Looking for a few good... amoeba moosen. (g'on, ignore post count, eh?)

[ClosetMonster]

Glaw said ...that sassy woman whose red hair and strangle-hold on werewolves stand out now more than her name.

*hee hee* Clavie.. dearest Clavie. Oh yes... I will one day write a book about her. Once I can write murder mysteries.. (heretofore impossible for me to do), because anything else wouldn't fit her personality.

Glaw said
Nobody catches and weaves the ridiculous and the magical into brilliant stories like you do.

You know, coming from YOU that is a huge compliment, because I often times feel I'm just holding onto your coat-tails and trying to keep up. I mean, for gods'sakes, Glaw! It was just a Caravan! Next I know, we're rushing through trees, turning into lichts, and wakening a Red Dragon (which wasn't a dragon at all, not sure if we ever really knew what the heck it was) and snatching some guy through a mirror (and to be fair, you gave me a blank mirror - I railed against that mirror! What in the world am I to do with a BLANK MIRROR???) I love writing with you. You drag the best out of me, generally with me squalling in terror in the background.

Glaw said But now I have an old woman with a secret that is ripe to be told, and no one yet to tell it to. What do you think? Fill in plot as we go? Any particular time period and/or setting you fancy? Past, present or future!

Old woman, tale to tell, and I get to choose the time period and setting and ...and...

Oh you know it doesn't really matter. Why don't you let her tell us where we'll be and end up? No doubt we'll be some kind of mixture of all time period and the setting is just as likely to change after twenty posts from desert to under the sea as I am to have dinner tonight, so I wouldn't dream of trying to capture your creative forces within any boundaries. Unless, well, unless you WANT me to give you fences just so you can bust them down. There is some fun in that. :)

Do we need a time period? Can it be... all of the time periods and yet, none at all? How about outside of time? Time is malleable? Or does she need a particular setting to live her story out in? Then I call... well, someone wrote Bazaar and I've been loving the idea of sands and hot winds and very spindly legged horses. A land of lions and limited water and closely packed homes to keep the dangers of the natural world out. Yes?
And if that doesn't suit, we could always throw her into a deep forest, quiet and sacred, with white birch everywhere and a wind soughing through the upper canopy (for a birch stand so old would have an upper canopy) where even the brush does not dare grow and the ancient irish elk walks with his mighty rack (almost a moose, but infinitely cooler, besides the fact I've never put one in a story and seriously? An irish elk would kick a moosen's hiney). Ah hah!

Or, really, any place she wants to go. You talk it over with her and I shall follow you both into whatever story the dear wants to tell us. :)

[Foster]

ClosetMonster said In fact, it is this truth which binds and directs much of our behaviors, and just because we can symbolize things (put them into words) doesn't necessarily make reality any more complex than our reaction to our root biology. In other words, I think we've as much chance making it through Nature's gauntlets as does an amoeba or a cockroach, provided we have the needed dna for survival.

Provided any misconcieved notions doesn't blind us like lemmings off a cliff, we'll do fine.
^Pretty much the entire moral of "To Light a Fire" aside from the value of the buddy-system... provided you're both knowledgeable... otherwise you die like Specialist Wade.
(subverted, in that he's shot in the liver, pretty much as garaunteed bleed-out as a heart-shot or a stab in the kidney, just slower)

Our desire to symbolize things also extends to the need to personify things, a lesson we could do well to forget. Life of Pi.

So who gets the tree-house?

Blue-orange is a scale of altuism vs selfishness. As it is possable to be altuisticly evil on an ideological level, or to be selfishly good on the applied level.
-Is it more important to eat, or to die dignified and 'right'?

TvTropes summary of it in RL
Natural selection itself could be said to promote Blue And Orange Morality of a sort, as it promotes behaviors that maximize an individual's genetic contribution to future generations. Period. Whether that maximization occurs through intrafamilial altruism that safeguards one's close kin at one's own expense, or through rape, infanticide, and brutally killing off one's competitors doesn't make a lick of difference, so long as it works.

