Ordinary Day

Those of you who roleplayed with me back in the day on AetherMUSH may remember that Faanshi wrote a song called “Ride Upon the Wyvern” in memory of her lost first love, Lyre Talespinner. Not only did I have lyrics for that, I also had a melody, even though I never actually wrote it down or generated chords for it.

Last night the melody to that song bubbled up from the back of my brain and said to me, “Hi, you’re going to make me be a tune now.”

And I went WAIT WAIT WHUT? And promptly had what I’m thinking is going to be called “Talespinner’s Reel” or perhaps “Le reel du raconteur” pop into my head. It’s in G. It can be played either as a straight-up reel OR as a hornpipe, and as soon as I have the notes down, I am totally transcribing this thing and sharing it with you all.

But that wasn’t even it with the part of my brain that’s suddenly up and decided that learning tunes isn’t sufficient–apparently I’m going to have to write them now! Because my AetherMUSH buds will doubtless also remember another aspect of Faanshi’s roleplay that never made it into Valor of the Healer: i.e., her great big dog Kosha, the hundred-pound guard dog who was fiercely loyal to Faanshi and who had the heart of a puppy. Kosha is still in my brain and he is now totally demanding his own reel. The Big Dog Reel, or perhaps Le reel du grand chien. Because there are call-and-response turlutte bits in this thing, because it’s all about Faanshi trying to teach the dog and he’s having none of this because he TOTALLY wants to play. And there is absolutely a very steady podorythmie component to this, to capture that rhythm of a happy dog trotting along, which I was known to try to put into words when I RPed that dog on the game: dog dog dog doggie dog dog dog!

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. Not to be outdone by fictional animals, the real animals in my life, Fred and George, apparently are going to eventually have to get their own entire set. It will be called We Are Such Good Cats. The first tune will be Run Around Go Crazy Time, the second tune will be No YOU’RE a Butthead, and the last one, We Didn’t Do That That Was Other Cats. This set will involve a great deal of interplay between whatever instrument represents George and whatever one represents Fred as they chase each other around the house. There will be slower rhythms for George because he’s bigger, and defter, higher-pitched stuff for Fred. And LOTS of stomping to represent all the things they’re knocking off counters!

So um YEAH. Who turned on this part of my brain? Did I just hit some sort of critical mass what with going to session and trying to learn a bunch of other people’s tunes, so that I want to start writing ones of my own?

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

With Valor of the Healer dropping tomorrow (to wit: EEK! *^_^*;;), I have a post up today on the Here Be Magic blog, talking all about how my MUSHing days influenced my writing. With big ol’ shoutouts to my days on PernMUSH (where I got Kestar’s name from) and especially my days on AetherMUSH.

The post is right over here! Clickie! If you’re a writer who’s also a former (or current!) gamer of any kind, come tell me about how your gaming experiences shaped you as a writer! If you’re not a writer yourself, tell me about your favorite games or characters!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

There’s a fun meme going around Twitter today with the hash tag #10yearsago. For the benefit of those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or Facebook, here are my contributions! It’s fun to write these down, especially given that this year was before I was regularly doing anything like blogging.

Y’all will notice there’s a whole lot of fandom and geekery here. This would be because, well, I was indulging in a lot of fandom and geekery that year! Which has certainly not changed at all in the ten years since.

