I quit!

Yep. That’s right. I totally quit my job last week.

I had five years of living the dream before ditching for a nightmare. You’d think that was a backwards way to live life. You might be right but a boy’s gotta do what a boy’s gotta do and when a hot chick makes an offer you can’t refuse. Know what I mean?

So, yeah, I landed in the city where dreams are made and, maybe, destroyed yesterday. I’m still not settled but I think I got a place to crash. Thanks for the poke Dav - sorry it took a day or so to actually get something up here but I had to find me some wireless. Man, I’m fucking excited to be here. I still can’t believe it. I mean how in the hell did this happen. Out of all the people out there… me. That makes no sense but damn I’m good. Go me.

I know lotsa folks, mountain boy in particular, are a bit “concerned” about my “influence” and “unsure” of my “intent”. Whatever dudes. At least I’m not some fucking moody ass freak with a hidden agenda like someone I know. Yep. I said it. What’s he gonna do? Go psycho? Cry like a little girl? Beg for protection? Yeah, that’d be different.

Max is a bit pissed off by this whole thing. Not because he thinks I shouldn’t be here helping her out, but cause I’d totally recruited him for the Madlands project. WTF dude it’s not like I ain’t gonna be around just cause I’m on the other side of the damn country. Shit, just close my eyes and there I am, you know. And it’s not like the crap we learn there won’t really help me out here. Ok, so maybe it won’t help but it certainly ain’t gonna hurt.

Phase one kinda an into a problem. I wanted to make it up to the mountains to get a good look at everything. I mean it’s not like I can just zoom out or anything so that seemed like the place to go. Buncha wusses wouldn’t go up there with me and, yeah, I’m too much a wuss to head up there on my own. So Max and I went up to the top of the highest building we could find that seemed reasonably safe. It was totally questionable though which rocked. Seriously. Death waiting for you on every floor. Boo.

We divided the place up into about 8 different neighborhoods. He’s working on a map  cause his memory is better than mine. I’ll throw it up on the wall of dreams as soon as he sends it my way. It’s a lot bigger than I really remembered. I’m not all that sure of how to go about mapping it out in a bit more detail. Max wants to hit up the city center first. I dunno. Course I wanna do the harbor area which is just a suicide mission until we level up or some shit. I hate grinding.

So this connection sucks so I should post it before losing it. More later.

Holy crap! I can’t believe I’m here. Unfuckingreal.

The Madlands: First things First

OK. So last post I was all Time To Play The Fucking Game and it totally is. I’m fucking ready. I’m also fucking pissed off. I know it’s been close to a year and all. It’s more like six months, but lets say a year cause it doesn’t sound quite so pathetic. I haven’t moved. I haven’t done shit. But somehow I lost the notebook that I used to record so much of this crap. It’s nowhere. I know it’s not a big deal but I really wish I had stuff from before I knew what was going on and from when I was looking at the world with as a gamer and not some crazy ass cat trying to cuddle up in some chicks lap.

Yes. I said cuddle. You gotta play the game my friend.

So. Yeah. Where was I. The world. The Madlands. Yep. That’s what I called it back then and what I’m gonna call it now. And this blog is gonna be me figuring it out how to play it. It’s not about making it anymore. It’s about surviving it. (note to self: I really need a better tag line than that if I ever do make this thing)

First things first. Get my bearings. Start off big. None of that detail crap.

Second things second. Figure out my inventory. What do I got and what do I need.

Third things third. Zoom in. Check out the place. This is the time for some details.

Fourth things fourth. Join a guild. This is pretty much done. I are a cat. Meow. But I need to get a better grasp of who is in the guild and what they can do for me and I for them. What are the strengths. The weaknesses. Do we got ourselves a mage? A tank? Who’s who and all that crap.

Fifth things fifth. Stalk the baddies.

Sixth things sixth. Take em out.

Seventh things seventh. Kill the boss.

Eighth things eighth. Split the spoils. Need before greed and all that.

