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I've been looking into forums to use for pbp stuff...

Mostly because I would like a solution that doesn't involve me coding a great deal, heh. Yeah so I'm lazy, meh. :P

Anyway I found that Vanilla has a pretty nice die roller plugin for it already... but I can't find a way to make subusers (basically one user, but several subusers to serve as characters). I'm thinking that it probably doesn't matter *anyway*, since I don't think anyone will play more than one character in Tower RP except me/Jon :P but it's still kind of annoying to have to log in and out for each character.

Also messed with a new theme, though I decided not to do it for now. Mostly just need to find one that appeals to me. The one I have now is pretty good, but it gets boring looking at the same thing all the time.

So I just rearranged some front page stuff. Decided to nix the forums and take out the buttons. I'll just bring back the donate button some other time, because it feels pretty lame asking for donations when I don't DO anything for anyone. I may end up wiping out and redoing the gallery at some point, too, and just reuploading all my screenshots.

I did find an awesome static cache for taxonomy_get_vocabularies patch, which I am hoping will really help with loading times given my hugetastic tag list. With that and my changes I'm back down to less than a second on load times (mostly), woo!

At one point I really have to go through the 700+ tags and remove some, but lazy Siren is lazy. :( I swear I'm just not good at anything. Not at writing or coding or anything. Just feel ...useless right now? I don't know. it's depression and my period has been delayed FOREVER, too, so, that doesn't help.

Ooh ooh. I may be getting into FFRPG on RPoL. The rules are a fan-made Final Fantasy based RPG system, by Returner Games. I'm really looking forward to trying this out. :D The FFRPG project has matured a lot over the past... decade? and now includes material from every game all the way up to FF12: Revenant Wings. :D

AND YES! I am playing a Viera. OF COURSE I am. :D In fact, I'm using Brynja -- though, it's a different Bryn than the one I was going to make for Lumi's story.

FF11 update: I am up to... level 10! Mithra Red Mage. I spent a lot of time playing and chatting with Rin, which was cool. He taught us a bunch of stuff we'd not been aware of and even took us on a quest (which led to a TPK. But we were all only level 8 then.) Apparently he really wishes I was a WHM, but I want to be versatile, and rather like Red. -_^

And here's some of the writing I sent the GM for my FFRPG character (it's set in a custom world named Grayth.)

Cleverbot is supposedly a chat AI that 'learns' to make more clever, human-like responses as people type to it. Very entertaining to talk to, even though sometimes I half suspect there's real people typing back. The fun/amusing thing is that (unless someone's debunked it, and I'm pretty sure Jon would've found it if they did, hehe) I'll never really know!

But it's a fun diversion. You'll find that it's pretty well-versed in internet memes already -- for example I think it can follow along with almost the entirety of Rick Astley's "Never gonna give you up" :P and it knows about things like "over 9000!" and "This is Sparta!" too. Totally useless but amusing knowledge.

Sent college apps. :O paid $90 and $85 to send them too, ew. :( But they are sent now. I applied to Concordia and McGill, but I think I have a better chance with Concordia (also, I prefer it... see, this could be my new uni. :O)

I found that permanent residency is not needed to *start* the process. Only that I need to have the Permanent Residency ID before the semester actually starts. And I'm applying for Fall 2009 so I have a lot of time for documents to get where they need to be. I'm feeling a little bit of hope here!

That's what happens when you sit up all night watching Obama speeches. Even if they're just words, they're inspiring. People say he's just saying what people want to hear, preying on Americans' insecurities... but damn, he is a good speaker. I envy him that talent! So since I can't go to the U.S. polls on Nov 4 I'm just going to try and do something to help my life for once.

All in good fun...

Sally, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be:
Taupe Armageddon Palin

I'm not even posting this 'cause I think names have to do with people's worth or anything, but... it's just kind of funny. (TAUPE ARMAGEDDON! It makes me think of being a Jedi for some reason, 'cause they wear all that brown and tan.) 'Cause I dunno. When did "Track" become a name? or "Trig"... I guess I'm just scratching my head at the choices.

Willow is a nice name though! *tries to be positive* :P

Hrmmmm tomorrow is the election. *boggles* I'll be out for part of the day, possibly, to send for college transcripts... unless I go and do some of the prep for it (filling out forms :P) tomorrow instead.

Outcastes game is disappointing a little... not 'cause of my efforts, but more 'cause I seem to have a group that mostly likes being tossed in the action, and I so don't mesh well with those who don't see any fun in anything that's not combat or otherwise moving towards some concrete goal. :(

I had one even say after the fact that I made a mistake by not putting people in the action right away. Probably true -- if I don't know the group it's best to start with action. But I'd had my hopes up for people who actually enjoyed their character concepts enough to flesh them out without action to be an impetus (note: I've met people like that in RPoL! I was just unlucky and didn't get any this time around.)

Anyway, after all that my pride kicked in and I thought "Y'know I really COULD do an action-y, immediate goal oriented game" and decided I'd start up Escape from Five Coils instead. I was impatient to start a second game... RPoL games are always slow, and it'll take me some time to figure out how I'll do Lion-Bull War properly (if at all) due to the Mass Combat stuff.

Exalted 2e: The Lion-Bull War now has a forum up at RPoL.

However... as stated in the info for the game I don't think I will begin the game itself for a while. I just wanted to get the premise out there and give people a chance to check it out, think of concepts, maybe request to join if they wish. I feel like it's futile for me to keep pointing it out but RPoL actually *is* fun. Sometimes slow, since it's forum, and the experience depends on the players.. but it's fun.

Oh, and I also found out I was wrong about From the Abyss, there really *are* female sprites. I just had the volume down so I couldn't tell which ones were chicks, haha. (It's the last two sprite selections.) So now I have Atma running around in the Abyss chopping up monsters! Putting all her points into Attack and Agility so far. Later, I think I may make another who'll be a bow user/magicky type, too! (Maybe Jadira?)

There it is, on the left right (WTF dyslexia). Or if you're viewing this through RSS: Donate to darksiren.net

I'm not a person who likes to ask for charity. Do it if you feel it is necessary, otherwise don't. For a long time now I've offered free hosting to my friends and I don't intend this to be a "now you have to pay up!" thing. Just, if you want to (even if you're just a passerby) the option's there.

What I will use donations for...
- pay fees for darksiren.net (both the domain and the VPS)
- potentially, upgrade the VPS, if I receive enough donations to warrant that (that'd be at least $20 a month on top of current fees, or $240 more)
- pushing further, could also be used for me to buy a second server, where I could possibly start up some low-cost web hosting with software installed on demand.

'Cause I apparently can't stick to what I said I'd work on (though I'll get to the other stuff this week!!) I ended up putting up all the preliminary info for my first RPoL game, Outcastes on the Open Sea. It's something of an unofficial Grandquest sequel, you could say, as well as an opportunity for Jon and I to play Jadira and Lasuri again.

I plan to be taking RTJs for at least a week. I want people to actually take their time thinking about it, and enough time to build a decent amount of applications to choose from.

Tomorrow(ish) I'm going to start advertising in some of the games I play... tonight, though, I thought I'd post the link to the game here for people who read this journal. Since I know many of you personally, I figured you guys should get first chance at trying to create a character, if anyone wanted to. :O

P.S. Kraken, your chara is already accepted by default ^^ though if you've the time to type out the RTJ that'd be great.