All Too Human - All Too Human

This will happen.

4/30/2015

So today, I got my artistic drive reinvigorated. I really, really have this urge, this ~passion~, to work on Red Hood Rider, and to make it a serious story. No, I'm not going to bother you with setting details.

I'm mainly making this blog post as a promise to myself. I WAS going to waste my day doing nothing but playing games all night, but now? Now, I want to do that, until I get it right. I want to practice. I want to draw. I want to get it looking good.

I want to make it, seriously MAKE it.

...Also, this will serve as a mental reminder to follow through on the art program lead I got today, about maybe replacing GIMP.

And I still want a tablet. I'm increasingly tempted to see about ordering one with my credit card. (Which I basically never use--it's there for food stops at Subway, emergency need for gas, and paying my TKD bill, but other than that I am not a spendy person.)

I'm going to find out a way.

I hate it when this happens.

4/29/2015

So remember when I did that gigantic ramble about me that was based off of an imaginary conversation I thought I might have? Yeah, well, something similar happened to drift into my mind today. An absolutely epic ramble about me, mainly focused on the differences between my dreams and my reality, how I live in the dreamworld and the only thing keeping me from staying there forever is that I want to share the dream and for the dreams to last even after I'm gone, but just like then, it was in the form of an imaginary conversation.

And right now, I can't translate that conversation into a ramble. Not directly. I need time to mediate it through writing. I'll do my best not to lose the thoughts, but in the mean time, you'll just have to take my word for it, that I had an amazing mental conversation which was very revealing.

It did have a little bit of self-hate in there, but not emo self-hate, more like honest reflection, in that I was giving a perspective on myself that was, well, giving a look on how my mind works both the good and the absolute horrible, dark things that go on in there. The basics involved deal with how much instability there is in there, dark impulses, random thoughts, and whatnot all having some negative consequences yet also the good the instability gives.

It was, in essence, a description of why I am me. Why I can seem "out of it", why my "head is in the clouds", why I have absolutely horrible grasp on real-life situations but master the finest of nuances to them when writing about fictional versions, why I have such good ideas yet never see them through, why I have a fast-working mind but horribly-slow ways of expressing my thoughts.

That is just a touch of the surface. It gave a look at who I am. Mostly original content, not repeat, too. I'm just, frustratingly, lacking the proper way to get the conversation translated into rambling. Sorry.

Guh, sometimes I hate this.

4/28/2015

I have all these thoughts that a better blogger could bring out...and yet here I am, with absolutely no desire to see them come to life. I almost came in and said, "I got nuthin'", even though that's technically a lie. Stuff happens. The entire POINT of my blog is to record that stuff happens. Even boring, every-day occurrences in my life that are entirely mundane to me may be of interest in blogging form.

Yet here I am, unable to bring the words to life. It's not exactly writers' block, but that's the closest term I have to explain it. The excuse of me being an amateur blogger only goes so far before its credibility has been stretched thin. The simple truth of the matter is, I want to record all these happenings, all these things that're racing through my mind, I want to share it with you, but because it's so difficult, because it's a struggle, I don't want to go through all the effort of figuring out how to translate my mind into words.

I suck.

Past Midnight, Shut Up, I Know XLIII

4/28/2015

I thought I'd give my notes of the day. Not much happened today other than work and it being REALLY warm (it's 82 degrees...at 2:30 AM, not PM, right now) today.

However, I thought I'd share with you some story notes on Red Hood Rider to fill the gap. Both of them are things that already existed, but were never written down. The first is that Dale uses as his primary weapon a Katana, but he's a skilled dark art master, able to conjure up high-level techniques like a solid rain of dark arrows, or later after seeing Ruby perform her ranged soul suck, developing his swarm of stingers as his own variation on the technique. Things like that.

The second is also vampire-related. I mentioned before that some vampires have aesthetic fangs. What I didn't mention, but which comes up in a story arc where a vampire tortures someone, is that vampires can in fact drain blood from the mouth, and it's how they prefer their non-fresh blood intake. The thing about drinking blood is that it is inefficient--it goes into the digestive tract before being absorbed into the body, whereas when sucking blood through the fingers, it goes straight in.

