Sandwich Rations

Over there!

Teuthida — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:05:48 +0000

This blog has moved! The new address is:

http://www.sandwichrations.com

See you over there!

Anna’s Friday Five: The Three R’s

Teuthida — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 06:10:33 +0000

Ouch! Sarth+3? Still hurty. In any event, I didn’t fill out Anna’s Friday Five earlier today, so while I’m licking my wounds (metaphorically), here are some Friday Five answers!

Can your character read and write?
All my characters can definitely read and write, although of all my girls, Agness and Ovistine are the ones most likely to curl up with a book for fun. Those two are definitely into the “trashy” genre, by the way — if there’s a “Dwarves of Our Lives” paperback series, Ovistine definitely collects it!
Is he/she good with numbers and business-like things?
Agness and Trisia are for sure! Agness is better with theoretical numbers; Trisia is better with business numbers. But of my girls, Lyja is the star in this field. She’s a businessgnome with an GMBA (Gnomish Masters of Business Administration). Not only is she great at doing things like taxes, she loves it! She’d have been an excellent accountant or banker-gnome, but she’s thrilled to have a stake in her own business.
Does your character have a formal (schooled) education or an informal (apprenticed/learned by experience) education? Or both?
Agness and Ovistine are both apprenticed (Agness to Nancie, Ovistine to Agness). Trisia has no education to speak of and no formal apprenticeships, either. Teu — hard to say; I’m not sure. She definitely seeks guidance from the elemental spirits, but I’d hardly call that an apprenticeship. Lyja, however, went to school, college, and grad school. As I mentioned earlier, she has a GMBA — and it’s in finance.
Has he/she learned another language than the one they grew up speaking (in full or in part)?
Agness would speak a rudimentary form of Dwarvish if she could. Obviously, Ovi and Nancie both speak Common as well as Dwarvish, although Dwarvish was the language spoken in their house when Ovi was growing up. Lyja speaks both Gnomish and Common, but considers Common her primary tongue. Teu only barely speaks Common, and would much, much rather speak Draenei if it weren’t considered rude to do so in front of people who don’t speak it!
What does your character’s handwriting look like?
People who get mail from me in-game know that my girls tend to leave a note with their items. I think most of them have legible, “girly” handwriting, although Nancie tends to write in block capitals.

Mental note: Not all guys are sleazy.

Teuthida — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:19:03 +0000

One day, many many many many moons ago, I’d told a friend of mine that I was on Feathermoon under the name of [MyNowDeletedToon], and to look me up if he rolled a character there.

A few days later:

RandomPerson: My, aren’t you a fine-looking woman!
Me: /ignore RandomPerson
Friend: Oh, hey! RandomPerson is that friend of yours… he just sent me a tell saying you’d put him on /ignore.
Me: Oh, crap!

I will admit to this: my /ignore finger is very, very trigger-happy. I /ignore people for /yelling in cities (oh, if only I could /ignore Arcanist Braedin). I /ignore people for chattering OOC in the auction house. I /ignore people for using Trade for random babble. I have installed IgnoreMore, and I am not ashamed.

My first toon was a human female. I’ve also played nelf females, draenei females, dwarf females, and gnome females. I think the highest I’ve ever gotten a male toon is about 28… I’m just not very interested in male characters, for whatever reason.

And if you’re playing a human or a nelf or a draenei, people will randomly whisper you with things like:

Sleaze1: hot ass

Sleaze2: mmmm wanna cyber

ICSleaze: Would you care to make ten gold for a few minutes’ easy work?

…I admit, ICSleazes give me a moment or two of pause, because okay, sleaze, but in-character RPing sleaze! It’s kind of awesome, in a “please be awesome somewhere else” sort of way.

But, as Anna points out, randomly hitting someone up for RP may be their very first attempt at doing it — and now I feel guilty for all the times I’ve cut somebody off at the knees and quickly punched the /ignore button.

The other day I was passing through Darkshire. As usual, I had ImmersionRP on. (Agness’s current IRP description: “For some reason this warlock is trying to make her imp stand behind her and stay out of sight. It isn’t working very well.”) I got a tell:

RandomNightElf: You RP?
RandomNightElf: I’d be happy to RP with you in Darkshire.

My first thought: Oh ew! I’m so not going to cyber with him in the undead-infested land of Darkshire. How is that even an appropriate venue? Why isn’t he looking for people in Goldshire or something?