Repeat as necessary.

Shit it’s been too long since I’ve been on a raid. What am I missing? That sounds way too easy.

Tonight… first things first.

A year of lurking in hell

Yep. I’m coming up on the year mark in just a couple weeks. Hard to believe, that. I didn’t even realize it until tonight when I hooked up with a dude I used to work with. He quit in March before I had any clue what was going on and when I thought I was just obsessed with this game stuck in my head. I was trying to talk him into doing the graphics for me. He was wondering what the fuck ever came of it or if it was just another one of my big plans to take over the game industry that died after I realized it was just the same old bullshit in a different wrapper.

It got me to thinking about everything that’s gone on in the past year. I think I hit on this in the last post, but I’ve gotten myself all wrapped up in the drama. How in the hell that happened is beyond me.

I know this shit ain’t a game but that doesn’t change that I am who I am. I think best and do best when theres a controller in my hands. I’ve always approached my life like it was some sort of crazy RPG. Gotta do the grind. Need more cash. Get more skills. I don’t know what kind of gamer I am, but I obsess and optimize. I figure shit out. I know the levels. I never do the same thing twice cause there’s always a better way.

For the past however many months I’ve been sitting in clan chat bitching that the game sucks ass. That’s not how I play, so why the fuck am I doing it?

It’s time for a plan. It’s time to get back to mapping out the damn level. It’s time to figure out the enemies and prepare for the raid.

It’s time to play the fucking game.

the moon be all red and stuff

You know how when you’re going through something it seems like there’s all this shit going on but then when you look back it seems like nothing happened? I was trying to explain this stuff to my girlfriend yesterday when it hit me that I’m living in one of her stupid soap operas. You know how you could go a month without watching the damn thing and then turn it on to see the exact same people doing the exact same shit? Yep. That’s my life.

Well not so much last night, but for the past few weeks it’s just been red moon red moon red moon ohmahgahd did you see the red moon.

NO I DID NOT FUCKING SEE THE RED MOON I TOLD YOU THIS YESTERDAY!

I don’t know why we’ve been so obsessed with it. It was strange for sure, but I dunno if it was strange enough for two fucking weeks of non-stop talk about it. I think it’s because nobody wants to think about all of the other things happening. I mean who wants to talk about the very real and very scary stuff when they can talk about a glowing red moon.

So, yeah, the moon went and glowed red. I missed it, but a bunch of others were around when it happened. Reports are that it lasted anywhere from a half a second to a minute. Some say it was hours. We don’t listen to them. They’re smoking some good shit or something. What’s even freakier, to me, is that they say the air cleared when it happened. Even people in the heart of the city could see it. Like all the smoke and everything just went away and you could see the sky perfectly and moon turned red for a second and then everything went back to normal.

Nobody knows what to make of it but everyone’s got a theory or ten. Consensus seems to be falling in around it being some sort of vision by the always kickass Saint Feline. Why and how everyone got to see it is still up for debate though. As is whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. The fact that it looked so fucking awesome leads people to say it’s a good thing. The fact that everything in the nightmare is a fucking nightmare leads people to say that it’s a bad one. Plus a red moon isn’t really a good omen, I don’t think. I’m not really up on my omens. Personally, I don’t know what it means for stuff in the future and I doubt that we’ll ever know until we get to the future. And as much as all the damn repetitive talk drives me absolutely fucking insane, it has been a nice distraction.

At least it was until last night when suddenly whatever the fuck is going on with Mountain Boy seemed to take center stage. Maybe someone here can explain wtf this is all about cause we ain’t got a clue. I pretty sure he got the message, but I’m not too sure about that. He wasn’t around when I was, so I don’t really know. That only added to all the bs that was going about last night cause none of us knew that he was even looking for a job.

