Ioh Meets Blue Anew

Ioh Meets Blue Anew
Theme: Pump

An RP I happened upon at the Midian Bunker a while back. Yes, I do remember Blue, and I think I remember about the time that I met her. And if I remember correctly, Beast was the one who first mentioned to her. Not sure, but I just might have the old RP of their first meeting buried somewhere. Not exactly sure what I still have left from before the last reboot of Ioh's photostream.

Anyways, a fun bit or RP. And yeah, the drum cadence linked as theme is pretty cool too. =~.^=

Wandering About In The Bunker

Ioh looked around. He didn't see too much of immediate interest. Staring at the makeshift fountain for a bit,  he gave up on there being any fish. He walked up the the stairs until he came around the wooden walks  where he spotted a feline. Not certain if he knew her, he flicked his tail for a moment in contemplation, then shrugged. Might as well greet and find out. "Hello there."

Standing off to the side, using the shadows and her dark attire to her advantage, the other feline finished her cigarette, tossing the butt to the crates below. No sooner had the embers and ashes stared their journey to the ground was there heard a sound. Creaking boards caught her attention. "Evenin'." Her voice was rocky and used. Her nose and eyes took in Ioh's scent and physique. She fouind him curious, and maybe familiar, but she couldn't put a claw on which sense it was.

For a moment, Ioh continued contemplation over the feline. He picked up in her scent as he got close. There was something that teased at a faint memory. Noticing this, and where he was, he had to be wary. Not all that were familiar were friendly. Regardless, he smiled. "A slow evening."

The other feline was being wary as well. Her one good eye kept a constant gaze as she watched him. She was also in a corner, which only added to the necessity of alertness. Her cybernetic optics zoomed in and out, showing visuals and collecting what data it could. "It has been lately. Lots of people are venturing out. Many are tired of waiting around and living what could scarcely be considered survival." Turning to face him, her metal arms crossed in front of her chest. "May I ask your name?" Maybe finding that would help trigger her memory.

He listened to her talk, but for now wouldn't mention that he was from without and had recently ventured in. No reason to say that. Probably no reason to be cryptic, either. Even so, for her answer, he riddled, "I would ask the same of you. I don't think that this was just a meeting out of the blue. Yo soy el que soy – I am who I am.  And if you know who I am, I'm certain I may know you."

She smirked at his riddled response and continued sizing him up. Her long tail twisted and drove around behind her as she considered his words. As she smiled, her sharp feline fangs peeked out. "Well, I do have this sneaking suspicion that I know you from somewhere." She tapped her metallic pointer finger upon her lips as she sank into thought.

"Considering where we're meeting right now, " he added, keeping with a calm, almost laid back posture with a slight grin, "It's not a long stretch to say we first met some time ago in what used to be Midian."

She let out a little chuckle as she glanced over top the make-shift tents below. "You're probably right," she said softly, then shot look back at him. "I wouldn't know, actually. Lost a lot of memories in an accident a while ago. Lots of people I had to re-meet." She gave a lazy shrug. "My name's Blu, let's start with that."

Ioh's tail swayed more relaxed as she chuckled. A humored response could be positive. Then again, good humors had a way of turning sour. Still, he listened to her, and, when she gave a name, and one he somewhat recognized, he assented to being given her name by her. "Then if you must know, you can call me Ioh." For all he knew, she may have once known him as Joe.

As far as Blue knew, she was meeting him for the first time. His scent kept nagging at her nose as being familiar, but that wasn't much to go off of. "Ioh, huh? interesting name. I like it." She looked away as she bit the inside of her lip. Her tail still flicked and swayed about behind her non-stop. She was really hoping her heat wasn't noticeable yet. She hadn't expected to run into a male hybrid so soon after getting back from the swamps.

"It's of a certain Latin origin." Or close enough. Even among felines similar, he couldn't say the true origins. Their history was better off lost in this moment among the current generations. He noticed her tail swaying. His own gave a slight flick in its sway as he approached closer. "So, what brings you here." He tried to carry on the somewhat casual conversation.

Blue tensed up when he moved closer to her. She held her composure. Her tail flicked as she tried to relax it as much as she could get it to. "Shelter. The kitty family I have left. Just making sure all the younger kits are doing alright." She eyed him again, now that he was closer. "What about you? Did you wander in recently?"