-Take two people completely opposed on some issue- say an avid hunter and a member of an animal rights group. Chances are, they will find themselves literally unable to comprehend the other's point of view. The core element of many animal rights arguments is that animals have the same rights as people (or should), thus, shooting them is morally equivalent (or at least similar) to murder. Meanwhile, the core elements of the hunter's viewpoint is that this argument is patently false, and that humans who hunt are as much a part of the natural environment as any other apex predator. These two views simply cannot be resolved in any meaningful way, and both sides believe they are "good" while the other side is "evil" (or, at least, willfully ignorant), making the essential conflict a blue-and-orange morality issue.
◦ And yet, both see nature conservation and treating wildlife with respect as very high virtues (albeit with different takes on the concepts), and will freak the hell out if a species is in danger of disappearing or a natural habitat is threatened with destruction.

Oh, and the thing about horsies...

[Glaw]

Aaahhh myyyy have I mentioned I've missed you? XD All your ideas are so tantalizingly brilliant, we should simply do them all. Time and space are merely our playthings!

The mysterious sands sound amazing -- she agrees we should start there! If you like, I'll go ahead and whip something up as a starter. As always, nothing is set in stone and everything can be manipulated and expanded upon if you feel so inspired.

Spelunking in new ideas is such fun! *cackles*

(RpG isn't going to go down again is it? Maybe should start saving posts.)

[ClosetMonster]

I am glad to be missed and definitely have missed you right on back. And I am not at ALL surprised that you'd take the all above and everything else that hasn't been thought of route. ;) I've my axe and about fifty feet of rope readied for our expedition (one can never have too much rope).

I'm thinking RPG isn't supposed to go down again, it was fairly stable before (I began in '08 and it had been up a year or so prior to that, failing only of late) but I think I may start to definitely keep track of posts, yup! For certain. And I may wrest an email from you at some time in the case it does get down, so we can mutate into something else and continue.

I will manipulate away! Unless you give me a mirror again. Which I will get very mean with and ... and stomp on. ;)

[Glaw]

Ha! I promise no mirrors. At least none whose purpose is expected of you.

I've written something! I hope there's enough for you to play with, I didn't leave much in the way of openings, I think. http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/2723/posts/ic

[ClosetMonster]

:) On it.. and I shall force my way in, as befits the post, I'm sure!

[ClosetMonster]

Foster said
Provided any misconcieved notions doesn't blind us like lemmings off a cliff, we'll do fine.

Awe, c'mon. Lemmings have a fairly good track record. They're still around! Maybe we need to listen to our inner lemming a bit more often. It would take care of the current population explosion.

Foster said
Pretty much the entire moral of "To Light a Fire" aside from the value of the buddy-system... provided you're knowledgeable... otherwise you die like Specialist Wade..(subverted, in that he's shot in the liver, pretty much as garaunteed bleed-out as a heart-shot or a stab in the kidney, )

And now I'm cursing the lack of high speed internet in my back-woods world. I'm not sure of the To Light a Fire reference unless you mean Jack London's To Build a Fire - which I have read? Otherwise, I'm again coming up empty - though I'm sure you've a quick remedy for that. And besides, we all know that before you do anything as dangerous as walking out your front door, it helps to bring a buddy along. Preferably a slower one so that you can get to safety.

Foster said
Our desire to symbolize things also extends to the need to personify things, a lesson we could do well to forget. Life of Pi.

Symbolization and personification definitely lead us to believe that we are, in some way, removed from reality. Or perhaps, puts up a barrier between us and reality. When something is symbolized, personified, anthropomorphized, etc., we can then believe our assumptions regarding the state of our own personal world view is then reality and those assumptions gain a power which, had we merely our senses to rely on and not words, they would not otherwise have. Although, having been around a goodly many of social creatures in groups (not necessarily human) I have to wonder at the truth in that. Once we become something called a social animal, our very hierarchy has a power in it that is not related to what is real. Hierarchical societies, social groups, are governed by more than aptitude and ability, but also by some strange construct of birth, allegiance, alliance, etc. Which then leads me to wonder at how much a "construct" those indeed are. Aren't they just as you said earlier (or Heinlen, actually), just more complex reactions of an organism to gain control over his survival (population pressure)? At a base level, all behaviors are the same as they were at the moment we were born, mutations to allow the organism and its get the best chances at survival.
Dunno. Just rambling because you've given me a lot to think about. :) And it's fun to play with the ideas, as if I were someone who actually knew.

