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lkh_lashouts2006-05-19 05:34 pm
larathia.livejournal.com) wrote in lkh_lashouts2006-05-19 05:34 pm
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Stop me if you've heard this one. Really. I think I need a hard smacking and this may well be the perfect place to come.
See, I love the Anitaverse. I just can't bloody stand Anita anymore, or LKH's writing of her.
...Which is tempting me to start an RPG. All originals, or second string characters, but no Anita - Anita's dead, her triumvirate is dead with her, and anyway the setting would be Chicago and not St. Louis, so while some of the old favorites might transfer, most wouldn't.
Oh. And no posted smut that hasn't got a provable plot bearing (like a vampire deep-rolling someone, so they can control them later, or a lycanthrope dominance contest).
I've poked around looking for Anitaverse RPGs and they're as All About The Smut as the Anitaverse itself has become. So one must assume that an Anitaverse RPG that was about the world and the laws and non-smut character interaction would probably either Go Nowhere or devolve into horribly written sex, weighed down by its canon.
*bows* Please cluebat me. Hard. The brain keeps thinking this is a good idea and should be tried. The brain is very bad and needs to be taught a lesson.
See, I love the Anitaverse. I just can't bloody stand Anita anymore, or LKH's writing of her.
...Which is tempting me to start an RPG. All originals, or second string characters, but no Anita - Anita's dead, her triumvirate is dead with her, and anyway the setting would be Chicago and not St. Louis, so while some of the old favorites might transfer, most wouldn't.
Oh. And no posted smut that hasn't got a provable plot bearing (like a vampire deep-rolling someone, so they can control them later, or a lycanthrope dominance contest).
I've poked around looking for Anitaverse RPGs and they're as All About The Smut as the Anitaverse itself has become. So one must assume that an Anitaverse RPG that was about the world and the laws and non-smut character interaction would probably either Go Nowhere or devolve into horribly written sex, weighed down by its canon.
*bows* Please cluebat me. Hard. The brain keeps thinking this is a good idea and should be tried. The brain is very bad and needs to be taught a lesson.
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Creve Coeur - which I can never spell right - is a fairly well off suburb of the greater St. Louis area. I think Anita's even driven to/through it a few times. Very pleasant looking place, really, and it's not hellishly expensive for St. Louis. Comfortable middle-verging-on-upper-middle-class, would be how I'd classify it.
no subject
no subject
-Dira-
no subject
Have some local freebies:
1) There's a road in North County (around the Florissant/Hazelwood area) called Sinks Road. It's called that because the area is full of sinkholes - the steep dips in the earth you get when a cave collapses. That whole area was/is owned by Laclede Gas, was used for natural gas, and few houses get built there because the ground is, yep, uneven/unstable. The road itself has many twists and turns to avoid said sinkholes.
Net result: One of the most beautiful back ways in the St. Louis area, with a paved road kept in great repair that twists and turns through thick forest that, especially in autumn, is breathtaking with color. It's only a few miles from end to end, really, and hemmed in by your more usual wide throughfares, so it's a bit of a quite-local secret. Any lycanthropes could have an effing blast in there.
2) There's St. Louis City and St. Louis County. Unless you're going to SLU or are a highly poor/urban background sort, you're living in the county. (I always laugh at how the fanged and furred got the riverfront - they so got it because nobody with normal human attributes could survive the area too long. Hell, by the look of Anitaverse, they really cleaned the area up.) The county has all the suburb-cities, which can expand to the south and west, but in the north is stopped by the Missouri River. In general, to the east (read: near Mississsippi River) are the poor, and the South County, to the north are the middle class, and to the west/southwest are the area's very well-to-do. (Again, I laugh because yep, the southwest, west county area is sooo where the better vampires would want to live. Very pretty, quite expensive for the area, generally wrapped in little woodlands.) Of these, I think Ladue still holds the record for the most 'select' area, but I might be wrong.
3) Most of the little suburb towns have little festivals - those parking lot carnivals - in the spring, on the weekends. If you're a teenager with a car, you can pretty much hit a different one every weekend from april through june, but only if you're reeeeally bored. (Which, this being St. Louis, you probably are.)
4) Unless it's Denny's or Steak 'n' Shake or Wendy's, the entire. city. is largely in bed by 10pm. Hence why teenagers get bored.
5) Local quirk: The north county, middle class town of Florissant is pretty much owned and run by one man, who's run it forever, (read: I think at least the past 20, 30 years, when it stopped being farmland) and the cops really do stop anyone who looks under 18 if they're on the streets past 10 or so. Curfew law.
6) Most suburban residential streets have a speed limit of 25 (meaning people drive at 30 mph most of the time). The relatively poor town of Dellwood, however, deliberately set their street signs to a speed limit of 20 and put stop signs at every. friggin. intersection. as a kind of permanent speed trap - since if you habitually go 30, in that area you're therefore speeding.
