(no subject)

[larathia.livejournal.com]

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.

Comments

part 2

[larathia.livejournal.com]

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

[saadiira.livejournal.com]

I didn't say my base of comparison was NY. I've actually travelled rather widely, and have done a good deal of READING about St Louis. Having done that with other areas, and then visited them, I'll say that it's reasonably effective. Generally, effective enough that whatever gets written is not negatively impacted., especially as concerns a fantasy setting.


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

[larathia.livejournal.com]

*g* I'm not personally passing judgement on them - just saying that walking around St. Louis wearing a Mets or Cubs jacket/hat is likely to get you some snark, at least. Not terribly well loved teams around there.

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.