He came a few steps closer then paused. "Family, eh?" Among the cats in Midian, that had at least two possible meanings. Either a litter of their own, or a certain group that lived on the rooftops. Though intrigued to know which, he crouched his curiosity in an assumption, "I bet you have quite a lovely litter."

She chuckled a little at his assumption. "I'm sure I would if I had one. I mean the people I consider family." She swallowed back the lump in her throat as she tried to ignore the way her body was feeling.

He had a better idea who she meant, but it was of no concern. She did say she had no memory, right? Besides, something compelled him to come closer to her. His tail flicked as he realized her scent indicated something more than familiarity. "Well, it's good to have a few cats..., close."

Problem - Ariana Grande (Cover/MIDI Arrangement)

A couple versions of Ariana Grande's single 'Problem' done with slightly different synths.



The only thing I did was play with the synth, recording, and video edits, with Jane Catwalkin'... sorta.

Prairie March

Started composing this Thurs night ( 9-4-2014). Began as a melody that popped into my mind after choir practice.  The cello has the initial melody. From there, a sort of round and various counterpoints formed.  Then the drums filled it out with  a sort of 18th or 19th century sort of cadence.  I swear, I haven't listened to Gorges Bizet in a while. Though 'Carmen' is a pretty cool opera. <.<

Seven-Eight

Another Midian Revival?

Despite not really being much on SL for a while, I still have been able to manage to hear the rumors about Jade possibly starting up 'Classic Midian' again.  There's talk that the Pack and the Catwalkers will return.  But then there's also talk that it might be human only, which makes no sense, considering that the Pack and Catwalkers are both famous and notorious for being hybrid groups.  In fact, I remember long before I came to Midian the first time back in 2007 this talk in clubs and stores about some sim that had a gang of cats, of nekos.  It intrigued me, being that I had already grown accustom to Ioh's leopard spots back then, wearing the Jungle Voodoo Golden Leopard skin.  My concept of what a kitty gang might be back then was something like Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats musical, and, I don't know, maybe Heathcliff?  So the Strays, Catwalkers, and Pack brought about some pretty cool experiences in developing RP that had its fun moments. Sure, there were ups and downs, but overall there were some memorable moments worth their while.

But what about reviving Midian... again?  I don't know. Can't re-create the past, but can't wipe it out completely either. But certainly, we have to define what it was to people to have any idea as to what it ought to become. For despite that classic progressive liberal angst against looking back on the past, even science has to remember that they would not be able to see as far as they could without standing on the shoulders of giants. That is, even progress has its predecessor that helped mold and make the progress better be able to move forward.

But I'll keep it basic. So the first question to ask, though can be the most difficult is:

1. What is Midian?

This is a two-fold question, really, since the two questions being asked are:

1a. What is the owner's vision of Midian?

and:

1b. What is the vision that the players have?

The first part of it may be easy for the owner, but the difficulty comes because, if you want a sim to flourish, especially if you want vibrant RP with great storytelling, you have to consider what the players bring to the table.  Yes, they come to the house as guests.  But even in real life, people visit friends and family for a variety of reasons. Or with a business, you don't just open a coffee shop to sell coffee, you also sell an experience. And that experience is not, and will never be the same for any two people.  Similar, true, but not the exact same, and no one really wants that sameness. If they wanted the bland atmosphere, they wouldn't go out to a coffee shop or to a restaurant.  And even at home, no one wants a dull home experience either. Peaceful, yes, but not dull.

The other question is:

2. What are Midian's limits?

This relates with the vision, which is the internalized concept of what one wants or believes they want to see.  However, this poses the question of the outward projection of how the concept is actualized in real time.

So here, the twofold is better asked:

2a. What does the owner perceive to be the goals and expectations for what happens in Midian?

and:

2b. How do the players that go to Midian perceive these goals and expectations.

At the moment, it seems that both concept and perception are not coming to any common ground between the owner and the players.  Without such ground to found the RP on, it's not going to lead to a healthy, nor successful atmosphere for the RP, and it will most likely choke and die again.  And if you're going to put thousands of dollars on an RP sim in SL only to see it go bust again because neither the owner nor the players can come together and find that fertile common ground to plant the RP in, well, I'd say save your money.  I'd also say it would be a much cheaper venture to take it onto an Opensim grid, since, at least if you don't get a lot of traffic there, you wouldn't be pissing away near as much money and, in some grids, little to no money at all.

