On one hand, I managed to get my father’s printer working and he’s happy.

On the other, I just heard my godmother had died.

Lately, thanks to a three-week long sick leave, my “human interaction” has pretty much been virtual. That in practice means MSN/IRC, Facebook, Left 4 Dead and City of Heroes. I also logged on to Second Life after a pause to collect my weekly free money.

On IRC, I “hang out” on about a dozen channels these days. There’s one that’s actually quite active, but sadly, the activity is something that doesn’t really concern my life a lot anymore – it’s the channel for my old main subject’s student group. Then there’s a “nowplaying” channel, where music I listen to gets pasted on, in real time. Pretty much like last.fm does. Sadly, haven’t found a spotify-mIRC plugin, so not much of the music I listen to these days actually gets pasted there. And it’s very rarely someone listens to something there that grabs my attention. Then there are a couple of “legacy” channels – channels that used to be active, but have gone into some form of a hibernation in the past years. I join the channels, and hope someone would talk about something, but the best they can do really is paste a couple of links and not really comment on anything. Some of the channels I’m on are only about organizing games these days. RPGs or Online Games, depending on the mood and time. But there is nothing really interesting to chat about there either. And on the rest of the channels, people hang out because it would be impolite to leave the channel as the two or three other people you know would take offense. Some of these channels are silly to the point that the people on the channel won’t talk to you on the channel, but start a private conversation, killing any hope of some conversation happening on-channel.

In case it doesn’t show, I’m thinking of quitting IRC.

On MSN the situation is actually much better – While there’s only a handful of people I talk on it, the conversations are much better. Even if there’s not a community feel to the conversations, they at least seem to exsist. But there are a lot of dead contacts there as well. I don’t even know why I have half of the contacts I do, anymore.

Facebook, as Larsa put it the other day, is something that you thought you would hate, but is actually quite great when you got into it. For me, it’s not that important, except for the few people I keep touch in through it. There are of course downsides to every coin, but mostly it’s a very “cute” system of staying in touch with people without actually staying in touch. Or to internet-stalk your ex-girlfriends, if you’re into that sort of thing. The only thing that really bothers me about it is the careless way some people seem to regard their own personal information. Somehow there’s been an abundance of memes going round that, when seen by wrong people, can be used for malice. Like provide the reader with information like “your mother’s maiden name”, something that is used quite commonly as a user verification question.

City of Heroes has seen some turmoil in the past few weeks – the EU offices are being shut down and moved to the US, something that might cause horrors to the EU players. But that’s something that only time will tell. Meanwhile, a small group of people that I know only through the game provide me with lots of great humor and good cheer. The group of us (all many-year veterans of the game) do a couple of hours of teaming every now and then and catch on on the latest gossip. Stories of what has happened to one another (who has gotten married, who has been in a drunken bar fight this time) and to those that we haven’t seen online in a while (but someone in the group happens to know in real life). Compared to the other communication channels, the fact that I haven’t met any of the people I play these days with in real life makes it quite unique compared to the others.

Which leads to Left 4 Dead, another game I’ve been playing actively. The main difference between CoH and L4D crowds for me is the fact that there is voice chat in the game. The people I play with vary from those I know in real life to those I’ve never met. But not having to rely on keyboard to expres yourself, and the game being very action-oriented, changes the communication quite a bit – most of the things said are very much related to the gameplay, which leads to text that’s very, very shallow – I have no idea what’s going on in the other players’ lives, whereas in CoH someone might curse his girlfriend’s cat or other small things that are in no way relevant to the game, but are quite intimate.

I also mentioned Second Life. I’ve been a user for so long that they’re actually paying me to log in every week, but I’ve never really “got” the environment. I guess it’s all those flying obscenities that man can imagine that keep me distant from it, but I must admit, there are some good things here and there – “specs of light” as one might say. One is a garden decor store a friend of mine runs there – a shop full of very “normal” things for sale. It’s almost unnerving to see someone sell a well-crafted rock when you’re mostly used to seeing … well, unnerving things. And another thing I’m going to have to buff is the Second Life Shakespeare Company, that try to provide some meaning to the damn place.

None of these really beat human interaction on a “real” level. A phonecall from a friend usually means a lot more than him pasteing you a link of people walking across a road.