Foster said
Natural selection itself could be said to promote Blue And Orange Morality of a sort, as it promotes behaviors that maximize an individual's genetic contribution to future generations. Period. Whether that maximization occurs through intrafamilial altruism that safeguards one's close kin at one's own expense, or through rape, infanticide, and brutally killing off one's competitors doesn't make a lick of difference,

A nice way of parceling out opposite sides to the same coin and I have to say I'm in complete agreement, having sat in on many meetings where opposites cannot come to a consensus and yet, are actually fighting for the same things, are just basically fighting over semantics (or ideologies, or belief systems, world systems, etc. - symbolized views which give purpose to their arguments). I hadn't heard of it before, so thank you so much for explaining that to me.

As for horses... heh heh... okay, so I did totally grab my all but adult son and read that aloud to him because seriously? Horse-icide to deal with flies. Brilliant.

[Foster]

So, shall the tree-house be blue (hunter-trapper type naturalist), or shall it be orange (Humanitarian type naturalist)?

I can do blue.
So will this be a blue-on-blue RP, or blue-againt-orange RP?

[ClosetMonster]

We could flip a coin. But then, they have to be friends. Beer drinking in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, while staking out deer haunts and having long philosophical discussions on how tree house living is/is not the way to go? And if we're lucky, they won't come to blows.

I could totally do an Orange, in conflict... mostly because being an orange means one should never be in a tree waiting on the deer. Or on one's front porch, waiting for the deer so one's friend could shoot them. Heh. But as a humanitarian, one has to make allowances for the "human element" of one's friend. Even if that human element is Evil and makes them want to Shoot Bambi.

[Foster]

Or, an orange-mentality person hears there's an awesome tree-house timeshare... only to discover it's a hunting-shack/outfitter's camp...
-lol, only in Canada.

[ClosetMonster]

Or possibly in the U.P of Michigan - I heard that time and space react differently to the laws of physics, let alone reality, a tad differently there. Hee hee.

[Foster]

ClosetMonster said
Or possibly in the U.P of Michigan - I heard that time and space react differently to the laws of physics, let alone reality, a tad differently there. Hee hee.

True.

[ClosetMonster]

Heh heh... you speak my own language, eh?

[Foster]

ClosetMonster said
Heh heh... you speak my own language, eh?

<-- On Wisconsin.

[ClosetMonster]

Good gravy - Now that is a real blast from my familial past. :) Crazy - making beer commercials for all walks of life. When will they do the Emo-commercials? Or how's about the ones where they make a commercial advertising to the soccer moms? "When I take Junior to his game, I make sure to pack my own pick-me-up next to the orange drink that has no nutritional value. It's the only way to keep me In the Game for the next three hours." (cutaway to mother stumbling up the white line, screeching, "GO BOBBIE, GO!")

Hee hee... Gotta keep up with the Joneses, m'man. Get mah family van and then the cooler, yeah.

[Foster]

ClosetMonster said
Good gravy - Now that is a real blast from my familial past. :) Crazy - making beer commercials for all walks of life. When will they do the Emo-commercials? Or how's about the ones where they make a commercial advertising to the soccer moms? "When I take Junior to his game, I make sure to pack my own pick-me-up next to the orange drink that has no nutritional value. It's the only way to keep me In the Game for the next three hours." (cutaway to mother stumbling up the white line, screeching, "GO BOBBIE, GO!")Hee hee... Gotta keep up with the Joneses, m'man. Get mah family van and then the cooler, yeah.

Ode to the cooller-cooler man.

[ClosetMonster]

Foster said
Ode to the cooller-cooler man.

I declare today, a cooler day! it is football and we will start an entire RP, you and I, Foster - wherein it is a bunch of guys from the UP area, in search of the golden cooler. There will be strange northern lights, lots of whiskey, and some deer running about in tutus (but that could be the whiskey, we're not sure). Cheese hats for Wisconsin second cousins is a must.

[ElisabethJohnson]

Are still looking for role-players? Also, do you do modern plots?

[ClosetMonster]

Hullo Izzy, welcome to the guild and all that! And yes, I'm open to modern stories. I've done a few in the past and always enjoyed them.

[ElisabethJohnson]

Did you want to discuss a plot/idea here or pm's?

I had two ideas, you can add or take away from them if you want.

I have an idea about a rock star guy, and he goes to a normal school. But he is the teenage heart throb, (if they still call them that) And there's this one girl (me) who doesn't pay much attention to him. But he finds that fascination and wants to know why, but she always blows him off.

Then one about this girl who gets abused by her father, and you play the popular guy, who also picks on her a lot. Not realizing her situation at home. On this, my girl will be the new girl at school, and your guy will be the popular guy.