Once more, with feeling

[khaosworks]

I did this meme once before. Time to do it again!

"Go through my interests list and pick one that 1) you know nothing about but sounds intriguing, or 2) you know something about but can't fathom why yours truly would be interested in it, or 3) you know a lot about and love and want to natter on with a kindred spirit and request an explanation (or natter away:-). Could be fun, could just be a new way to start a conversation."

Comments

[misshallelujah.livejournal.com]

Okay... so many interesting/weird interests there, so I'm just going to go with something simple:

"anglo-chinese junior college"

Simple? Why? Because my reaction can be summed up as this: "Oo;"

Heh.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Uh, because I attended it?

[misshallelujah.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I figured as much! So did I, but I've never felt the least impulse to include it on my interests list. I dunno. I guess it's more of a place... a belonging... thing, rather than an "interest" to me per se.

Odd.

[thespian.livejournal.com]

since I understand/know about almost everything else, I will instead ask how you came to be interested in the Barenaked Ladies.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing he just failed to notice the capitalisation... [G,D&RVVF]

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Ah. Pure happenstance, really. I was walking around in Boston - oh, must have been around 1996 or so - and stopped by a Disney Store to look for something which I have long since forgotten, and there, on the video wall, was playing the music video for "Brian Wilson".

It'll be obvious to anyone who's seen the video why it caught my eye. To those who haven't, it's hard to describe. The video takes place during a BNL concert, and as the song progresses, the action freezes at various moments and the camera moves in a bullet-time-before-bullet-time effect. On top of that, it was a damn good song, a poppish style with a rock edge that was almost retro in tone but not quite. Remember this was 1996, so you know, the Alanis Morissette-Fiona Apple wailing angst crowd was in, and the BNL sound was refreshing.

So I went back to Singapore, ordered the single of Brian Wilson off Amazon, and thereafter pretty much back ordered every CD they put out.

Am I permitted to pick a couple?

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

Cthulhu, Star Trek, filk, and Rpgs... start nattering :)

While I've only played the RPG (CoC) once or twice about 12 yrs ago (and rather poorly I might add, as the one time I didn't last more than 5 minutes before being turned into a blathering idiot, and the other I was gobbled up within 10.) I have just recently started reading some of the stories and find them quite engrossing...

Star Trek? well, what else is there to say? :) My personal fav is DS9... I like the continuing story-lines...

Filk? Again- it speaks for itself.

RPGs? What are your favorites? Ravenloft is pretty much my favorite... Like the gothic horror aspect of it.

Re: Am I permitted to pick a couple?

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

It's all tied in. Mostly, except Star Trek.

I started playing wargames around sixth grade - 1982. Avalon Hill stuff... Dune, Starship Troopers, stuff that fed into my SF reading habits. Then, while wandering around in a mall looking at the various games, I saw the red/pink box D&D basic set, and got my parents to buy it for me. By seventh grade, I'd bumped into the people in school that would be my gaming group for the next four years or so, and that was pretty much it.

I can't remember who first brought in CoC, but it must have been around 1984 or 1985 or so when we first played it. The exact feelings I had about Cthulhu and Lovecraft and how I got from it to filk can be found in my explanatory note "Blasphemous Fusions: Cthulhu... and Abba?" here.

I haven't played RPGs for a very long time. It's hard, when the guys I used to play with are scattered all over the world and we all are working with lives now. It's also difficult when the people I'd like to play with are 60 miles away and I don't have transport to them. To be honest, I've reached the stage where RPGing doesn't hold that much interest anymore except in an academic/story sense. I like reading RPGs and examining them critically in the same way someone might look at a good painting and appreciate it, but doesn't paint themselves.

Why I fell away from D&D is a whole other rant, but my favorite game system was really Chaosium's. It was a free ranging skill system - the first without character classes - that they first brought out in Dragonquest, and extended to most of their first games, including Call of Cthulhu, Ringworld (which had the most intriguing chargen system since it covered 2 centuries of development), Elric, and other licensed properties. When Chaosium pretty much let everything else slide except CoC, I switched over to GURPS as a system of choice. I still keep my subscription to Pyramid, and I kind of like the d20 system, although it's still too game mechanic heavy for me.

Games I used to play and enjoy heavily aside from GURPs, which really could be anything, were Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, Star Trek (the original FASA game). On the non-RPG side, I was really into the Renegade Legion series of games at one point, and AH's Flight Leader game (which our group used to roleplay the manga series "Area 88").

Star Trek - well, I first watched it when I was 5 years old. I remember it very vaguely, and I knew I liked it enough to grab the Gold Key comics. Those were really awful on hindsight, but I was 5, what the hell did I know? I liked Space:1999 too. I watched reruns here and there, but didn't become a rabid fan until the release of the Slow Motion Picture - which I liked, because Dad had a bootleg video of it and I could fast forward all the boring bits. Then when Wrath of Khan showed up, I converted my friends to it, and we started playing the RPG.

There's a lot more to my Star Trek fandom life, but space prevents me from going into a lot of detail. My favorite of the lot? DS9, obviously. There're too few episodes of Trek that deal with consequences, and DS9 was all about consequences.