So a player from our gaming group asked me to help him get a new tattoo – my job was to compile a composite from his source material to a form the actual artist can work with. He asked me to do that about a year and a half ago. Well, now it’s out of my hands, and as suspected, that’s a good feeling. And kind of weird one at the same time. The stuff I tinkered with will eventually find form on someone else’s skin. There is something near-sacred about that. My own view on tattoos is on some level close to semi-mystical reverence. Things etched on the skin telling a truth more deep than all the clothes and mannerisms out there. My father still wears the “Sailor’s Shallow Grave” tattoo on his arm, even if he hasn’t been sailing the high seas in years. He’s not exactly proudly presenting it to people, but it’s something he’ll have for life and no amount of suburbanizing will take that aspect of his life away from him. Of course there are stupid tattoos (although some behind that link are really awesome), I’d love to think that quite a good portion of people, when selecting a tattoo, attach some meaning to it.

So when in RPGs someone has a tattoo, it’s quite sad for me to see what it’s usually there for.here seems to be three typical possibilities why it’s there. 1) It’s cool. “The mysterious stranger has this awesome tattoo of a thundercloud on his face that is so fetch” 2) It’s magical “The mysterious stranger’s tattoo shoots a burst of salami at you” or 3) it’s to mark the wearer as a part of a group “The mysterious stranger’s thundercloud tattoo means he’s part of the thunderous pasta chefs’ ninja-pirate group”

It’s very rare to see a tattoo in RPGs (both in sourcebooks or actual games) that’s there beyond those reasons. In other media tattoos that are there for the character instead of for the story somehow aren’t that uncommon anymore (Battlestar Galactica‘s the first that comes to mind). But not in RPGs, really. For example, in the d20 Future campaign I’m currently playing, two or three of the characters have high profile tattoos, and if I recall correctly, all of them are of type 2. And any tattoo we’ve come across on NPCs have been of type 3. Maybe some of them have started as Type 1s, but moved to the group identity thing quite fast. None outside that.

I try to recall my own campaigns, but can’t come up with many that had tattoos in them outside the “Look at Me, I’m Important” -sphere. I ran a campaign called Käärmeuurna (Snake Urn) that had a minor theme of body modification in it. I think there might have been a character with a tattoo that wasn’t there because it was important or especially cool. But most likely I’m lying if I’m saying that. I do vaguely recall that one of the player characters getting a non-uniform, not-just-for-cool, non-magical tattoo in that very game, but that might have been something she was planning on getting, not really sure if she really actually got it. Closest to getting a normal, character-based tattoo on any game so-far, I think.

The sad thing is that having a tattoo on a character quite easily falls into the superficial cool side instead of anything else. Might be time to actively change that in the next campaign I run. And in case one or more of the people in our gaming group are reading this, I’ll ask you: Have we had regular, “human” tattoos in our games?

So, just paid some money and will be going to Knutepunkt this year. Which means that I’ll be in conferences/related hulabaloo most of the end of April this year. May will not be pretty. I predict a massive hangover after Vappu.

I’m currently annoyed at:

• Not having a pair of 3-D glasses
• Facebook meme “25 things” that includes tagging your friends so they “can” do the quiz too
• The realization where things went wrong with the game I’m running, midway the campaign.
• Slight flu
• Having to postpone a LARP I’ve been planning for my birthday on account of not being in the country
• Forgetting the Lady GaGa CD in the car
• Not being able to express myself in written form as well as I’m wishing (or “not having an editor on my retainer”)
• Television series with Filler Episodes
• Missing laser tag tonight
• Not moving on with things
• End of Last Watch. Too Deus-Exy, in my opinion, even if the metaphysics were sound
• Life in a distant corner of the world

Since there is an emergent trend of cat blogs, I’ll post one post about them here, now. It is a blog about the zany life of my three cats, Mörri, Tallukka and Töppönen.

Be warned, post contains cat photos.

Mörri and Tallukka are planning to take over the world. You are probably on their very long kill list.

Töppönen doesn’t bother with their schemes. He knows he will be the king when the time comes.

This was the last picture ever taken by a nameless photographer. It was taken on that special day on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Moments later, shots were heard and Kennedy was shot. There is no apparent connection between these two things.

That is the life of the kitties here. They’re like the Great Old Ones, waiting for the stars to be right for their reign to begin. Until that day arrives, I will be a loyal servant, et cetera.

Spiritual awakening is a lei’d cat

Taken on my cameraphone, thus the excellent quality.

After a cellphoneless holidays, my phone is back on. What I have learned is that a cellphone always present greatly increases my stress levels and that I should do something about my cellphone habits. Returning to a landline might not be an impossible thing either. I think things were much simpler when we weren’t available all of the time.