Today is PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE Day.

Isn't it? So how come there's no big fuss?


game on
Yippee! I'm finally involved in a regular role-playing game again, and it wasn't even my idea. Dean missed the old days of building new worlds every week, so we gave game meister Alex a call; and just like that, three days later, we were playing. A far cry from my usual trauma of having to beg, borrow, and steal just to set up a one-shot.


So after being royally spoilt over dinner by Alex's wonderful household helpers, we sat down to some serious gaming with Alex and his lady, the lovely, intelligent, and much-maligned Kate. (You'll have to ask her what I mean.) The setting was a place called 'the Isle', and we had so much fun that I'm going to inflict my newly-written character profile on y'all.


Ellis Corezze is the daughter of jeweler Hector Corezze and the herald Eliandra. She has no official profession, but has actually been more useful in her father's trade than she cares to admit, given her unfailing memory for names, faces, and relationships. In fact, she is the inheritor of her father's pragmatic and calculating nature; she is also headstrong and has a temper, but has learned to conceal all this beneath a veneer of charm and rather heartless flirtation. She tends to be protective of her twin sister Elana, because she views Elana as the bookish sort who is relatively helpless in the 'real' world. (Not exactly true, but Ellis is four minutes older and, she thinks, wiser.) She not-so-secretly idolizes her mother and wants to be a herald like her, but has thus far acceded to Eliandra's unspoken discouragement of this ambition.


character creation
The other reason I've posted the above is to explain that that's generally how I approach character-building for everything, from comic books to fiction. I don't always write it down (In this case, I'm planning to show it to Dean, who's running the game), but I do try to figure out the character's general nature, how they are perceived, any particular quirks, what they want, and how they relate to people in their immediate circle. I find that it's immensely helpful in writing; and I learned to do it through role-playing, how 'bout that? And my dad always said it was pointless...

Grammar and Punctuation: styling titles
The titles of things which can stand alone-- like plays, movies, TV shows, radio programs, books, magazines, newspapers, works of art, and even pamphlets and famous speeches-- should be italicized or underlined (but only if italics would be impossible or illegible in the given format). The titles of shorter works or works that form a part of a larger work-- such as poems, songs, short stories, articles, and episodes-- should be bracketed in either single or double quotation marks.


So you would write, for example:
Nikki Go-Alfar's 'Panay, 1925', from Siglo: Freedom


Exceptions to these rules are: the titles of sacred works-- such as the Bible or the Koran-- and Judeo-Christian Biblical references, which are never italicized; and epic-length poems-- such as Beowulf-- and very long musical pieces-- such as Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite-- which are treated like stand-alone works.