However, it does taste better, thus why some vamps do it. It should be noted, though, that on a live victim, biting is considered incredibly cruel. The claws a vampire drain through are akin to a mosquito: the blood is drained, and the wound is sealed off. When a vampire bites the neck of someone, they're actually biting them, and it takes a dark art to seal the wound back up. In other words, it's extremely painful and messy, all for a meal that is far more dangerous to obtain and gives less of a reward.

Thus, why through the fingers is preferred. It's easier to cut into a victim from the hands than bite into them from the mouth, after all. Incidentally, this is also why feeding from the neck with a bite is considered the ultimate act of vampire intimacy with a donor: it requires incredible trust on both party's ends, a gentle, loving touch, and a fair amount of control and willingness to comply. Basically, finger-feeding is the default for donors because there's no inherent meaning to it, but taking the risk of pain or even death that mouth-feeding can produce is an extreme act of love, because the only gain is in pleasure.

I wanted to explain these in more detail, but it's 2:40 am right now, and I kinda want to go to sleep.

Fair warning about the blog:

4/27/2015

Know all this talk about the Pacific Northwest Teen Square Dance Festival? The one I'm competing in, and which we got screwed over for?

Yeah, well, that's THIS week. Starting Friday. Friday the drive there plus casual dance, Saturday the all-day competition (and I do mean all-day; it traditionally begins at six AM and ends at MIDNIGHT. Yeah. 18 hours), and Sunday the drive home.

Plus maybe an afterparty; you never know.

Obviously, during that time, I won't be able to blog--I might technically have the capacity to do so if I bring my laptop and there's a working internet connection, but even if so, it would be inadvisable for me to actually follow through, since the only times I'd be writing would be late-at-night. (Saturday after competition is possible, I suppose, but I'll be so worn out I don't think I'd bother.)

Not to worry, though. I'll do what I can to record things in writing as I can, because this being an annual competition meant for fun and the promotion of square dancing (which, mind you, is one of the reasons everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE, in the Stateside clubs is ROYALLY ticked off at the people in charge for not granting an exception they have previously granted in prior years, because it goes against all three, sabotaging competition, destroying fun, and leaving a bitter taste in the mouth of a preteen novice dancer forced up to senior because of these blasted POLITICS), there is a ton of whacky shenanigans to report on.

The festival is always a blast. I've always been frustrated by it, because year after year after YEAR my square has always been the losing square (no, seriously; this is my fifteenth year competing, minus one where I was screwed over TWICE by being available and yet being told there were no openings...when there were, and yet in spite of going at it for that long, I have MAYBE one or two first place wins where I had competition, and the rest are a string of losses), which is particularly disappointing because all of my siblings were in winning squares (save my older sister the one or two years she was in MY square) the majority of their career or in my younger sister's case the entirety of it. (She's danced one or so years less. So her, 14 years a champion, me, 14 years the loser. And we've not directly competed against each other more than 5 times at most, so it wasn't her square winning over mine until recently.)

Yet in spite of that absolute frustration, that we never get enough practice done, that we DON'T practice recovery (no, seriously, I chose my current competing club specifically because they had a reputation for being masters at it...and yet, not ONCE have we actually practiced recovery, instead focusing on what I've been stuck with my entire dancing career of trying not to mess up in the first place, which never, NEVER goes well because it's literally impossible in mystery calls to dance them perfectly without hindsight as the entire POINT is to break the squares down), that our displays are usually woefully underpracticed, that our styling's never as refined as it should be, that we constantly have arguments (seriously, this is something that I know for a fact most squares don't have, but which I've had the misfortune of time after time again), in spite of all that...

I still have fun.

And if either of our club's squares so much as places--and I do mean that, third out of sixth would be an extreme achievement--then the feeling will be of pure bliss. We sacrificed so much to get this far. We are royally ticked off at being screwed over, but we're determined to not let that stop us. This is my last year to compete...and while ending on a high note is impossible, human beings being made of spite, I'd be happy to have us pull the Canadians out of the leaderboard with luck and passion on our side.