But you know, I do agree that concepts and perceptions change over time.  The things that interest me about RP have matured a bit, and I'm not looking for an RP sim what desires to be 'hard core' or 'hard and nasty'.  There's plenty of sex sims out there for that, and even many of them have pretty slow traffic at times.  Maybe sex doesn't always sell, or maybe people want more out of their SL experience than just sex.  The same could be said about meter battles, which are becoming less compatible with certain changes that have happened with the way direction and jumping function.  For some reason, SL seems to be wanting to go away from the more FPS style and experiments with the click and move aspect.

But anyways, I digress. What's important is that common ground gets established between owner and players.  If this doesn't happen, there's really little point to investing in Midian.

Dearest Memories

Fresh Wave

Hoppin'

A New Direction for Blogging

This blog hasn't been daily, and I haven't RPed as Ioh for quite some time.  I have wanted to, but haven't been really sure what I want to do.  Part of me has considered returning back to Midian, but I'm not as sure if that's really where I want to go with Ioh again.  However, that is assuming that Midian is the same as it was.  Not sure that such an assumption is fair, considering that Daey has been the owner of Midian City for some time now, and has recently moved the city to a new sim.  A lot of new things are happening that completely change certain aspects, which could be for the better or for the worse.  At the moment, I'm too indifferent to really say which way is good, bad, ugly, or otherwise about these changes.

I remember the reboot a while back, and thought it could have been good.   However, there was likely still some gnawing by a good many people about old drama, including for me.  That was roughly 2 years ago.  Now? I just don't know.  For a while I wasn't too happy with the Catwalkers for very personal reasons.  These reasons went beyond the RP.  Let too much drama hit me, and probably trusted too many people and my feelings for them too much to think clearly.  Could the issues have been resolved differently?  It's possible, but such possibilities are pointless to dwell on now.  What happened in 2009 is over and done with.  Went on to RP in other places, which were fun for as long as they lasted, and for as long as I kept out of the drama.  By this 'drama', I mean the OOC nonsense that happens in just about every RP where people try to play power games outside the RP and try to push people to do one thing or another based less on the RP and on the way others want to control it.  There's a certain godmodding to in on one hand. Yet, on the other hand, people do seek to play with people that have similar interests and goals.  This is very simple nature that you hear about among religion, philosophy, political science, essentially your general all around human studies.  People whined a lot about 'cliquish behavior' in Midian back in the days of the old Midian Forums, particularly around 2008.  So much argument and whining over things, rather than actually going out and RPing.  Particularly found it an irony that those who whined the most about such things were cliquish themselves.  Or, they had a particular way of RPing that had to accept certain niche ways to play a character.  And such is fine, not only if you enjoy RPing that way, but also if you don't complain about not getting RP, and practically demanding RP to happen because you are there and waiting for something to happen, because that is how you choose to play.  If you just want to wait for someone to RP with you, then continue to wait, if that's what you do.  But don't complain when people don't RP with you, especially if you take little to no initiative to strike it up in some manner, say, writing a post about walking down the street, looking around at the people your eyes happen to meet, and maybe, just maybe, give a simple wave or say 'Hi!' in some manner to greet.  If it works, great! If it doesn't, move on and don't get so irate!

I guess I needed to do a little bit of a Midian tangent, since it's been so long. <.<

*Ahem*

But anyways, moving on....

So, to be honest, I would like to say that I see some promise with Daey. I must say, as a former CW, and one that continues to have an affinity for nekos, this particular picture of her in a sexy catsuit had given me promise for maybe a true good and new generation of Catwalkers:

However, what seems unfortunate in some of the current things I've looked over is how nekos look to have been watered down quite a bit.  Much of the race information I read isn't new to treatment of nekos on other sims, where they are considered weaker, or inferior to humans, as if to set them up to be merely slaves or pets with little to no room to breath.  If this is truly how Midian is to be changed, then I don't see the point.  Ioh was meant to be relatively strong.  Leopards generally are, even the wild 4-legged types. To say that this would be degenerated in a feline hybrid doesn't make sense at all to me. Part of the reason I liked Midian was that it didn't attempt to degenerate hybrids, in so much that a person's RP character themselves wasn't intending to be a degenerate, anyways.  That freeform was, well, a free form to play out your character and develop that character any way you wanted to, that was the draw of Midian for me.  Never much cared for dice systems, and the growth and challenge that RP text combat had was far more interesting than using a meter.  I much preferred the 'within reason' element that allowed for much greater dynamics and less restraints.  And yet, if you wanted to play a restrained character, you had that choice and ability to.  The key there was in the choice, rather than being forced to have to play a certain way.

