(no subject)

Yay! My little laptop is connected to the internet! I am truly mobile now! The embarrassing thing is that I've always had a laptop; mine have just always been wired to the printer and the mouse and my speakers and USB ports sticking out like mad. So while they're technically mobile, it's usually just too much work to unhook the darn things. And they're behemoth laptops, so they aren't quite as little as this one. Yay getting office cast offs from dad! Of course, the keyboard is so small that I'm having a hard time finding all the proper punctuation.

yhlee was also evil and pointed me to an email-based RPG. I've never done RPGs before or gamed whatsoever (computer or otherwise), and I was always quite curious when I was shelving all the White Wolf and D&D stuff back at the bookstore. Anyhow. I got to the site, which is for a very character-based type game, apparently, and wow.

It's like finding tons of people do this thing that you only thought you did as a kid. For more background: as a kid, I would play these games with my sister and cousin and various friends, in which we were people in the FBI or Greek gods or something. I think I mostly did this because I so wanted to be the characters in books I read about, and instead of channeling that desire into writing, I played games. Of course, it was always more fun being the character and making up the character and doing all these background bits and everything, but usually we'd have to think of some sort of (very freeform) plot and act stuff out.

Anyhow, my entire point was that the RPG was like this! Very exciting. And someone goes about making the story around you and with you so you are not the one poking your cousin and sister to play ;). Wow. Very interesting.

I've always found it rather funny that pretty much everyone who knew me as a kid will get around to asking me if I want to write. I think it's because I've always loved reading (duh), and I was very into English classes, and I don't quite mind writing papers (unless they are theses, in which case I shudder horrifically). And I've dabbled around in writing stories and such, but it's never been a driving need. I have a world or so in my head that I enjoy tinkering around with, but I seriously doubt I will ever get it on paper, because I'm much more obsessed with reading than with writing. I feel almost bad about this sometimes, because I suspect mostly I'm just too lazy to create a good fantasy story. But I guess I am always so satisfied by other people's worlds and stories that I don't feel that much of a desire to create my own.

What drives you to write or not? I've always been rather curious about this, knowing that there are quite a few avid readers on my flist and quite a few avid writers too.

Fullmetal Alchemist, ep. 20-21

( Spoilers galore )

LJ Thoughts

Sparked because today is my "categorize everything into Memories" day. Some day I shall adopt tags... aka, a) when I figure out how to duplicate my layout in S2 b) when tags are not limited to 100 entries and c) when tags and memories are mutually inclusive systems, so if you tag something, it appears in Memories, and vice versa.

Anyhow, it's rather interesting, because I enjoy going through everything I've written every month and sorting it out. I mean, some of it is a little embarrassing, but it's interesting. Not just from a depression standpoint, in which I am striving to notice my moods and assorted other mental temperature taking, but just seeing what I wrote and how I said it, how happy I was a certain weekend and how down feeling I was on another. I've got a pretty bad memory, and so LJ is a bit like my second brain.. it helps somewhat recapture the feeling of the moment.

So it's always particularly interesting when I know people who do go through their LJs and are embarrassed by previous entries to the point of deleting them. I suppose I am embarrassed by mine at times, especially since I tend to write with a great deal of run-ons, parentheticals and exclamation points, but another part of me is rather happy for the exclamation-point-happy me who posted two weeks ago, because I don't feel the same level of sheer joy today (not that I am sad, because I am calm and relaxed, but I am definitely not leaking exuberance out of the pores. Alas, I fear I am obnoxiously cheerful). I think part of me rather recoils at the thought of deleting LJ entries. This is probably because I've been keeping various notebooks of things that I find interesting my entire life -- poems, names, story ideas, movies I've seen, etc. I like lists. I like organizing things and having them all there, filed and ready for access. When I got a computer, I'd have my notebooks and Word docs or Excel files or whatnot. I'm still sad that I never managed to rescue all of them when our old computer died, and now I've lost the notebooks as well. It is sometimes painful reading old story tidbits and how bad they are, or my old diaries, in which I write that I feel so old but I sound so young (I shall snicker at this later on and think of how young I sound here too), but it's a bit of a fond painfulness, if that makes any sense. I know I wouldn't be me today without going through those spots.

I don't remember if I felt like this while depressed, but I suspect I wasn't the purging-entries sort, because I still liked rereading, and I don't think I've deleted an entry yet.

Plus, it's rather interesting sort of seeing myself the way other people on LJ are getting to know me, via text on the internet and snapshots of my life. I always wonder what people end of thinking of me, if the me on LJ resembles the me in RL and how far apart the two are. It's very strange, now that I've met LJ people in real life... the first moment is almost always one of shock, in which they don't quite fit my mental picture (aka, Yoon was not actually a crow. Amazing.) And then, I can start seeing resemblances in their conversational voice and their LJ voice, a family resemblance of sorts, and then, sometimes, I can't read their LJs without hearing their voices.

On the opposite side, when I read the LJs of friends that I know in RL, it's always a little strange as well because I feel they are saying things they wouldn't necessary say right out to me, or that I am somehow getting a more intimate picture of what's going on in their heads.