Not that everything on the other side is all theory and gossip. Saint Feline is most definitely pulling herself together. Shit man, the chick is just on. Well, she will be. She’s more getting there. We still freak her out a bit but only because stalk stalk stalk but who would be freaked out about that. I mean damn we’re worse than a bunch of horny geeks at a trade show snapping pictures of the titties hanging out at the booth. But she’s holding it together and bringing us together. If I were a bit more polite about the whole thing I’d say I was really fucking proud of her. She knows that something is happening and it’s time to bring us together so that’s what she’s doing. I kinda wish I’d been doing the same thing in the only way I really can, which is getting the word out to people with these blogs. I even got a chance to talk to her about the sites and didn’t make an ass out of myself. I brought up a couple ideas for her site too. Would be cool if she pulled it off. We’ll see.

So there’s about a month in a few paragraphs. It’s probably a confused mess, but I tried. I almost made it by noon, too. I fucking rock.

Hitting snooze

Here’s a little known fact about sploit… the dude is a selfish bastard that puts his desires above pretty much everything else. The kid has no self-control or maybe too much of it. Like sleep. He loves fucking sleeping. If it weren’t for that damn alarm clock going off every 9 minutes like fucking clockwork, the kid would sleep all damn day. Unless of course he’s all freaked out about the damn nightmares, then he wants nothing to do with sleep and will force himself to stay up for like 5 days straight which is just a really fucking stupid thing to do because you start hallucinating and shit, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to sleep so he won’t.

So why is he telling you this in the third person like some sort of freak? Because the kid needs help. He wants to play games or hit the streets or some shit and the last thing he wants to do is write some damn blog entry about how much he sucks at writing blog entries. He needs some sort of alarm nagging him every nine minutes to get off his ass and write something. Shit. Every nine minutes would suck but like once a week or something. If there’s been more than seven days without a post, I want you people to comment the shit out of the blog about how much I suck.

Bigger post coming sometime today. Swear. If it’s not here by noon (pst), start bitching. Let’s see who will win this battle. You or me.

Look what the cat dragged in

Fuck. Sorry for just running away after the scream. I know that some of you get why and others of you are probably pissed as hell. Just the way things went down. It got ugly and I didn’t want to add to it. I bought into the idea that it was best to just shut up and that things would change or that we should try to keep what we knew (read: what we have no fucking clue about but think we do) to ourselves in order to keep everyone safe. I think that was a mistake.

Information wants to be free.

It’s like when you go on a raid, you know. You gotta do the research. You gotta know your part. You gotta be ready to act. But you can’t fucking act unless you know what everyone else is doing. You don’t need to know all the little details, but to work like a team you’ve gotta act like one. You gotta be consistent and trust that others will do the same.

Well, here I started sharing shit and setting myself up as that guy. My actions were predictable and people knew that I’d say what was going on. Folks that hated that would hate me for it (and probably not tell me anything). Folks that liked it would love me for it (and probably tell me way too much). Then I just shut up. Now nobody knows when I’ll just ditch again. Nobody knows what I’ll share and what I won’t. That’s not cool.

Things have changed and being quiet didn’t help. Hell, it may have just about wiped someone off the map. I never really liked the guy but shit. I didn’t want him to go through hell. I don’t know if things would have been better if I’d been blogging about what was going on, but they would have been different.

Yeah, I’m talking about Mountain Boy. Sinyx was right, he was in a heap of trouble. I don’t know if there was anything that could have been done in the dream that wasn’t tried. At first we’d all hear him screaming. I think that was BA’s doing. The two of them have something going on* and there’s something about her that just makes everything more intense. But hearing him like that was creepy as hell and no matter what we did, we couldn’t find him. Not even BA which is more than a little scary. Then one day it all just stopped. I don’t know if she was trying to protect us or what. Listening to those screams every night changed us all. It just gets to you. And knowing that he was one of us? Shit. Who was next? Talk about putting us all on edge.

Last night, I was hanging out down by the docks. I hadn’t been there in weeks. The place is just too fucking dangerous for a cat like me to wander around alone and no one’s crazy enough to go with me. But last night I didn’t care. I couldn’t tell you how I found him. I mean I know how I found him in those cages, most were empty, but I don’t know how I found those cages. It’s not like there was a big shiny arrow or glowing door telling me to enter. That would make things easier.

