Ordinary Day

Got to my desk at the day job this morning to discover that my reaction post yesterday to recent Elfquest issues got linked to on Elfquest.com! And gosh, there are a lot of you coming in to check out what I had to say. Hi there, fellow fans!

If you’re wondering who the heck I am and what my background in Elfquest might be, I’ve got a long history of being in active EQ fandom. I was one of the administrators (a.k.a. “wizards”) of Two Moons MUSH, an online, real-time, Elfquest-themed RPG. On Two Moons, my primary character was Rillwhisper, chieftess of the Willowholt, and I also have a history of having played both Mender and Rayek there. I’ve still got a very large archive of roleplay logs from the days of Two Moons, and you can find them over on my other site, annathepiper.org, here. Look for the section on this page involving “Two Moons MUSH Logs”, since they’re all broken down by various characters I played and various tribes I participated in.

As a writer, I’ve also frequently posted about how Elfquest has been a huge formative influence on me. If you look at my homepage or the pages for Faerie Blood and Bone Walker, you may well be able to see EQ influences there. This is because EQ has been a huge influence on my concepts of what elves should look like. And when I commissioned the covers for those books from artist Kiri Moth, particularly the cover for Faerie Blood, I told her all about that. In particular, for the Faerie Blood cover, I told her, “Here is a picture of Leetah from Elfquest. Here is a picture of Rayek from Elfquest. I want you to make my character Kendis look like the child these two characters never actually had.”

Please feel free to say hi and tell me about your own history with Elfquest! And I hope you’ll stick around and check out my books!

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.

Because I’m totally on a nostalgia trip for the Seafarers, and because Wayfound and Arnos still aren’t leaving me alone, I’m on a major log-posting kick today. All of these are logs out of my long-unposted backlog. Hope those of y’all who were in on the Seafarer RP with me will enjoy! damara, stickmaker, ssha, animenathan, and most especially syn, these are for you! (Any other former Seafarers actually reading this, sing out, crew! I miss you!)

“Council by the Campfire” shows Vardeus and Kephissa learning quite a few things from the humans and elves helping them, while making plans for finding the rest of the crew; “A Joyous Reunion” is the log of Vardeus and his party finally finding the rest of the crew; Vardeus shares with Coralfire the news of his betrothal to Tiana in “The Captain’s Delight”; in “Coralfire’s Dilemma”, Coralfire shocks Vardeus by seeking out his advice on what to do about her love life.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

This is mostly for the amusement of my fellow veterans of Two Moons MUSH! Since I went and merged my archive of TM logs with the rest of my roleplay logs, I’ve been absorbed in re-reading a lot of the best of the lot–especially the ones involving Wayfound and the Seafarers. So I got into the mood tonight to pull out a few of the ones I never posted and add them to the archive. I may do one of these a day for a while and see if I can get more of them caught up.

Tonight’s log is “Calm and Storm”, a quiet little scene between Wayfound and her soon-to-be Go-Back lovemate Tefin, who’s introducing her to a Vraeyan version of chess.

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.