Aquarionics

There is an advantage to living with other people. There are several, in fact. One of the advantages, for example, for living back home with my family is that my brother is far better at making pancakes than I am. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and today I had three and several half pancakes, but all the whole pancakes were tossed properly.

Also, Pancakes with icecream and melted chocolate for the win.

I had a big rant about RSS and Atom and how it’s just fucking life up for those of us who want to produce things where the user can press a button and have it Just Work.

But I can’t be bothered, so here’s the straight dude’s guide to Brokeback Mountain

Okay, lack of content. Really sorry. I have no excuse.

I do, though, have the best mitigation report, the only such excuse valid in all parts of the world.

I have a note from my mum.

And with that crypic reference to forthcoming content, I shall leave you to guess.

I was asked to read stories into a microphone by a friend named Helen, because a fanfiction reading that I did shortly beforehand helped her get her newborn son to bed.

Said son started school, I believe, a little while ago. Yet still the project rages. Well, angsts. Every so often I remember, feel guilty, and start reading Alice into a microphone again. This time I got all the way up to chapter four before entropy kicked in, so I’ll stop for now and pick it up in the morning.

In the meantime…

It is a lonely business being a super hero.

(Sorry, I do mean for there to be more content around, but I haven’t had time to write anything more interesting between LARP, CoH and all the other things I’m failing to do properly. This, ironically, being one of them. I do have an article on Larp, what it is, why I do it, why it’s fun and such, but it’s in my head fractured and illogically put together. People who I Larp with will see the inherent irony in this, I’m sure. Until then, we have an article on my City of Heroes character. Sorry).

Raynebow came to Paragon city over a year and a half ago now, and has reached about midway in the ranks of Super heroes. I haven’t been playing him as much recently, mostly because I have his arch nemesis (“Solochrome. Someone took his colour. He is not a happy bunny, so he hurts people.”) on City of Villains. He has changed costumes a couple of times, and gone though a nuclear reactor once. (City of Heroes has this really cool concept of Respec missions. Basically – In Character – this series of missions which ends up with you fighting inside a nuclear rector to save Paragon City causes your powers to go on the fritz. Out of character, you get all your XP back and are sent back to level one, and can then level up all over again all at once, this time without any of the powers you don’t actually want and with cool new abilities. Raynebow swapped out Flying for Super Jump (Basically leaping around the landscape 500 feet at a time) with a free respec (Given because Cryptic (..Studios, who build the game) futzed around with the powers a bit, so they gave people the opportunity to make the decisions again with the new sets). He now has Fly again, because it makes his cape flap nicely. Also, he’s a blaster, which means he does metric shit loads of damage (He can one-shot an enemy of equal or slightly higher level once every couple of minutes, providing nobody’s shooting at him) (Build Up + Aim + Snipe, for those CoX players who may be reading) but will fall over if someone looks at him funny. Thus being a super jumper isn’t really terribly good, because every so often he will be bounding across the landscape and accidentally land on the head of some Lycanthropic bastard space nazi (Or “Council” as they’re known) who will promptly stun him and batter him to death like a spandex clad pancake.

Raynebow hasn’t yet joined a Supergroup. Well, he hadn’t. Running though the game without a Supergroup seems to be an advert for every tinpot fool to send you an invite to theirs (People in a Supergroup earn “Prestige” for their group when they fight things. The more of a Supergroup in a team doing a mission, the more prestige they earn. Also, they get a prestige boost for every member that joins, and an extra bonus for the 15th member), so Raynebow has formed his own Supergroup, called “Colourific” to stop people asking him to join theirs. (I’d actually quite like to join a normal supergroup that does things – I’m in one on CoV – simply because there’s new content for supergroups fighting each other which looks really cool).

Having got his new Supergroup Charter, Rayne also has a supergroup base. Sadly, with only him in the group, the base is a little small.

But the only way to fix that is either to recruit people (Which I don’t really want to do) or get Prestige. So it was time to go do some missions.

Doing someone else’s mission, Raynebow ran into an old friend. (This is an actual CoH villain. Names have not been changed to protect the guilty)

Since a few people on my friends lists and reading lists and such have mentioned they owned the game, would anybody be up for a Play By Email game of Civilization 4?