A Few Thoughts
Tues Jan 10th
I can’t honestly believe we are already ten days into January of 2012. For some reason most of my life I’ve seen 2012 as some mystical year that is supposed to be life changing in one way or another not just for myself but for the whole of the world. I’d never given it any thought as to where I’d be when this mystical year reared its head, but looking at things now I can’t imagine things being any different than they are. Maybe I thought I’d still be working on my career. Maybe I figured I’d still be looking for love. But the truth is I really have everything I want.
Its odd to say that. I mean, like everyone else I could use more cash in the bank, but from personal experience I know money doesn’t buy happiness. Happiness buys happiness.
Maybe I’m feeling all soft and squishy because I finally feel better after a bought of pneumonia and that always brings out the softer side to my normal hard-assness. But really, sitting here typing this I feel like I’m living the now dead American Dream. I feel bad that most people in their teens aren’t going to have the same opportunities that people my generation had in terms of easy home ownership and the ability to rise corporately without an education. But then again my generation didn’t and won’t enjoy the huge ‘retirement’ checks our parents are getting now as we grow older. I did everything right too. I got my education by twenty-two and was out in the world working as a field biologist. There’s no greater joy and sorrow than working with animals. I was there when we reintroduced wolves back into Yellowstone and Central Idaho. I was there when we learned that spotted owls in the Northwest were mostly hybridized with Bard Owls and couldn’t be protected under the Endangered Species Act. I got laid off under the Clinton Administration and realized another dream of independence and travel, hitting the road as a long haul trucker for the next seven years to scrimp and save to buy a horse farm. I fell in love along the way, madly so, married, and then together bought the farm with my husband.
I have my hobby farm now, my greenhouse, and a house full of dogs and cats and an incredibly supportive man at my side who doesn’t mind if I’d rather spend a couple hundred at the vet rather than at the beauty parlor. I honestly can’t remember the last time I got a professional haircut. It’s just never been that important to me. I’ll buy name-brand saddles but I won’t spend a dime over twenty bucks on a pair of tennis shoes. I don’t care if my jeans have labels or if they fit like a glove. I like them relaxed, loose, and under twenty bucks.
I make stuff too. I love to make food stuffs – bread, fancy dinners, homemade desert. I love to sew and decorate and paint and take something someone’s thrown out and turn it into something amazing. I’m great at re-purposing things and re-imagining things into new found objects and art. I have a very quirky elaborate sense of humor and if I like someone I’ll sit down and make them jewelry rather than just tell them I’m a fan.
I think sometimes the person I am online isn’t the person I am in real life. I come across grumpy and gruff, intolerant to the limit, and somewhat impatient of fools and idiots. And in fact I’m often quick to label someone thusly if they seem lazy or inclined to ask a question rather than go look for the answer themselves.
One of the issues contributing to this is Mizahar itself. I love this game passionately. I’ve put my blood sweat and tears into it. Mizahar is something I’ll always have that no one can erase or take credit for or wipe my existence away here. The other Founders are fabulous people. I don’t often tell them they are enough, but its true. You folks I think often see some of them as invisible or ‘never around’ but when I look over the game I see pieces of Gillar and Columbina, Tarot’s heart and soul, Liminal’s quirky humor and Cayennes intense passion everywhere. Every line I write has something to do with one of them. If you walk across Eyktol your walking across a piece of Colombina’s soul. Each character that’s created is somehow tied in. The beautiful, the ugly, the cardboard troup and the well defined... they all have a place.
I’m currently working on an article for the wiki that combines quite a few of my loves. I’m obsessed with gemstones (you’ve seen the Gemstones list right?), my fascination with Semele (and her Mele), and the artform of Jewelcrafting. I’ve already written an entire jewelcrafting article practically from scratch (though these days you’ll find no credit given to me for it) for another site and I find it very startling that when I wrote that article I was almost a completely different person from the person that’s writing this article now. There’s six years between the two pieces of writing, but the emotion and drive behind both works is incredibly different. That Jen was someone who was afraid of her own shadow, thinking she couldn’t write technically enough and someone who was afraid everyone was judging her – and in truth they were. That Jen’s work was done based on what people would think of it.
The Jen of now is vastly different. I can’t say if the changes are for the better or worse, but I can tell you it’s easier living inside the Jen of now rather than the Jen of then. The now Jen is writing because she loves the topic and the articles on both Jewelcrafting and Mele are free flowing meaning there’s a real joy to them. There’s no awkward wording on trying to convert modern science into medieval terms. I can get inside the head of a jewelcrafter and feel comfortable there, writing technically in a fantasy realism way helps this enormously.
Mele isn’t a new idea. It’s based off the pseudoscience that all gemstones have properties and that if you utilize gems in this light they will give back to you appropriately. Some are healing, some promote thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Some give clarity. Some cloud judgment. Some will even warm your soup. I’ve never had a more fun time than I have writing up the mele for Semele and I feel like its going to be one of my finest works here. I felt that way about Dreamwalking since no one could actually look at my article and claim it was like anything else out there. But I think Mele is going to top Dreamwalking because its more ‘familiar’ to people in a way that the world should work on Mele even if it doesn’t always do so. I’ll let folks be the judge. My goal is to have all these up by the weekend. I might not make it, but if I do you can give me some feedback on it for certain.
I guess my point to this Scrap is to remind myself that Mizahar doesn’t have to be full of frustration and anxiety. I know it’s a huge site and people have trouble getting started or expect it to be like other sites out there when its about as far away from the norm as we could get. But being an active busy Founder and the number one go-to girl on here, I lose sight of the real joy I find on here. And that joy is the joy of creation.
Creation.
Think about how that word makes you feel. I totally grin in anticipation of thinking up a new skill or magic or gnosis. I loved Katie’s delight when I suggested she craft a magic called ‘static’ to fit her plotline problems. I enjoy Dani’s steadfast under-the-table claim to Kenash and the God of Summer. I’m not going to shatter anyones dreams, but encourage them. I love making NPCs and watch people craft them. Cities only work, in my opinion, when the players have an active vested role in their development and maintenance.
You walk on a piece of me, of my heart and soul, everytime you create a new Konti. When you take your Svefra swimming with their talvan you’re holding my hand in a way. I hope the wiki class I held opened a whole new world to others too in regards to crafting people, places and things so new people later down the line can enjoy their creations as much as I enjoy the creations of others and others enjoy my creations. There are some days I just sit and think of artifacts and add them to the artifact list I have steadily growing on my hard drive that needs to be converted into the wiki artifact list. I get a kick when someone wants to utilize an artifact that’s currently unclaimed and love to see them out and about in the world being used.
Creation is a huge drive for me.
It gives me the same kick, only with a different spice to it, as when I see new plants sprout that I’ve planted in my green house in late winter. This is a huge kick, a core deep spiritual kick that’s frankly just as great as having a big ‘o’ but one you can go back and relive every time you see something going on. I’m glad Xalet has the twin short swords now. I’d love to see Leo use Nakali’s Leash. I’d really enjoy seeing a few more artifact level items scattered about the site, especially the ones I’m going to introduce in my planned Dreamwalking quest that involves five folks for the Cytali. I love giving bad guys a jumpstart too and have quite decided to do so with the Irst plotline I have been steadily adding notes to thanks to Caliet’s drive to become one.
I’ve also been thinking about plots. Mizahar needs more plotting in general. But that’s definitely for another blog another day. |
by Wrenmae on January 7th, 2012, 9:57 pm 
