I've never been entirely comfortable with the (()) OOC thing. The first online game I played was extremely heavy on the RP, even though there were people mourning the lack of it every day.
One person who really impressed me was a leader in the community who had RP by the bucketload, and who encouraged all around to RP events that she'd spin out of the air as they occured to her.
I remember someone once asking her why she never used brackets or OOC to show when she was dropping character, and she pointed out that being in character was a state of mind and she was able to deal with even out of character situations in-character. It was also obvious which bits were out of character and which in character, and using any artificial system to indicate this was really just suggesting that the person's RP was so poor that it required signs to let people know when they were in character.
I therefore never bothered. My RP on Virtue is fairly resiliant and I think it's easy to spot if I am in or out of character. I couldn't speak for Rei Rei though.