• #10yearsago Mylee Ejercito drew me a Shenner picture! http://www.annathepiper.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/shenner3.jpg
• #10yearsago I was still totally fangirling on Strongbow from Elfquest, enough that I had a web page dedicated to him!
• #10yearsago X-Files was starting to wear out its welcome at the Murk, but ZOMG Season 3 of Buffy. Big, big fun. Mayor FTW. <3
• #10yearsago Had big fun seeing The Matrix, Sixth Sense, Toy Story 2, and The Mummy, and OK fine ogled Ewan MacGregor in Phantom Menance. ;)
• HA I was wrong. My Presario laptop was NOT running XP. It was running Windows 98 and I upgraded to SE that year. #10yearsago
• #10yearsago Phantom Menace came out! Mimi and I were in line for a late show with a kid with blue hair. We played Egyptian Rat Screw!
• #10yearsago We didn’t go to Worldcon in Australia but DID go to NASFiC in Anaheim and had a 3-day marathon Disneyland run! Indy ride FTW!
• #10yearsago I’d quit PernMUSH, BUT! I was still writing in Pern fandom offline in Telgar Weyr, as brownrider Tember and bronzerider J’marr.
• #10yearsago I was still using a Compaq Presario as my laptop, and it was running XP, and I was FINE with that. Poor deluded 1999 me! ;)
• #10yearsago Wayfound was born at the Willowholt on Two Moons MUSH, and I destroyed the Willowholt in floods at the end of the year.
• #10yearsago Tance Vokrim was my surviving character on CrystalMUSH, and he got his beloved Kesya back halfway through that year.
• #10yearsago I was playing Shenner and Han Solo on Star Wars MUSH and making people’s jaws drop that a girl was playing Solo.
• #10yearsago in addition to not knowing Great Big Sea yet, my dad was still alive, I worked at Attachmate, and I’d just joined AetherMUSH!
• In 1999 I was still living at MurkSouth and had not yet discovered either Russell Crowe or Great Big Sea. Had no idea what I was missing!

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

Okay folks — it’s a whole year (or two, depending on who’s counting) too late to be my New Millennium webpage. But well hey. I got the urge to change things around here again, get rid of a lot of content I won’t be updating anymore, move some stuff up a level in order to make it easier to find, give the place a whole new graphical scheme, and fix a whole bunch of things that were broken.

In honor of all of these changes I have bought myself my very own shiny new domain name, which points to this place now: www.annathepiper.org. My usual address will still get here, of course, but I always rather wanted my own domain name, too. It’s up and running, everybody, so please feel free to use it in your bookmarks. Here’s the nitty gritty on everything I’ve changed around, though:

• Almost all of my MUSH character pages have been removed, since I am no longer playing AetherMUSH. Instead, I have set up a directory for old characters in my MUSH section, and have pages summarizing my various alts on various MUSHes there that I’ve played over the years. The exception is old characters from Two Moons MUSH, which are still chronicled in detail in the Two Moons section of the site.
• All my old logs are still up and available to be read, though. All logs not from Two Moons live in the MUSH section now, in the old logs section. I will still periodically update this part of my page as time and whim dictate, since I do still have a bunch of unedited logs I haven’t gotten around to posting, but the priority on this has gone down. Old logs pertaining to Two Moons MUSH as well as the set of logs for the only active roleplay I’m doing right now, which is for the Seafarers group of sailors on that game, can be found in the Two Moons section.
• My small pages for Great Big Sea and 30 Odd Foot of Grunts have been moved up a level out of the Music section, to make finding them easier.
• Speaking of music, I’ve also added a formal top-level link for the section of my site devoted to my jamming group, Three Good Measures.
• Y’know those little blurbs on the main index, or up at the top of my sub-pages, that change when you roll your pointer over the menu graphics? Well, those weren’t ever centered right in Netscape, and they weren’t showing up at all on Opera, both of which rather drove me batty. So I did a lot of restructuring of stuff under the hood to eliminate those problems, and I should be looking okay on all three of those browsers now (or at least, up through IE 6, Opera 6, and Netscape 4.79; I haven’t tested against Netscape 6.x, because I haven’t bothered to actually install it on my personal machine. Anybody out there use Netscape 6.x and wanna tell me if I look okay on that browser, drop me a line).
• Pretty much all the other top-level pages have been updated in some form or other, links checked for validity and such. And the Sitemap has been duly updated to reflect the overall changed status of the site. If you need to find something, that remains the best place to look.

I’ve tested the updated site on IE 5.5, Netscape 4.79, and Opera 6, at resolutions 1024×768, 800×600, and 640×480. If you’re using a different browser or a different resolution and see anything that looks broken, or, for that matter, if you see anything that looks broken in general, drop me a line and let me know!

And I hope y’all like the redecorating I’ve done around here!

EDITING TO ADD 11/3/2019: Removed the link off of 30 Odd Foot of Grunts in the third bullet point in the list in this post, because that page is no longer active.