I didn’t even say anything to him. I just saw him and left. I headed downtown, but by the time I’d gotten half way or so and still hadn’t seen anyone that would help, I went back. I don’t know what I was thinking. Fuck it? If I couldn’t get him down myself I could at least put up a good fight, right? I never claimed to be smart.

I thought I knew where he was but fuck all those places look the same. I must have wandered around a dozen of em looking for it. I couldn’t tell you why they dumped him where they did in that alley, but when I saw him lying there I knew he was dead and kicked myself for not talking to him before. But, shit he might have been dead then for all the time I spent checking on him. He must have been in that cage for weeks maybe since the scream. You never smelled something so nasty.

I grabbed a big stick that was lying on the ground and just started poking. You know like you always hear about kids doing with road kill that’s sat in the sun for too long. I never did that when I was little. I think I was scared it really would pop and then I’d get dead animal guts all over me. That’s really fucking disgusting and I was more than a bit OCD back then. Dead animal guts were cool but not cool if they were on me. I don’t know. Maybe it was cruel to poke him with a stick, but I couldn’t just leave him there without checking and I didn’t really want to be getting all touchy feeling with a dead cat. So maybe I am still a bit OCD but dead animals, even in your dream, are really fucking disgusting. There could have been maggots and shit. I think it was on the 6th or 7th poke when I jammed him a bit too hard in the gut. Fuck the noise he made scared the shit out of me. I’m not kidding.

He screamed. I screamed. There was no ice cream. But there were a hell of a lot of tears when I got him back up to the wall. The dude still wasn’t talking when I woke up. I have no clue what happened to him, but something ain’t right. One thing’s for sure though, this is no game.

* Nobody that I know of has a clue of how or why bseeingu.com went crazy on Halloween. The few of us that have taken a closer look at it have decided that somehow when the scream hit, BA was able to tap into it. When we talked to her about it, she had memories of some of these things and others, like the things above, were from a dream where she was “in tune with” Mountain Boy, aka Devon. I don’t have a clue why nobody round here is digging into all of this more. I mean the chick updated her website without a fucking computer and everyone’s all “well, that’s strange” NO SHIT! Really?! Strange? Ya think? Idiots - the lot of em.

The Scream

So, apparently yesterday was the scream. Not just any ol’ scream. Nope. This thing is nasty. I don’t quite get it and thankfully work kept me from sleeping around 1pm which is when it happened, I guess. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what went down and those that were there aren’t really talking about it. I know I have should pushed people to talk about it but I just couldn’t. I don’t know how to explain it but when I was there, I just didn’t care which pisses me right the fuck off now that I’m not.

One thing I did do last night was wander around. I was half hoping I’d find the Badass Dream Chick. Nope. Nothing. Not even a feeling that she’d been there. This is kinda like two months ago only not all like it. At least then I thought she had just found a way out and had taken it. That made it easy to think she’d be ok. Not this time though. We all know she stayed in the mountains and this is where I get pissed. WTF. Why would she do something like that? What did she have to prove?

I’m holding on to the idea that she’ll pop back in after a couple of days. I mean if anyone could do this, she could. Right?

Twofer

First off, huge thanks to Rowan for the latest (err only) excuse for my excuse file even if I totally blew it off in the last post. I’m good like that. Now I just gotta find me a ferret so I can pull it off. I mean I could just lie, I’m not really above that when it comes to making up excuses, but if people think I’m nuts for believing that I’m dreaming dreams with other people, they’re going to think I’m absolutely insane if I have invisible ferrets. Though, if you’re gonna have an invisible pet, I think a ferret is probably the way to go.

Second off, BA Saint Feline, aka psychic aka my badass dream chick aka the girl that saved my sanity, posted to craigslist! It’s been over a month since I’ve seen anything from her on there.

