For those of you, if there is any, who are reading this you may notice that my profile pictures kinda suck. Well dearest reader allow me to explain why. I draw my own pictures but there is a small catch. I'm not all that good, I try to get more into realism but it ends up looking like....well if a cartoonist, manga drawer, and realist had a child. It would look like my drawings. When I was very young my first grade teacher basically forced anime down our throats. But in contrast to this my mother was naturally talented in drawing realism. So I learned from both ends but I don't have a real middle ground. And since anime is easier to draw (sometimes) I do that more often than not. I kinda suck at that too so yeah. But I am kinda happy about how it turned out. At least it doesn't look as bad as my last one.

Anyway moving on. I'm thinking about asking someone else to draw the picture of Banir. I personally have this image of him with his hood down standing so that he's on an angle. His head looking off to the right with his dirty green coat moving in the wind and with a bit of snow falling. That would look SO epic! I might even attempt to draw that if I don't fall flat on my face about it.

Note: This is the first blog in a series of three that I have planned, which may or may not ever get finished. Also, this is the first time I've ever done anything like this, so, yay I guess.

I realize for most of you the holidays already seem to have happened forever ago. New Year's is just barely recollected and Christmas is nothing but a distant memory. For me, though, things are just now returning to normal. I'm homeschooled, so early in the school year my family took a long vacation, and I fell way behind on school. The New Year, I decided, was as good of a time as any to make that final push to catch up. I'm getting very close to reaching that goal, but in the meantime, pursuits other than school have suffered, including Mizahar. To anybody that's suffered from my lack of activity, I apologize.

Anyways, I'm in my junior year of highschool and just now beginning to look at colleges and majors and such. Consequently, I'm just now starting to feel pressure to choose at least a "goal major" and sometimes even a precise plan for how the rest of my life is going to happen. Over the holidays, I believe I was asked by five aunts and uncles, four grandparents, and more than a few cousins where my life was going. Sometimes I gave them the simple (but true) answer of "Well, I don't really know." Others I told that I would probably be a Chemical Engineer (also true). To none did I confide my real ambitions-- the true depths of my dreams-- yet for some reason I feel compelled to do that here with people I have never seen the face of. Maybe it's the sense of anonymity.

My entire life, I’ve been captivated by two things: Math and the written word. Since probably the age of ten, I’ve known that I am going to have a career in something related to one of those two things. To make matters worse, both of the things that I enjoy doing, I also excel at to some degree.

Math is and always has been easy for me. Complex concepts and problems that others struggle wit...

[ Continued ]

Well, its been a long week and it keeps getting longer. A lot has happened in real life and it keeps getting worse. I'm not sure why, but I bet if someone was interested in astrology they'd say something like 'Mercury is in bad alignment with the planet Bullshit' and that's why life is going oddly. It just keeps getting weirder. I started out the week having a day where I was seriously the biggest klutz ever. I tripped up stairs, down stairs, over my own feet, broke eggs collecting them from the chicken house cause I dropped them, lost tools, broke a headlight, and had misc things happen in a long string of exhausting events. My tire went flat, I was late for work, etc. Can you say Ugh? I can.

Anyhow, I thought it was getting better. Until last night.

Anyhow... what changed my mind? Life was crazy busy last night. And above all the other stuff going on that defined crazy, I met someone who was acting crazy. Well, you know how distracted people can get driving right? They talk on cell phones, text, eat cheeseburgers, shave, apply lipstick, drop something on the floorboards, fiddle with the radio, etc. Well, officially as of last night, I saw an all new high of stupidity. A driver had a laptop computer mounted to his dashboard that was playing a movie. He was more interested in watching the movie than dropping his load and picking up his empty. He was acting dangerously, and so I stopped him. I asked him to not watch his video in the yard and please please please be thinking of safety.

So he pulls out his work permit? Green Card? Some sort of card BS and his lawyers card, and flashes them all at me. I'm not kidding here. Then he goes "You are interfering with my civil rights! I will sue you!" In heavily accented russian. At least I think it was russian. Yea. Dude... you have a high probability of running over my family (or someone else's family) with your 18 wheeler because your stupid distracted driving and I'm crunching...

[ Continued ]

Today started out like crap and progressively got worse. In between there was a few good spikes but nope, it ended up even worse than it started.

I won't say what happened that make it such a horrible day, but I will say that I'm very hurt and upset right now. I've been self conscious since I was very, very young, and what thin, little wall of confidence I've built has slowly been trying to grow. But it keeps hitting these things that like to prevent it from becoming stronger.

Pieces are falling off because I've been knocking down facades and barriers while with my boyfriend. It feels good to be my true self, but at the same time it makes me very vulnerable. I'm not a confident person at all, and I really envy those that are. I envy a lot of people, and I don't like feeling this way. I used to be strong, even if it was false. I sort of miss that.

...I sort of don't, though. I wouldn't miss it at all, if I just didn't get hurt so easily.

No, this isn't a whining entry about pushing you guys to start more threads, though those are always welcome. Cheese and whine are not my favorite dishes anyways.

Alright, I got a little sad going on Google's webmaster tools and checking out the list of keywords Google gets from our site. Most of them have absolutely nothing to do with what we actually do on Mizahar - can you believe 'roleplay' isn't in the top 200 keyword list? Our top ten is...

mizahar
character
lore
blog
post
gnosis
posts
often
zith
magic

So, we apparently abuse the word 'often' around here. Anyways, these keywords won't help us get more players from Google, so I've been making a few changes to improve the frequency of the keywords that really matter. Replacing 'play' with 'roleplay' on the menu bar was an obvious one. You should expect a few more in the near future. If you can think of places where we could easily fit a mention of words like fantasy and roleplay, then by all means let me know. We get quite a few hits from the search engines - too bad most of them are for such unrelated keywords*** that they don't help much.

*** unless you consider stuff like "the world's fattest cat" to be related to Mizahar!

P.S. Gossamer is #30 on the keyword list. Tarot is a humble #52.