Phew.

So I just wrote and deleted several ranty forum posts for my flag forum. They're discussing "Wargames" and I'm absolutely foam at the mouth opposed. See, in the game if two flags declare war on each other, any PvP battles between them are sinking. That means if I fuck up my battle navigation in the battle, I could lose my ship and every thing on it. To the pro side this adds excitement and fun to their daily game playing. To me... well... every time I think about it I want to quit the game and go throw up somewhere.

War to me is not fun, ever. War is disgusting and wrong. To take war and make it into a game insults the people that the word War means dead friends, dead family, dead cultures. I guess I'm a big old bleeding hippy about this. Kinda. If my home, my country were at risk I'd go to war. That's the same thing within this game. But to do it because some jaded old-timer is bored? I'm sickened. Absolutely sickened.

I know it's just a game. But in many ways it's not. I've put months into this game. Each ship I sail has a story behind her. I've worked harder at this game than anything else in my life for far too long. *laughs* So to have someone propose that I have two choices, stop playing or risk my ships, just infuriates me. Every time this subject comes up I get a raging headache.

Am I wise enough to post "I cannot deal with this concept. I must walk away from it." In the various threads about it? Of course not. But I really should. Maybe I will tonight.

And that's a much overdue 15 minutes.

Last thought: Have these people never seen the movie? Dude.

15 minutes then I go do some more dishes. I just finished wiping down the kitchen counters and man does it feel good to see them all clean and shiny again. There's this point with the mess that it just overtakes you and it suddenly takes a lot of work to get it back to clean again. We're coming up on clean now, and it's an accomplishment.

I bought our first real crew ship this morning in Y!PP. Well, it's ordered, we now have to wait 10 days until it's finished being built. It's a cutter, the second smallest ship in the game at 12 crew (sloop takes 7). I'm pretty excited about it because it'll let us do more in the way of forage and pillaging trips.

I was hoping to buy the ship from the shipbuilder I used to make my Sloop. He has posted in his stall that he gives discounts for crew and people that work for him. A couple days ago I caught him in his stall and decided to ask what the discount would be on a cutter. There was a bit of miscommunication, I was looking for info, he appeared to think I wanted to buy right then. I couldn't because I didn't have anywhere near the level of PoE needed, so I thanked him for his time and left.

Since then he's posted an advertisement of his stall on the forums. Included in that ad, was this: "If you don't have the poe please dont bother me."

Dude!

I ended up making a good chunk of PoE this morning on a forage run, more than enough to buy our cutter at standard prices before any discounts. So I debated buying from this guy, or taking my business elsewhere. I ran it past Mike and he said "I felt that way a lot in my business too, but I never stuck a sign in the window telling people not to waste my time."

That decided me. I know it's a game, but I'm coming up on 3 years in business offline, and I would *never* say to a customer to fuck off until they can pay. Information is free, even when it's a pain in my ass, because it makes for good customer relations.

So I quit my job at dude's stall, found another shipbuilder and ordered and jobbed there. And in 10 days, we should have our newest lady.

And that's 15.

So, 15 minutes on the timer as I again attempt to grab hold of the routines that made my life a lot easier before we got Mephostophilis. I just finished a 30-minute tidy and I actually got to the point of rinsing and stacking the dirty dishes. I haven't been able to find the space to do that in weeks. Our kitchen has been a pure disaster area, and !Mike! has been the only person doing any dishwashing.

I have a bit of a get out of chores free pass as I am babying my back and my sciatic nerve as much as I can. I had a really bad flare-up with the nerve a few weeks ago, as bad as it's ever been, and I'm still recovering. It was bad enough that when I saw this tacky as hell cane going for $3, I bought it for the next time I can't walk. There's something very sad in buying a cane so I can simply walk at 29. Ahh well. Not much more I can do about beyond taking it easy, doing my physio exercises and accepting that this is where I'm at.

I've been using the pain as permission to spend a lot of time on Y!PP. If I can't walk, I can certainly sit and sail around a virtual pirate world.

I'm a Captain of a wee tiny crew on there, and it's been such a great fit for me. I was miserable as anything as a pirate in a big crew, I'm too independently minded. So I quit that crew and went on to make my crew, Wings of Aesthir. (10 points if you know how I found the name for it!) I trained myself up to where I felt I could handle other people, and then started taking jobbers. In the weeks since that point I've had 8 people join my crew and 3 leave it. I have a right hand man from one of the first mates to join with me. It's so much fun and it feels damn good to have people actually following me.

So I'm now thinking about making up a website for my little crew to put on all the various things and items of useful info. So far the only thing I have written up are the ideals of the crew. I think I may sit out in the sun for a bit today and write out the way we'll handle money -- personal and crew. We'll see what I end up with.

I want most of all to have a crew of people that have their own goals, their own ideas held together by the ideal of helping each other out under the crew name.

And that's 15.