Which should have been my first clue that maybe this guy wasn’t looking for Deeprun Tram-style action.

I really wasn’t up for random RP at the time; I was on my way elsewhere anyway. But I did whisper him to say, “um… when someone with an obvious female name gets a random tell asking for RP, she may be a bit suspicious.”

Which is completely true — and completely unfair.

Exactly how are guys — or girls, for that matter — supposed to meet people if they can’t whisper anybody in different zones? Is it really so bad to look up the people in /xtensiontooltip2 and ask if they’re interested in spending some time RPing? Of course it’s not. Not everyone hangs out in Stormwind, and at 11am server time, the server’s pretty dead. If you’re not into Goldshire-style RP, the crowds in Stormwind probably aren’t your style, either. Dalaran might be way too taxing for your computer. Where else do you run into folks? That’s what global channels are for; that’s what RP mods are for.

So, RandomNightElf, I apologize (and if I could remember your name, I’d apologize in-game), and next time I’ll give someone who does that the benefit of the doubt.

(Postscript: You may have noticed that I left out dwarf and gnome females on that list. Is it because no one’s ever hit on my dwarf or gnome girls? Actually, no! It’s just that they only do that in character, in person. And, amusingly enough, only the younger of my dwarf girls gets hit on — the older one was deliberately designed to look like someone’s mom, which she is. It’s not a hardship to hear someone telling my dwarf lass, “Ach, ye’re one o’ th’ most bonnie lasses I’ve seen in ages — would ye take this bouquet frae me?” )

Anna’s Friday Five: Sights and Sounds

Teuthida — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 19:17:51 +0000

And now we get to the whole reason I started this blog: so I’d have somewhere to post responses to Anna’s Friday Five posts. Today’s is Sights and Sounds:

What is your character’s most recognizable trait? (If someone saw your character in a pub/on the street, what would they first notice? What makes them immediately recognizable as themself?)

What does your character’s voice sound like?

Do they like to sing? Can they sing?

Does your character have a noticeable accent of any kind?

If your character was spending an evening in an inn/tavern/pub, where would they sit? What would they be doing?

Teuthida

Teu is a magpie at heart. She likes gaudy, shiny, gem-encrusted things, and she also likes stuff like Sprung Whirlygigs and “battleproof tinsel”. In the Halls of Stone, when Valinar grabbed a Sprung Whirlygig off an enemy, she squeaked with joy and asked if she could have it. He handed it over… and she tied it to her horn. So if you run into Teu, you’re going to notice bling and glitter and shiny stuff. Her enchants are often of the “really sparkly” variety; it’s amazing she doesn’t glow. In the Winter Veil season, she ties jingling bells to her hooves and wanders around chiming.
Teu has a pleasant voice — low alto, surprisingly nice to listen to. It’s just that what she says can be so odd and confusing that nobody really notices the voice itself. (When she’s speaking Draenei, it probably comes across much nicer.)
Teu loves to sing and is a really good singer, actually! It’s one of those things no one knows about her, because she doesn’t sing in Common.
Oh, you bet she does. She’s got the typical in-game Eastern European accent, and she speaks broken Common and gets quite a few words wrong at that. Now, after four years, some of that is actually a put-on. Her Common isn’t quite as broken as it looks. However, she’s discovered that a lot of people find broken Common quite charming, so she hasn’t bothered to put in the effort it would take to correct it. Also, Teu sucks at languages. She is really, really, really bad at all of them. She may be exalted with Ironforge and Gnomeregan and Darnassus, but she doesn’t know a word of Dwarvish or Gnomish or Darnassian. Her Ambassador status has much more to do with her ability to get along with people than her ability to speak the language.
If at all possible, Teu would be cooking or serving something. If the circumstances didn’t allow for that, she’d be making happy, bubbly conversation. Teu likes people and likes hanging out with people, but she doesn’t need to be the center of attention.

Ah, but I have other toons! Let’s see what the rest of the girls are like…

Ovistine

Ovistine’s most prominent physical feature is her braids. When she first went to Northrend, she thought about putting them in buns so she could fit ear-warmers into them, but people actually failed to recognize her! Her braids are so much a part of her that I actually think of them as a full-out part of her healing (and gave Teu pigtails as soon as barbershops went live).
Ovi has a perfectly average voice — not too high, not too low. She’d sing high alto if she were singing.
Which she can do if she has to, but she’ll never win awards for it.
Ovistine worked really hard to get rid of her accent. She grew up in Stormwind, and the last thing she wanted was more attention for being different. As a result, she started off speaking with no accent, deliberately. These days, though, having met a bunch of happy, wonderful, self-confident dwarves, she’s stopped editing the dwarf syntax out of her voice before she talks. She’ll probably always have a “human accent”, but her word patterns are decidedly dwarvish.
Ovi’s pretty quiet. She’d probably be drinking like a fish dwarf, mind you, but would be listening more than she’d be talking.