Plus, there's a ton of good stuff going on, too. In spite of the fighting, unlike a lot of clubs, right now our club has in its favor a feeling of being a family, one which I'm okay with being in, now. Our family came in two, not very compatible, generations, senior and junior, and the seniors got along beautifully and the juniors did too, and they were forced to intermingle, thus the debates, thus the arguments, thus the lack of cohesion, but we've recovered, we're coming back into our strides, the blending process has caused the generational gap to be closed, and the club could end up stronger as a result, with plenty of partying to go about.

Got a small surprise today.

4/26/2015

My family (save my younger sister, for obvious reasons) actually showed up to my dress rehearsal. I still had to drive down there, mind you, but I got to sleep on the way back. It went well; given the circumstances, my parents said that what we've got is impressive. There's a bunch of stuff I could be talking about right now, racing to every little thing in my mind that happened, but I'm kinda tired.

I will say that what I wanted to say earlier is that there was in fact an upside to my tiredness. You guessed it, Red Hood Rider notes. Fortunately for you if you're tired of them (or unfortunately, if you're interested), they're entirely dealing with the story's epilogue, thus, HIGHLY spoilerific. I'm keeping the final arc more or less in my head, but I figured I'd write down the aftermath. I'll say that two couples I always knew were official are written down, but that I've also created some others. (One was a "Sure, why not?".)

I'll also say that the final arc is a bit of an outrageous, potentially-nonsensical (as in, potentially Gainaxesque), out-of-the-blue ending, but I think I can avoid that, that I can make it make sense. It'll be a bit cheesy, but in a good way, a way that makes sense given that Red Hood Rider is a story set in a world of SUPERHEROES.

And that's all I'll say.

Ahg, why now?

4/26/2015

So in spite of getting just as much sleep as normal--if not more--and the quality OF the sleep being higher, today, I am feeling absolutely fatigued. This level of exhaustion's typical after a long day without rest and with less sleep than normal; it's that bad.

Worse? Today's my club's dress rehearsal of sorts, anyway, our last official practice, where we polish the details. But there's more. Normally, my sister drives me there. But since exhibition was cancelled thanks to the aforementioned "we got screwed over" blog post, she has no reason other than being 'volunteered' as my chauffeur to go...and my younger sister also has dress rehearsal--a far more impressive one--tonight, which our other club (my older sister's a member of) was invited to, so she, my mom, and my dad are ALL going...meaning I have to drive myself.

Yeah.

Needless to say...nap time!
(More will come later.)

Got my hair cut today.

4/25/2015

And it feels ~fabulous~.

Anyway, last night, I had a dream. It was basically a game, where players were up against a slenderman lookalike. The game is absolutely brutal against newbies: you must make it to certain save points in order to have progress saved, but to make it to those points, you have to go through a ton of risky ordeals. Making money is nearly impossible, as it involves the same process, and yet losing money is easy; you just need to visit a save point. (That's right, saving costs money.)

The slenderman like foe can only be stunned by weapons, but the player starts with none. Thus, to survive, newbies need to hire NPCs to help distract the slendy-lookalike while they make a dash to the cash. They can also have a human player guide them, assuming that human player is online, was at the last save point, and has 'beaten' the "course" the newbie is currently on.

The game gets easier as you go along, though. Basically, if you have a sponsor, a player that is experienced backing you up, then you can survive. Otherwise, you die. But if you survive, then you thrive. You get weapons. PvP opens up. You can buy save points so that people visiting those areas give their money to you. Eventually, you can form parties of your own, rather than going solo, and hunt the slendy-lookalike, pushing it back but of course never stopping it, all to further rewards.

It was an interesting dream, to say the least, but that's about as much as I can remember, unfortunately, other than that some of the details were absolutely gorgeous and that the NPCs you hire are programmed so well and are so diverse that they are practically players themselves and thus you mourn their inevitable death.

More of the same.

4/24/2015

One of the reasons I want to give a greater amount of variety to my blog is because I realize that any theoretical readers I have (I don't think I have any, anymore; the ones I had I think moved on) are probably getting really tired of hearing about the same thing, over and over again.

Sadly, that is not today. Today is...well, you read the title, right? Yeah. Rather predictably...more Red Hood Rider.

I'll start by saying that I don't anticipate many more days of me talking about them, though. Not because I've lost interest, mind you. Mostly because they've revealed almost everything about themselves to me. There's a few story arcs that I keep developing in my head that I don't blog about, but actual meaty, juicy facts about the characters themselves, well, those I mostly already have. I set the baseline, and they just showed me the rest of them.