Not to say there weren't abuses, but, there was much intriguing RP that, despite all the whiny fussy people, became near legend to people willing and able to remember.  People not only enjoyed the potential of their characters, but the actuation of them in a real time streaming story.  For that was the strength of Midian at its heart, the stories that were made and had continued on in Flickr pages, blogs, and otherwise generating a lot of metacontent that kept people curious and wanting to come back, even after being all butt hurt about some nanite infused moron that thought RP was all about head shots, purely personal BDSM porn harem, and doping out of virtual drugs.  Ok... so maybe a good much of that went on, but still!  People had particular visions of Midian and would shout "This is Midian!" like some bronze statuesque god-like Trojan warrior crying out "This is Sparta!"  And there was a damn good bit of fun in all that.

But is that who I am now?  Honestly?  No, not really.  Sure, I want to believe that, push come to shove, Ioh would whip out his sword, Eternal Blue, or maybe a handgun or military grade assault rifle if he happened to acquired such weaponry again, and give some hyper-mech mad man-machine monster thingy a hearty back alley beat em' up brawl.  But is this really how I even picture Ioh any more?  To be honest, beyond the whole Dream Sequence after my fall out from Midian long ago, the attempt at an ending story for Ioh on Mars seems to really point that I've pretty much retired him from RP, if not permanently, then at least from Midian in any meaningful way in the foreseeable future.  If I did return, I'd want to be able to play his particular Feles nature, which keeps him youthful, and able to live nearly a millennium, assuming he doesn't get himself killed in some permanent manner.  Since Ioh's ending sees him dying a natural death, then the likelihood of accepting death is obviously a pretty hard no.  But even beyond that, I've become less trusting of RPers, and don't expect to really be able to do much of what I used to do.  Maybe a part of it is not trusting myself, or maybe becoming conscious about things of my former RP that I simply don't want to go down such paths any more.  For instance, I don't care to do sex RP that much, and not really looking to be tempted into it either.  No longer think picking a fight is much fun, and would be more apt to back away and only fight if put into a corner with no other option than for Ioh to defend himself.  Thus, I don't see much purpose for going back to Midian right now, other than to pay a visit and maybe do a bit of RP with friends I may trust.  Much of my 'serious' RP, or at least that sort of serious attitude, I feel it needs to move to writing books and seeking out ways to be published as an author.  I'm at that age where I really have to consider purpose of things and how they can account to my life work as a whole, and not just the nostalgia of some past play that I was enamored with back in the day.

So it's time to start paving out in that new direction. Maybe this blog with become more of a place for me to explore where I might want to take Ioh in a published story.  For a while, I've been trying to develop the history of the Feles on Mars.  Well, their predecessors in an ancient and long forgotten past.It poses some origin questions that go beyond that generic RP aspect of near future genetics experiments, and somewhat considers a sort of 'ancient aliens' type of concept.  However, not looking to make it about little green men or the world of the UFO sorts.  More or less considering the notion of Egypt and pre-deluge people having had some contact with Martian peoples that came to earth seeking sanctuary.  Not really going into the whole Enoch cycle, though the book and notion of it has intrigued me for some time.  But, pretty much, the particular story I've been mulling around deals with the notion of this last society of Mars being not too different than modern Earth, save for obvious race traits that we'd consider makes them animal-human hybrid humanoids, even though they've considered their appearance as normal and their concept of being naturally humanoid, despite the animal features.  Of course, because they were so different, confusion came and the people from Mars, called Panterreans (all-earth/all-terrain, not anything about 'panthers', despite some being such <.<), were either worshiped as gods or damned as demons by the Earth's early indigenous human population.  Yet, this part of the story is far in advance of the particular story I've been trying to focus on, which takes place on Mars itself.  But, will consider what I'll share on that in other posts.

At any rate, I do hope Midian City success as it grows and matures.  Currently, I have no plans of having Ioh become a resident there of any relevance.  Hopefully there will remain a place for nekos, and hybrids in general, and that they can keep from being watered down from being weaker version of a human that has animal features.  But what is the future of nekos and hybrids in Midian is no longer my fight much any more.  It's sometimes been a thankless fight, all things considered.  And it really isn't my fight any more.  It's for the nekos and hybrids that seek to RP at Midian with some consistency to decide how they want to play.  And if I happen to come along and visit one day, then hurray!  But it's not likely to be today, though it may happen some day.