Nancie

I think the first thing most people would notice about Nancie is she’s an older dwarvish woman. She’s old enough to be a grandmum, and has the wrinkles and grey hairs and serious expression to prove it.
Nancie’s voice is higher than Ovi’s; she’d be a low soprano if she were singing.
Nancie can’t carry a tune to save her arse, but boy, she sings with the best of ‘em!/li>
Like many dwarves, Nancie has the standard Blizzard Dwarvish accent, complete with all sorts of apostrophes.
In a pub, Nancie would be drinking, laughing, pounding her fist on the table on occasion, and trading war stories. She’s happy to sit and listen, but she doesn’t necessarily listen quietly.

Lyja

It used to be her business attire! She carried a clipboard and wore a three-piece suit. These days, though, you’d probably have to look twice to be sure you were seeing Lyja; she changes her hairstyle every time she passes a barbershop. It’s usually strawberry-blonde — except for Winter Veil, when she dyes it green.
High and squeaky! Lyja’s also prone to giggling. A lot.
Lyja will not sing in public. Well, if you pay her, she might sing.
No accent for Lyja! She took diction courses at business school, though, so she’s very articulate and easy to understand.
If Lyja’s in a pub, it’s almost certainly because the pub owner has hired her to look over the books. And she’d find that a fun and relaxing way to spend an evening, too.

Agness

Left over from her days walking through shadow, Agness still bears a little bit of haze around her, generally at the hem of her dress. She blames that on the Shadow Silk, if Vaelen’s around to notice.
Another low alto here; Agness also spends time practicing her seductress voice. It comes in really, really handy when distracting Vaelen from noticing that imp who keeps following her around.
Agness only sings if she’s getting paid for it, but when she does, she’s got a smoky torch-singer type of voice.
Just the human accent.
Agness would be sitting by the fireplace knitting, sewing, or doing some other kind of craft she can tuck into a bag.

“Sandwich Rations” — say what?

Teuthida — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:52:01 +0000

Like many Draenei, Teuthida speaks broken Common with an Eastern European accent. Despite the fact that she’s been primarily speaking Common for several years now, she still doesn’t have the knack of it, and some misspeakings have caught on more than others. (There was the time she said a pair of gnome friends of hers — a pair where the male gnome was madly in love with the female gnome, who barely tolerated him — were off “boinking together”. She meant bonking together — as in bonking other people in an arena! The female gnome in question was not amused.)

Her greeting is often “Salutings!”, but then there was the time she tried to correct “salutings” to “salutations” — and totally missed. Instead, she said “Greetings and sandwich rations!”

Friend: …I think ye’ve got that a bit mixed up, Teu.
Teuthida: Oh, oh, I meant…
Friend: I like sandwich rations.
Teuthida: *cheerfully* Well! In that case, it is exactly what I meant! Greetings and sandwich rations!

After LK came out, I ended up fishing. And fishing. And fishing some more. Go figure — I seem to really like fishing now. It may have something to do with the fact that fishing produces such awesome food — including food that replenishes mana! Anyway, for raids, she generally has a fish buffet… but with mages around, those can easily be turned into “sandwich rations”.

And thus, “sandwich rations” has become one of the keywords that goes along with Teuthida in my head.

(I pondered a lot of other blog titles — things like Braids and Blastings, Beer and Squid, HealHealHealHealHeal, and so on, but “Sandwich Rations” is weird and unique and makes no sense whatsoever, which I find really appealing for some reason. )

Let’s try this again.

Teuthida — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:32:27 +0000

Ages ago I had a WoW-related blog on Blogger, but I found I had very little to say on it, and I closed up shop.

These days, Anna keeps posting Friday Five posts and I keep wanting to write things, and I never end up doing it. And there are all kinds of things I want to babble excitedly about. So what the heck — I’ll give it another go, and if I don’t post much, well, you can catch more activity from me on my knitting blog or my review blog. Because I totally believe in the value of compartmentalizing!