Sender: Bellerophon
Subject: Re: No Subject

What an interesting question!

I like to take sayings and make them my own... but I don't know if I strictly have a favorite. It changes from day to day, like the weather in the forecast when they're saying it's going to be a breezy day and then it rains on you when you're out shopping for produce at the local market.

How about this one: you either die an unsung hero, or live long enough to become a legend.

What about you, my freeloading friend? Anything to share?

Sender: Bellerophon
Subject: Re: No Subject

It's not plagiarism if it's not copyrighted. All art is derivative! Certainly, Maurice Leblanc could tell you that were he still alive, given his collection of stories featuring Sherlock Holmes... or, pardon me, Herlock Sholmes, facing off against Arsène Lupin. ^w^)b

I have to say, I'm not usually much of an alcoholic, though we all have our vices and I wish you luck in disposing of yours.

I only have some wine on occasion. More frequently, I cook with it.

The last bottle I bought went right into the Beef Wellington...

Wait, no, I lied, I did have some beers with the yakiniku just recently.

In any case, that's a morbid one. If we're talking sayings from that ballpark, I vastly prefer "carpe diem".

Though I'd also like to carpe noctem.

Or, more broadly, carpe vitam! Yes, that one suits me best. So, you're a man of gloomy disposition, are you?

Sender: Bellerophon
Subject: Re: No Subject

My, but you're a pedant.

We're both online, aren't we? Nobody is being genuine. Fake gold tiaras and glass diamonds. We're all playing dress-up with our personalities - some people are simply more blatant about it than others, for one reason or another! You can't possibly be as gloomy IRL as you are here.

I would hope, at least. The popularity of that gloomy-and-handsome type tends to fall off sharply after one's teenage years, so if you keep that up, you'll be sad and alone at the edge of the universe.

"Memento mori" is no less overused, you know.

Sender: Bellerophon
Subject: Re: No Subject

Crikey! You know, with a personality like that, you could stand to dress it up a little... though it is true that no matter how much you polish a turd, it does, ultimately, remain a turd. Hoho.

I look forward to seeing what other assumptions you might come to about me and my personality! Elaborating further will actually kind of detract from the point, so I'm not going to explain it. You will either eventually arrive at the correct conclusion, if you're as smart as you're trying to sound, or...

Well, I shan't say.

That said, didn't your parents ever tell you not to be too honest with strangers on the Internet? If they didn't, they really should.

They really, really should.

In no small part because strangers on the Internet, truthfully, don't give two shits about you and don't want to hear it, generally speaking, not because of infosec concerns...

Sender: Bellerophon
Subject: Re: No Subject

Well, you know what they say - how are you going to love somebody else if you don't love yourself first? <3

Maybe that's my new favorite saying of the day, actually! Perhaps something good HAS come from this conversation for one of us. Clearly, not you.

I'd prefer not to divulge any information about my family situation, given you think you're so cleverly dodging divulging anything about yours. Think what you want! I graciously permit you to. Is that the kind of thing kids expect narcissists to say these days, or am I overacting?

(Before you go and whole-arse a big, fat, snarky and juicy response to that one thinking you're on to something, I'll spell it out in plain text: I'm being sarcastic. Hope the mood indicator helps, big wheels.)

Sender: Bellerophon
Subject: Re: No Subject

My decisions are mine and mine alone. That remark about parents telling you what to do really got you good if you're still fixated on that one, hm? I sense a complicated family history that you haven't yet unpacked with a licensed therapist.

That said, I can probably let you in on a couple things, since you're being so... transparent, yourself. For the record, I think you're full of shite, but maybe you really are telling the truth about any of that. I certainly wouldn't be able to tell. Online, we are all nobodies.

With that in mind, take the following with a grain of salt:

- I'm a decently famous book author, though I could stand to be more famous
- Both of my parents work in creative fields and are fairly successful, but neither has anything to do with regular book publishing
- I have violently savaged a lot of people back in my school days with a tome of War and Peace, which is still the shittiest book I've sat through, and I have read Twilight
- I'm a linguist by education and I fluently speak six languages, two of them natively, the rest acquired; German happens to be one of the languages I know

I'm also currently working on a seventh language, but that's not particularly relevant!

In any case, I have a very good relationship with my parents, I'm incredibly grateful for everything they've ever done for me, and I'm past the age where they would have to take me to go potty.

Also, all sarcasm aside, I'm sorry to hear about your illness. Is that why you picked this game up? Can't move around IRL, so you're getting your recreation in VR? That has to be miserable.

Sender: Bellerophon
Subject: Re: No Subject

You can choose to believe what you like. That's the beauty of making your own decisions, isn't it? Your opinions are eternally your own, regardless of what other people tell you about themselves, the world, or yourself.

Although being too bull-headed about it isn't particularly good either. That's how you get those weird conspiracy theorists who think that school teachers are in the pockets of Big Orb and that the Earth is actually flat.

In any case, my parents have decades of work experience in their fields, but I wouldn't consider them famous. Still, they are successful - you just wouldn't recognize their names without an online lookup. Or perhaps you might, if you're into animated movies? My father is a decently well-known anime director, though he sticks to movies rather than the episodic format, and he used to do a lot more work back in the day. He's grown a little disillusioned with the current industry and has chosen to only work with studios that don't work their animators to half-death and can actually prove it.

As you might imagine, in the modern animation industry, that's difficult.

(My parents are very pro-union. I love my family, honestly.)

In any case, I don't live with them and I provide for myself, so I would consider myself independent.

I know Japanese and English natively, and I have learned German, French, Italian and Spanish. As I said, I'm working on a seventh - that would be Mandarin Chinese. I can already read passably, but don't ask me to speak it yet!

As for my purpose in playing this game... The World is distantly based on the Epitaph of Twilight by Emma Wieland - a somewhat obscure epic poem that was used as a basis for the prototype of this game, Fragment, and the remnants of which purportedly remain in this game to this day: namely, the Lost Grounds, as an example. Wieland's site was ostensibly copy-protected, so the poem doesn't survive in full to this day - all we have is chunks and fan translations.

But more to the point, it is a poem for which a series of fairly successful MMOs has been created. Isn't that amazing? A poem inspiring something of this scale...

I want to figure out more about the original poem, in interests of studying what made it so inspiring for the game's creators, and seeing if I can replicate that particular magic in my own work. That's about it.

A little dorky, I know.