infinity zone

Ugh. Well, ending the weekend on a blah note is pretty telling for the upcoming week. I'm in charge of managerial duties while my manager is on PTO, and I received e-mails on Saturday from designers already requesting alerts when I'm finished editing files due this next Friday. Good grief. I've never flagged so many e-mails in my entire career as I have in the last two months.

Travian's s5 war wrapped up at long last. FUSE (Fully United SE quadrant, headed by the former PD meta) built their World Wonder to level 100 first. Everyone in the Outlaws started sending out their goodbyes and congratulations for making the full 300-day commitment. Thanks, Sapph, for dualing with me for the last ... how many months? Five? Nearly half the game, or maybe even longer. I ended with 20 villages, in the top 700 players on the server, and with over 57k troops left in reserve.

I was happy to get messages from other alliance-mates who knew I had been with the alliance since the beginning of the server. I'm so proud we finished third in the game, even if I was an overstressed diplomat and lousy leader.

I'm not playing Travian for a long, long time, though. Keeping up with it has burned me out continuously.

Except I can't blame it for this funk I've slipped in since Sunday. Travian goodbyes were actually the highlights of the day. The quietness led to me contemplating if I should spend less time online. Hrm...

Travian stress. Will not go into it. Hopefully the intervention from my other server leader will help me stop stressing over the damn game. If not? Maybe I'll just freaking delete and leave the group to wallow except I'd feel pretty guilty about it.

Fanfiction archiving. I've made a community, edges_of_sanity, for the slow archiving of all my fanfics. I've got several oneshots uploaded now. The multichapter fics are going to be the ones that make me want to kick things. Donkey Madness and Darkness Bloom skdflsdkfjsldf

Because I don't want to do my work right now, I'm going to make a list of all the fandom characters I've ever RPed -- through LJ, e-mail, or IM. I've probably done this before, but meh. Updating it.

( RPed Characters )

Fffff... Probably old news to some people, but Advent Children Complete? Hell yeah, Rude with a bazooka! It's nice to see Tseng a little more too, but Rude with a bazooka. Reno and Rude being completely badass in the helicopter. Maybe it's a good thing I never got the original Advent Children movie. :| I want this.

In other news... Hmmm. I've got almost all of my papers to do my taxes; just waiting for the paperwork for my bank CD. I never want to take the time to actually do them, even though they've been relatively simple because I've just been working one job. I guess last year was the first time I collected from two W2s, moving from school research to my internship. And now, for 2008, I moved from my internship to my contractor work. And I'm still wondering if I'm going to end up owing taxes just because those two tax brackets may be totally different. I don't know how the firm projects how much a contractor makes in a year when projects may pay different rates. I guess they may still have a bracket for a "junior grade technical editor" and work off of that. Blah blah blah...

Spending this week at my parents' house; got a doctor's appointment in the middle of the week, so I need to stay in town for it. Little sister doesn't have school tomorrow/today, so we'll just hang out while I'm not working. I'll probably end up avoiding watching her play Persona 3; she's near the end already, and I kinda want to watch the ending for myself. :|;;

I started up on a S5 on Travian earlier this week with some veterans from other servers. I've got six alliance and confederacy members in my 7x7, and they've cleared all of the surrounding villages, so I can farm without losing troops. I'm psyched that the alliance I'm in is ranked first on the server; I've never been an alliance that's dominated a server before, so it's awesome to see how real players coordinate attacks. I've also got the leader's ear because we met on another server on an alliance that is struggling along; he liked my levelheadedness and playing style, so he invited me to join him while he gathered other players he's played with. He'd told me before that he had successfully led strong alliances on other servers, but holy crap, rank 1 blows my mind. And I'm the alliance diplomat, so I get to negotiate nonaggression pacts (NAPs) and confederation deals.

Some of the sadder application attempts I received yesterday (read from bottom up):

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Athena wrote:

Sorry man, come back when you learn to make complete sentences.
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quebecois wrote:

hey men plzzz y resting a place with me in this aliance


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Athena wrote:

Sorry, but no. Come back when you've learned some tact and have a better alliance.
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bigfoot42_ wrote:

can we make conferations plz


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So I'm basically the alliance strategist, telling all of these peons "Hell no, we don't need you or your alliance -- you're dead weight in our total quadrant takeover" (but always more eloquently written). I feel like a damn Silverberg.