Feast or famine

So, yeah, I’m a tease. I post about some big party and then don’t give the scoop on what went down. No real excuse. No fake one either since nobody helped me come up with one. Whatever. I’m not mad. It’s just an excuse would be kinda nice to have so I didn’t feel like such a jerk.

So, there was this “Feast.” I’ve gotta put that bit in quotes cause the whole food thing was a bust which sucked. I totally went to bed without dinner  so I wouldn’t ruin my, um, feast. Which, yeah, makes no sense but did at the time. I don’t get why they call it the feast when there was not a tasty treat in sight. Something about the cats on the mountain all getting together before the scream and I guess they all feast there. Which I know I knew but I guess I thought we got food, too.

The big thing with the Feast is that loads of dreamers get together on the other side at the same time. I mean we do that more and more now but I get the impression that they didn’t do this so much back in the day. Since we don’t usually all crash at the same time this brings together a load of dreamers that don’t normally see each other. With so many dreamers together, Emmet would come and give some big toast. Though I’m a bit confused on this part because without the drink stuffs how does he give a toast?

I might have had an answer to that question if the dude had actually shown up. That’s right. There was no food, no drink, and no Emmet. So, yeah, I was pretty annoyed by this point and was ready to ditch the party and head down to that crazy ass warehouse to see if it was still there and what was going on. I was saying my goodbyes and looking for Max to see if he wanted to come down with me when I noticed a couple cats looking to the sky.

Now, I’ll admit that the sky on the other side is pretty damn trippy with the way the smoke will swirl against the moonlight, but it’s not something that we usually stand around looking at. So, of course, I had to look up to see what was going on and just as I did I saw a huge bird flying incredibly high in the sky but casting a shadow over all of us. Everyone got quiet and for just a second or two everything felt completely pointless. I mean I’ve never really been the slash my wrists and pop some pills kind of guy, but had I had the chance right then I can’t say that I wouldn’t have. Then that buzz (purr?) that we all feel got really pretty intense. Not huge or anything, but it was distinctly different. Different enough that everyone started talking about it immediately. By then the bird had disappeared behind the smoke, everything went back to normal, and I woke up.

So, it wasn’t a very exciting first Feast. A bit of a let down really. No food. No drink. No Emmet. No badass dream girl. The one good thing, I guess, is that my fridge had a load of leftover chinese. Not the best of midnight snacks but far from the worst.

Bring it on baby

Whoa sorry new reader people for not keeping this thing updated but I spent way too much time on the computer last week and just had to take a break. Used up the last of my PTO so the rest of the year’s gonna be hell. Wheee.

The wall’s been grand fucking central lately. A bunch of crazy dudes have been coming by. New folks is always a good time, but these dudes rock. They’re old friends of Emmet’s with loads of stories of the way things were. You know uphill to school both ways kinda crap but without the screams to stay off the fucking lawn, so’s all good. Plus they seem about as annoyed with Mountain Boy’s attitude as me. Blahblahblah checking up on Providence. As if we care he’s been following him around and going to his place or how much he hates that damn dog but is doing as she saw. Seems pissed at her for this one. Whatever dude, you made your bed, now lie in it.

Spent last night trying to check out this warehouse down by the water that I’ve been hearing about. Didn’t dare get close enough to get a good read on what was going on. The guys standing around outside the place were just way too intense and talking of some dudes on a hunting trip. I was never much opposed to the idea of killing little beasts before I found myself in this fur covered avatar.

Everyone’s prepping for the feast. Totally psyched that I’ll finally get to hear one of Emmet’s toasts. Folks seem to be expecting a big turnout this year what with so many of us new dudes and all the excitement of Saint Feline. Even some of the experienced seem to be a bit more into her lately. Don’t know what took em so long… lusers.

Gotsta run. Gotsta get myself asleep in time for the party. I’m kinda scared I’m gonna dream about eating a 10 pound marshmallow and my fucking pillow’s gonna be gone.