Just Roll A d20 For SAN Now

Yes. I saw.

No, I am not the high bidder.

Dear brane:

I let you off the leash when we're on the PATH train to work so that you can get some random stretchy exercise and work off whatever crap didn't get knocked loose and flushed away during the night. You are supposed to run around, randomly entertain yourself, and drop the remains of whatever horrible smelly thing you were playing with when we actually reach 33rd Street.

The fact that you're still running around with your tail high and "Hey, wouldn't a De Lorean alt mode be perfect for an Autobot speedster like Blurr?" clenched in your jaws means we're gonna have to have some words. Where did you dig that up, anyway?

Man, I need to get some more icons for tangled_metal. In the meantime, the Decepticon sigil will have to do for Starscream filling ol' Shocky in on what happened in Mission City.

Cats: fed.
Sourdough: rising.
Dishes: drying, and waiting for the next batch to be washed, as there is only so much space for them to dry on my counter.
Litterbox mat: drying in the sun on my fire escape.

It's a start. The shower and the bike ride will come later.

It isn't much, but like I said in my earlier post, I'm nervous about my Starscream writing. Would those of y'all who know His Nibs better than I do be inclined to do me a favour and tell me if what I've got here sounds at all like him, and/or the level of overall suckitude? Playing Bumblebee and Ironhide is one thing, but this is something else....

Started in on the initial AU stuff the other day & I realised I hit a small snag. Even when I'm writing characters I don't like- say, Father, from Equilibrium- I have to be able to do one of two things to get them right:

1. Think like them
2. Respect them

And, um, well... Starscream. Havin' some trouble mustering either.

Shockwave? Shockwave I can do. He's easy for me to get into, from either direction. TV Starscream I always just wanted to throttle, and movie Starscream either has next to no characterization (movie 1) or is a cringing suck-up (movie 2). I have little to no interest in buying the Reign of Starscream comics that came out between the movies; I'm going to have to come up with some respect for the mech from somewhere before I go any further...

I'm gonna see if I can watch a couple of old kung-fu movies, I think. Screamer kind of reminds me of the guy who's planning on running the kung fu school as soon as the sifu gets too old or too tired to hold his position, only the hero of the movie gets in his way. Maybe I can get something out of that.

Apparently, the accepted designation for a Kuiper belt object (KBO) that orbits beyond Neptune and is not controlled by an orbital resonance with the giant planet- a classical Kuiper belt object, so to speak- is a QB1-o. It's in honor of the first trans-Neptunian object (TNO) found after Pluto and Charon, (15760) 1992 QB1. Treated as an English word rather than an abbreviation, the astronomy community spells this as 'cubewano'.

I mention this solely because I was trying to set up the initial meeting between Starscream and Shockwave on the trans-Neptunian object Varuna, and according to its Wiki page, Varuna is considered a cubewano, which may or may not have any kind of resonance with 'Guess what we found, Shockwave? And what got destroyed?'.

Astronomy people are weird sometimes. So are toy people. I know this because of my learnings.

I think I have just found a new favorite breathtaking act of KA-BLAMMO on the part of the human race: Operation Sailor Hat. Part of the mid-twentieth-century drive to make scary-ass top secret projects more secret by making their names too silly for anyone to want to repeat them very much, Operation Sailor Hat involved using godawful huge amounts of conventional explosives to simulate the force effects of a possible nuclear blast. It is this part in particular that won Operation Sailor Hat a place in my heart:

"The crater left by the blast is called the "Sailor's Hat" crater, and currently contains unique species of shrimp which have evolved to survive the hypersaline conditions in the crater."

Because dude. DUDE. They made evolution happen with an Earth-Shattering Kaboom and there wasn't even atomic radiation involved!

I've been compiling a list of tourist things I want to see in New York when I finally get the chance to take vacation time. So far I have:

Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, Astoria Park, the tram ride along the Queensboro Bridge, possibly the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia, the operational farm somewhere in Queens, the Brooklyn Aquarium, Prospect Park (esp. the Prospect Park Zoo), the Brooklyn Bridge, Chinatown (possibly the Museum of the Chinese in America), the South Street Seaport, the National Museum of the American Indian, the NY Fire Museum, the other tiny museums of south Manhattan, a random Staten Island Ferry ride, the Tibetan museum in Staten Island, the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Bryant Park area incl. Grand Central (the Chrysler building if they have tours), the Empire State Building and immediate environs, the Strand, Times Square, and Ellis Island and *maybe* the Statue of Liberty if it's not hot and smelly inside any more.