Everyone from Ruby to Gary (okay, admittedly he's a fairly simple guy so was easy) to Sally to Hannah to the weaponmaster to Dale to D.D. to Vili to Whitney to Amy. All of them I know, and can introduce basically everything about them. (Though I still need to work a little bit on remembering their names. It's a bit embarrassing. I forget the names of real-life people ridiculously often because names are hard to retain for me, but these are technically still my characters, so I should be better at remembering their names. But they're so much like actual, real people that the trend of not remembering their names has struck me.) I know what all of them look like, more or less, I have their backstories laid out and their personalities are basically refined. The whole package is there, from who they are to what they do (their powers).

...It's on that note I'd like to re-introduce you to Amy. In a previous blog entry, I mentioned that while Amy prefers melee combat, her specialty is in support, via linking and synchronizing her fellow teammates. (Particularly the other Riders of the Elemental Eight, but each member of the Ruby Gang--yes, that is their official group name--gets at least some benefit.)

I wanted to expand upon that, so her specialty is being reclassified into "extreme empathy". In a Trope, it's HeartIsAnAwesomePower. And she knows it, too. She doesn't like that she's not a combat specialist, because she likes to fight, but she is fully aware her actual power is extraordinarily powerful. Why? Well, for a start, it still offers all of the original qualities I gave her, including the synchronization, but now additionally offers her several other powers. Most of which act as amplification of her natural vampiric powers, and THAT is noteworthy:

-She has some degree of mind control, able to influence her target's thoughts, far moreso than a mere suggestion as most vampires have. It basically works by calling out for the target to act on their inner goodness, as a type of heroic brainwashing. Basically, it brings out the better emotions of a person, and turns them into a tangible idea that suits her will. Incidentally, this ability also works on animals, making her an absolute beastmaster above that of even a vampire lord; she can call upon ANY animal and have it serve her. (This, alone, is an ABSURDLY powerful power, albeit one that has no direct combat value, again mostly helping to serve as support.)

-She can transfer memories and emotions--not just her own, but also those of others. They can be shared in a multi-directional link or one-way, both memories and emotions or just one of the two. And it has no limit on how many people can be included. Basically, she can become a hub of knowledge, experience, and understanding, allowing her to bridge gaps. Incidentally, a secondary utility of this power is that it can allow for significantly faster training time: if two people are working on the same training, her linking them doubles how much they learn. Three people, triple. And so on. So imagine with all ten of them working on bettering their skills. It doesn't translate muscle memory, but concepts get passed along. (Note: Amy DOES retain the muscle memory, making her a bit of an ability copier as well.)

-A subset of both of these two powers is that she can instinctively sense emotions of everyone around her as an empath, and if she focuses, she can read the mind of a person without skin contact, albeit only with a limited range (or direct visual contact).

-But by far her greatest power is the offensive technique she possesses: Pain of Sin, her only named empathy technique. In essence, it's my version of the Penance Stare, or Paying Evil Unto Evil: Pain of Sin makes the target feel all the pain and suffering of all their victims, amplified greatly. It's practically worthless against lesser evils, though, because they've not caused enough harm to others for the technique to incapacitate them. Additionally, against greater evils, the technique is so strong that using it risks killing her target, removing any chance of redemption. (Which is the idea behind the usage of it.) So basically, there's only a few villains it COULD work on safely. Thus, she basically never uses it. It's far safer and more reliable for her to use her holy fist melee attacks, which she obviously has finer control over.

I also figured out some more about vampires.
I'll start by going on a bit of a tangent. I mentioned before that the weaponmaster ends up training the Ruby Gang, or at least I'm pretty sure I did. What I didn't mention but which was always part of his character from his very conception was that he's more accurately defined as being a 'Hunter'. This being a superhero setting, vampires aren't the only monsters that come into existence in large numbers, although they are the most prominent. Hunters are generic monster hunters, who hunt down monsters. They are NOT, however, hunters of an entire species. They only target the monsters among the beastkind, evil vampires, evil werewolves, and such.

