I’m sitting here on my couch listening to an old record of the Eagles. In theory, I’m supposed to be cleaning; in practice, I’ve put up a shelf and put the painting tarps in the closet. I have been wanting to steampunk my place for a while, and I recently painted the walls green. I’ve been going through all my random steampunk and larp bits, trying to figure out how to arrange everything. See, I look at pictures of people’s steampunk apartments and houses, and they fall unto two categories: things I don’t have money to do, and things that look unfinished.
Some things that have made the place look more complete are the painted walls, a nice area rug (it really ties the room together!), and curtains. I’m still lacking a lot of decoration, though. Everything is so *practical*. Granted, one of the things that bothers me about steampunk decor is when people find old machine bits and just leave them laying around. I saw a post by someone who found an old press and uses it as decoration. He thought it was a wine press at first. It was not! It was a beautiful cast-iron book press, and I need one of those! I wanted to strangle him!
On the plus side, my equipment suits the decor, so there’s that.
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, records. Part of the cleaning up/rearranging/decorating process has been to find a home for my record player. And now it’s set up, and I was listening to some wonderful dixieland from the 40′s earlier. Now it is the Eagles. I own this record player entirely because of a LARP, Dystopia Rising. Post-apocalyptic zombie thing. My character is a member of the King’s Court, a religion based around music from before the fall. I decided that a dressed-up iPod wasn’t going to cut it, so I bought a record player at the thrift store, and some random records. Now I find myself buying records not just for the character to have, but for me to listen to; I get far more enjoyment out of digging through old boxes of records and playing them at home to “check for record integrity before bringing them to game”. Sure, right. 
There have been a lot of things I’ve done for a LARP that have turned into real hobbies and skills. This particular character for Dystopia Rising (her name is Valentine) is really good for this: I now know how to make solar panels (thiugh I can’t make anything really efficient in my living room) and am learning about generators and other power sources. It is my personal goal, with her, to learn more about what powers our world, and our relationship with it.
You can check out of the LARP any time you like, but you can never leave.
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September 6th, 2011 by Cassie