7) In this town, if you're local, people know how much money you came from by what high school you graduated from, and most locals know at least the top five and bottom five school districts off the top of their heads. Racism is, unfortunately, alive and well in the area and most white people will leave an area that blacks are moving to. (I *think* the mayor of the City is still black - I do recall a quiet but widespread "oh, there goes the neighborhood" when that first happened. Sad but true, and one of those things that makes me look at LKH sidelong when she writes about black lycanthropes being rare. She's a St. Louis native, I've gotten used to double-checking locals for things like that.)
part 2
8) Last one. The suburban streets tend to wind and twist more than most towns I've been to - partly because they weren't originally one street. There's streets with name changes every few miles as they cross towns. Same road, different name. It's mostly locals that can follow this without getting bewildered or lost. A person giving good directions will give you the street names as they appear when you're making a turn - but by and large, most locals will use one street name for the whole road and leave you to catch up.
A corrolary to this is that most St. Louisans never leave St. Louis. They do remember all the ways to get around and all that, but they'll remember Shiny Things that existed or happened years ago. More than once I've asked directions and gotten "Hang a left/right where X used to be..." which is of course no help at all to someone new to the area.
...Oh yes. And you follow the sports teams, so you'll definitely know this one.
The Mets are pond scum, and so are the Cubs, and being a fan of either team won't win you ANY friends. (And let's not talk about the attitudes toward Kansas City. It's not as bad as toward NY or Chicago, but it's pretty damn venomous unless we haven't got a team and they do, which is where it reverses cos at least they're Missourian.)
*salutes* Hopefully none of that was new, but if it was, have fun.
(And wow, that was longer than I expected.)
Re: part 2
The Mets rock. Sorry, they do. They do not act in a pond scummy manner, and are a very good team when they're on. The Cubs do not rock. I've developed a bit of a fondness for the Cardinals, at times.
I would expect animosity toward New York. It's NORTHERN. Missouri was in opposition to it during the Civil War, so I'd see no reason to expect attitudes to be any more accurate about my home state there than in Florida, (or Georgia), where they also did not tend to leave the state if born to it. I've lived both in the South and with Southerners. I've got a point for comparison. I've also traveled extensively in the South West, particularly through Arizona...an entity with thought patterns all its own, but also typical in some ways of a place settled later than the East Coast.
Most places of that nature also have societal dividing lines as concern what high school one went to...that's pretty typical. (In my area, we have that by town. Long Island is a giant suburb going to beach and even semi-rural in places, with dozens of towns.) Knowing which is which is a feature of living there, true enough.
Actually, the St Louis area from everything that I've come to understand is quite comparable to our own upstate suburbs, from flora to general layout, and including the windy ass streets, and some of the interesting older architecture. Likely quite close to Westchester and Putnam, at least in part, and certainly in part points further North (All of NY is NOT Manhattan, and any other city, pretty much, is in no way comparable to that..though outlying areas often ARE). The further up there, the earlier they roll up the sidewalks, also..except for Denny's, etc. The weather can also be somewhat similar, although tornadoes are rarer here.
Would there be a huge problem with marijuana and drinking amongst the bored teen population? Perhaps designer drugs? Also pretty typical where they do things like close down the local arcade for being a bad influence, and where the closest movie theater is reachable only by car.
-Dira-
Re: part 2
And, no, no problem. Actually, my high school (which was middle/upper-middle class on the area maps) had so many marijuana fumes blowing around in summer school that some of the students IN summer school had to win their grades through contact highs. And yeah to the drinking too, though owing to there being nothing much to do, most of the evening gatherings were in parks. Lie on somebody's car hood, drink and smoke and generally bitch at the stars. Designer drugs I wasn't into, but I know they were around.
The main weather notes for St. Louis are:
Spring: Tornado season. Seriously, it's not at all unusual to average one tornado warning every few weeks in march and april. And where it's not tornado watch or tornado warning, it's Severe Thunderstorm alerts. The Midwest gets the biggest, loudest, most ferocious thunderstorms in the world, and they're used to it. (I used to sit out on my porch during some of them - quite ruined my taste for the average showerhead. Thunder and lightning and POUNDING rain, causing flash flooding in areas...) I've never met anyone quite like a midwesterner for the casual attitudes toward lightning strikes and tornados. I care not what the meteorologists say. In St. Louis, Spring is March and April.
Summer: HUUUUUUUMID. Those two rivers really make it humid, muggy, and mosquito-ridden. Also sometimes with the thunderstorms. Don't-Breathe-Days. (AKA Ozone Action Alerts.) Weatherwise, Summer is May-Sep.
Autumn: humid and cool, really. Fog happens a lot. Very thick, can't-see-more-than-fifteen-feet-ahead sort of fog. Sep-Nov.
Winter: I used to think it wasn't a proper winter unless the city pipes had frozen. Used to get plenty of unscheduled no-school days in december and january when they'd freeze and burst...really water management tends to govern the year all around. Dec-Feb, but sometimes winter doesn't really hit until January. February is almost always an icy snowy bitch, though.