There are more specific sub-guilds of the Monster Hunters Guild, though. Vampire Hunters exist. Werewolf Hunters exist. You get the idea. They GENERALLY follow the same principle, just with a more specific skillset that's been honed for their target prey, but it's not necessarily the case; there are some who hunt indiscriminately.

The weaponmaster started out as an indiscriminate vampire hunter, but over his career, quickly changed his ways. First, to hunting only evil vampires, then to the general hunter philosophy of monsters. He's since expanded it even further to not be beastly things and just be any evildoer, which is why he's one of the heroes in the first place; he's in the same business as them.

The thing about hunters, though, is that being human, they're generally outclassed by their foes. They require specialized training, outmaneuvering their opponents, outsmarting them sometimes, and generally still rely on a combination of blind luck and their opponents' arrogance of superiority. The final thing hunters have in their favor? Lots and lots of equipment, and, yes, weapons. So the weaponmaster is called the weaponmaster because he's a master of weapons. He's the de facto teacher of the group, and everyone takes lessons from him on a regular basis.

Whitney also contributes with a few professional tips she's picked up in her career, and most of the Riders' fighting is done on instinct rather than this training anyway, but it does contribute. Yet back to the vampires...well, I just described how a human would deal with a vampire. How does a vampire deal with a rival?

Well, it comes down to one factor: respect. Does the opponent respect you, or not? If not, then vampires actually use the same tactics as a human: let them underestimate you, then outmaneuver them, and even use the same gadgets the hunters do to take their unsuspecting opponent down. This is why several vampires actively seek out hunter training: learning from a hunter has the obvious benefit of allowing you to counter any hunter attacks on you, but it also allows you to use their techniques to hunt your own vampiric prey.

A vampire with hunter training both offensively and defensively and underestimated > A vampire with hunter training in offense and underestimated > a vampire with hunter training in defense and underestimated > a vampire without training that's underestimated > a vampire who is trained yet not underestimated > a vampire untrained and not underestimated.

Of course, this is if they don't respect you. If they do? Well, then, the solution is simple:
Bluff.

Believe it or not, most Lords are not nearly as tough as they make themselves out to be.
Oh, they're not to be underestimated. They're stronger than any lesser vampires; they're lords for GOOD reason. They are by no means weak. It's just that they generally prefer not to get in fights for a variety of reasons: risk they could lose, it being a waste of time, it being annoying, maybe the rare case of a moral against it, whatever the case, they generally try to avoid conflict.

So when conflict looks like it may arise, they use their reputation to their full advantage in order to resolve it. As an example, Lord Darkblood was the strongest vampire generally, but while he was the strongest vampire, and by no means rusty in combat (basically every vampire lord actively fights vampires that are near their level of strength, actual fights not mere spars, which keeps their skill level up), he could still be beaten if circumstances made it so that his opponent held the upper hand, which there are multiple scenarios that could make this true. If his opponent held the upper hand, he would have to resort to a bluff in order to 'win' the conflict. And as his reputation as the strongest vampire shows...he always did.

These lessons are part of Vlad's training to Ruby, and Ruby puts them to good use. Vlad can't train Ruby as well on the hunter offense, but offers a few tips for hunter defense, as well as how to be a little bit more bold in vampiric encounters. Basically, by talking the talk, she would be able to talk down enemies more effectively, making situations where she needs to scare them like she did with Dale less frequent. And if they didn't, well, she'd walk the walk and give them a pounding.

Like mother, like daughter. Recurring theme in the series if you couldn't tell, once Amy becomes a magical girl.

NOT Past Midnight, Celebrate, Yay!

4/23/2015

...Okay, so 11:40 is pushing it, but it still is on the day!

Anyway...long day. I went straight from the college (in which I did a LOT of work) to square practice...and suffered through a TWO AND A HALF HOUR COMMUTE, waiting in rush-hour stop-and-go traffic painfully, stressfully. It was taxing. Draining.

And then I encountered construction on the way home.

The day was well over 12 hours long. As you can imagine...the result is that any thought of something to blog about has been drained from me. Like, I'm 100% positive there were things I wanted to blog about. Thoughts. Hopeless dreams. Emotions. Experiences of the stuff that happened today.

But the long day has drained it all from me. I'm empty. Sorry.

Worst. blogger. ever.

Buthey, at least I keep going!