yeah, the Mythos has kind of a way of embedding it in peoples' subconscious minds, but I am not writing about it because I want to be ... I don't know, linked somehow to it, leech off its fame, whatever. I'm writing about it because it happens to be there, and I can't really tell my subconscious mind to stop fucking with me.

I don't plan to lie to you about anything. There aren't any secret clues or mysteries to be found here. Sure, I'll omit things - leaving my exact location/name for privacy/security reasons, for example - but I'm not going to lie about anything and then pass it off as reality.

Even the backwards writing and the coughing is easily explained rationally: I've been able to write like that for ages, and it just struck me as the thing to do for that post. And, well, I'm allergic to this entire fucking state. I've always got a minor sinus infection of some sort going on.

This is just me writing about my boring life.

Now, that doesn't mean I plan on, I dunno, going out and telling other people to stop having fun with their ARG, or even to point out that it IS an ARG anywhere else. Hell, for all I know, having never met the people out there or the Man himself, it might well not be, which is a good thought for never sleeping again, now isn't it? Believe me when I say the uncertainty of that has ....

huh. I kind of got distracted reading comics and stuff and completely forgot where I was going with this.

I actually don't think any of that really needed to be said, but since I've got massive writer's block due to not ... really having a ton of stuff going on in my head, this'll have to do.

'Til Friday.

Being sick is really leeching my brainpower.

The End of the World as We Know It

... And I feel fantastic!

Oh wow, the Apocalypse Challenge. This is something I'm pretty confident I'm going to fail spectacularly, but it does make for something awesome to do while I'm home sick with something horrible. Pretty confident it's a sinus infection after some fashion or other.

Because having a cough that just won't go away isn't at all unnerving given my recent obsession.

So, because I figure it'll be easier, I roll together a male Sim named Joe Smith.

Per the challenge rules, he's assigned the Politics career track, which is roughly the most useless career to try and unlock in the game. It's not very useful to be able to build outside of your little 8x8 box when you're starving to death. But I go with it, figuring eventually things would work out.

Three out of four of the other politicians? Vampires.

This can only end well.

So, Joe slowly begins to climb the political career ladder, polishing podiums and a myriad of other things, I'm sure. Along the way, he inevitably catches The Death, and rises as a vampire. All good, except for the part where he's got a day job, but sure.

There's exactly one living person left that Joe Smith even knows. So Joe fixates on her, in the hopes of having living offspring (someday), not to say the occasional midnight snack.

He takes her home one day, feeds on her - and it's delicious, given the hefty mood buff he gets from it - turning her in the process.

And ... promptly keels over dead of thirst.

What.

As it turns out, Joe was suffering from this bug that caused him to suffer massive, permanent mood decreases every time he got a mood buff. Which ... is ... mind-bogglingly frustrating, not to say stupid. 

Apparently this caused him to contract depression and suicide on a full stomach. I don't even know.

So I started again, in the same neighborhood, with a different Joe.

Joe Mk II had the good fortune of being given the Criminal career track, which is immensely more useful than Politics. He's got a vampiric lover (who, herself, is in love with an Elderly Sim named Edgardo, as well; I'm pretty much letting Edgardo kick the bucket from old age). His subterranean bunker is coming along nicely, and he's almost done with the Criminal career track. He's written three books now, all of them nonfictional accounts of his life and times.

In short, Joe Mk. II actually has a chance in hell of succeeding at this.

Now we just have to hope true love really does conquer all ....