The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

Challenging the Master
17:09 Aug 30 2010
Times Read: 629

The young man was at the end of his training, soon he would go on to be a teacher. Like all good pupils, he needed to challenge his teacher and to develop his own way of thinking. He caught a bird, placed it in one hand and went to see his teacher.

‘Teacher, is this bird alive or dead?’



His plan was the following: if his teacher said ‘dead’, he would open his hand and the bird would fly away. If the answer was ‘alive’, he would crush the bird between his fingers; that way the teacher would be wrong whichever answer he gave.

‘Teacher, is the bird alive or dead?’ he asked again.



‘My dear student, that depends on you,’ was the teacher’s reply.



Paulo Coelho

Healer
04:56 Aug 23 2010
Times Read: 642

The fabric sheathed her hips and waist accentuating her fulsome curves. The holiday elixir went right to her pelvis which she rotated to the 8-count drumbeat. He sat watching waiting wanting. She clasped her hands behind her head. Her craft unfolded. Wings sprouted from her jutting elbows and snakes writhed in her hair. He raised his arms like a child asking to be lifted and floated upward, encircled, absorbed into her center, pain free, at last.

Food, Life, Losses, Living
02:12 Aug 17 2010
Times Read: 648

Food is all those substances which, submitted to the action of the stomach, can be assimilated or changed into life by digestion, and can thus repair the losses which the human body suffers through the act of living.



- The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin

Spermary, or do you prefer Zooerastia?
22:57 Aug 11 2010
Times Read: 660




From a “blacklist” file included with the latest edition

of Crossword Compiler, a British computer program

for designing various word puzzles. The file prevents

blacklisted words from appearing randomly.



bawdyhouse

bollocksing

bonk

catamenial

clitoridectomy

diddlyshit

effi ng

fanny

fornicatress

gobshite

harlotry

hermaphroditism

nooky

paramour

pissoir

psychosexual

pyroclastic

rat-arsed

rogering

ruttish

sapphic

sexy

shtup

smooching

spermary

stiffy

tribadistic

trollop

wee-wee

whoremasterly



Fond of spermary. Sounds herbal. And zooerastia. Very rasta, spliffish, and fond of animals.

Social Networking, the internet, power and you
00:45 Aug 08 2010
Times Read: 683

How is your life online different from your life in the real world?



Which makes you the happiest? Why?





I have limited experience on social networking sites. Before VR, I was mainly on a writer's site, but it was a place I signed onto first thing, and visited throughout the day. I'm going to tell you about it.



There's a rating system on your work, but also commentary which is the most valuable. People can set up private rooms, which are invitation only, but there were few housekeeping duties so there was no heirarchy, except the hot writers tended to glom on together.



People were polite and cordial. They didn't have to be told to be this way. Some flaming occurred in the main forum over political issues, but I stayed away from those.



I met people in rl. Stayed in their homes, and they stayed in mine.



Role-playing: on the other site our role-playing was assigned to the characters we wrote about. We exercised power through our words, not in manipulating a real person.



You couldn't make someone give you high scores if you didn't deserve it. If the writing wasn't there, even if they liked you personally, you wouldn't get what you thought you might deserve. You'd just get more of their time as they tried to explain to you how to improve a scene - how to improve your game.



Dumb readers!!! you might tell yourself, but what good would that do you if your goal was to improve? This meant that you had to listen, evaluate and learn.



Not easy. Meant accepting that in some ways your work had come up short, hadn't satisfied, people distrusted your narrator. You hadn't brought them to a satisfying conclusion. Your power lay in your ability to do all of the above.



You might still get published ignoring the advice, doing your own thing, but the venue might not be as good as some others.



**************************************

All of the above was to set up a frame of reference, and perhaps an analogy, for answering the question I've posed. Answering it for myself since I'm still trying to work out all the angles on the question, and especially to understand how power and the perception of power works on VR.



Emotion: usually I felt sadness or elation, depending on whether the readers had liked my story. Occasional annoyance with the dumb reader, but never fits of anger.



On VR, there seems to be a lot of EMOTION. People are falling in and out of love with disembodied entities, and I ain't talking angels or demons, but humans sitting at a keyboard, or they're utterly obsessed with moving up, even to the point of clicking randomly to increase their pages viewed, or posting anywhere anytime and anything for the same reason.



Don't get me wrong, I've done all of these at one time or another, but I didn't lie to myself about what I was doing, and frankly I'm kinda embarrassed about it.



Why?



The only answer I can come up with is that as much as I'm online, as much as I enjoy some communication here, I'm always concerned that any time I spend here is time I'm not spending meeting my other goals. You know, the ones in rl.

Does whining ever work?
22:25 Aug 02 2010
Times Read: 693

When you hit a roadblock, you can complain or constructively communicate what you want. The Universe responds better to communicators than to complainers.