I reckon I won't see it all in a week, or even two, but I figure I can at least see a good chunk of the stuff on that list. Is there anything else some of y'all would recommend I add to the list of stuff that should be seen?

... suddenly I wish Barricade hadn't been killed in the first TF movie. Because I just found a quote from the video game Prototype that would suit him perfectly:

"You have the right to be ventilated. I have the right to burn your home and shoot your dog. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?"

Okay. Got the plot outline completely out of my head. Now comes the revision stage, and then the OOMery can start, but at least it is no longer trying to eat my brain out from the inside. And at least Bee is no longer glaring at me for what I did to Sam. So I'm good; and hopefully there will be actual plottage soon.

Thanks for bearing with me. I'll keep you posted as things develop.

And now, since I have a lap full of purring orange cat rather than the Guillermo del Toro-Michael Bay co-directed mess that was last night's drea, I put forward the character meme I've seen in a lot of places- but most recently in sdelmonte's journal.

Taken from all over:

PICK ONE OF MY CHARACTERS AND I WILL TELL YOU:
→ why I decided to play this character
→ my favorite scene or bit of interaction concerning this character to date
→ my favorite original aspect about this character (world-building for ocs or head-canon for fcs)
→ the last thing they did "off screen"
→ what their last words would be if they died tomorrow
→ what the next thing I'm doing for them is (narrative, post, shelving, whatever)

BONUS ROUND:
» I will tell you what character of yours I'd like to play mine against
» you may ask me a free question

I know at least one or two of y'all who read this have expressed an interest in the past, in spending an hour or two inside my head just to see what it's like.

For the record, it's like sneaking into the DC or Boston area¹ equivalent of a cross between Hogwarts and Miskatonic², despite being hunted by some unspecified group that I knew was chasing me with intent to do something awful, and nevertheless making a concerted attempt at finding something vitally important in the school's computers³ and casually strolling through the halls disguised as a teacher and getting onto one of the elevators⁴ with several of the students, and punching the button for the fourth or fifth floor⁴, only to find out to all our surprise that it was a Wonkavator or the equivalent when it rose two floors, went sideways, slipped through the wall and out of the building, and started cruising at high speed along the river while fighter jets attempted to shoot down an Air Korea 767 jetliner because they thought I was on it- and then attempted to shoot down our elevator because we had no way of responding to any hails or requests for information they might've been sending. And waking up just before the elevator would've dropped below the water surface and gotten into the hidden, extended elevator shaft that led back to the school from a quarter of a mile down the river.

Yeah. It's like that in here. Except that the dream left out the parts involving things about biology and medicine that I sometimes wish I didn't know, but my dreams always do that; it's their idea of mercy.


¹I know they are nothing like the same, but try telling that to my subconscious

²Mostly Hogwarts on the surface in terms of the ages of the students and what the students thought about it; Miskatonic factors lurked in the background in terms of what was really available to be learned at the school if you knew where to look and how to find it

³It's my subconscious, it'll bloody well have computers at a magic school if I want it to- it was damn near PS 238

⁴See 3

⁵Out of 4- floor 5 would've been the secret roof access, a la going to the fifth floor of Millis Science Center at Case, as the fifth floor of Millis was a small area on the roof that housed monkeys

Ngh.

Found an alt mode for AU!Rumble, one capable of explaining why both Silverbolt and Jetfire were needed to take him down. In honor of his earthquake powers, it is, very literally, the Earthshaker.

Imagine that being grumpy because its little brother got killed.

Gnf. Think I can wrap up the plot outline in two more posts, which will probably be flocked for dyin' and what have you. Got two job interviews to attend today for another IT person, so I might not be able to get one up until I'm home from the office. Once the outline is constructed I'll go over it with Geoff & see where Prime belongs, and then see what we can do about parts for the various non-TF characters who've found their way into our storylines. Hell, the space bridge is only there because of characters from Milliways...

Sort of wishing I had a way or a reason to throw in a lab scene with Wheeljack, because I saw a safety sign reading HEADS UP OR HEADS OFF in someone's user icon a few minutes ago and that sounds like his style.

The next section of the AU pre-alpha plot outline will probably be where I start having Named Character Deaths. I'd kind of like to keep those a surprise for people who might be participating in the plot, or reading the plot at M'ways, so I'm probably going to friendslock those. Rather than inflict them on my friendsphere at large, if you're interested in seeing the next few bits, please let me know and I'll put you on the friendslock, okay?

Great. Thanks.