Re: Am I permitted to pick a couple?

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

I think I got into RPGs around 1990... I was in college, and met someone who ran his own games, and had a few people he gamed with... He invited me over once, and my friends and I got hooked... Raven then graduated, and moved back home, and we found another group which was a little less "conservative" in the gaming aspect... you could do anything you wanted as long as you accepted the consequences (the GM was rather good.) I then moved to Harrisburg, and haven't really had much experience gaming since then.. I know all about the real life stuff... I've been wanting to do some gaming myself, and have even been reading the new Ravenloft stuff (being my favorite RPG) but with work, and noone to game with, it's almost pointless...

I think the ones I've played have been AD&D, some Dragonlance, Ravenloft, CoC, Warhammer, Spelljammer, and Shadowrun...

I've done a bit of OLRPG as well, when I've had the time, and that's mainly been Trek related, related and with one or more of the various fan clubs I belong to...

As for Trek, I've watched it since I was about 5 or 6, of course by then, it was in syndication. I remember being deathly afraid of Spock (musta been the ears), but as I got older, I watched it more and more... I remember my parents taking us to see the first movie (even then, I thought it was rather "cheesy".) Then TNG came along, and I watched it almost regularly (I was in college by then), and the other movies were released.. Like I said, Ds9 came along, and I was really hooked... it started off slow at first, but I still liked it... That one, I really miss, and wish they'd do a special where Sisko comes back, or at least a movie, but we'll probably never see that...

Re: Am I permitted to pick a couple?

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

So, what's your favorite episode(s) of DS9... some of my favorites were most of the last season (though I just about died when they destroyed the Defiant) and I think from 5th or 6th season, I forget which one, where Sisko tried to get the Romulans to declare war on the Dominion, and it took Garak sabotaging Vreenak's ship to do it... I think it was "In the Pale Moonlight"

Re: Am I permitted to pick a couple?

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

I have many, many favorite episodes, including "Trials and Tribble-lations", "In the Pale Moonlight", "Our Man Bashir", "Sacrifice of Angels", "Blood Debt"... the list goes on. If pressed, I would have to say that the one that stands out as first among equals would be Season One's "Duet".

[kaasirpent]

kodt? gmw? I don't know what they stand for, so I'm asking. :)

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

KODT stands for Knights of the Dinner Table, an absolutely hilarious comic strip by Jolly Blackburn and published by Kenzer. It was first featured in RPG magazines and is now in its own periodical. The comic revolves around a gaming group that play a D&D type game called Hackmaster (which has been written up and published too), and is really, really hardcore gamer geek stuff. It's not even well-drawn, most of the time - just talking heads around a table, but it's hilarious if you've ever been in a gaming group for a prolonged period of time.

QMW is Queen Mary and Westfield College (now just plain Queem Mary College) of the University of London, where I did my law degree from 1991-1994.

[elorie.livejournal.com]

Why the Civil War and Appalachia? for me those have personal significance...I grew up in north Georgia and I have assorted Confederate ancestors on both sides of my family, these were people that my father, grandmother and great-aunt remembered so it wasn't remote history to me....I grew up hearing stories about my great-great-grandfather for example, who was something of a vivid and eccentric character (clearly I come by it honestly). He wrote home to his father from Savannah, saying nothing of the fighting or generally horrifying and wretched conditions but complaining about the taste of the sulphur water and asking for "some whiskey to sweeten my coffee".

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

I got interested in the Civil War in a real roundabaout way. I first read Horatio Hornblower because of my interest in Star Trek - Kirk was based on Hornblower, after all. C.S. Forester's novels led me to an interest in the Napoleonic Wars in general, and then to the Richard Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwall. From the books I read, fiction and non-fiction, people kept pointing to the Civil War as a turning point in technology between the mass battles pioneered by Gustavus Adolphus and the more dispersed squad tactics of World War II. There were overlaps of course - small squads were used as skirmishers in the Napoleonic Wars and mass charges were still in evidence to horrific results in World War I, but the progression is there.

Then I watched Ted Turner's "Gettysburg," and I wept. I read Michael Shaara's "The Killer Angels", I checked the Civil War history books to see which bits were made up and found that a surprising chunk of it wasn't. I'm a sucker for a good story, and as I always say - nobody has to write the Great American Novel, because it's already been written. It's the Civil War. It has everything - betrayal, brother against brother, romance, heartbreak, redemption... Tolstoy's War and Peace? Pfeh. Amateur.

As for Appalachia, it grew out of a community studies course I took last semester, when I was reading about mountain communities like Cades Cove in the Tennessee Great Smoky Mountains and the Hatfield-McCoy feud. The beauty of the mountains struck me, as well as these "isolated" communities (which weren't really that isolated) who, while they were very in tune, politically and economically, with the modernizing efforts around them, were trying to cling to a way of life and attitude towards community and goverment that was really a century out of step. And I like bluegrass.

[elorie.livejournal.com]

well, then, you should know that they have bluegrass every Thursday at the Steam Company Pub. Come with me some time...I don't go as often as I'd like, but if I have some motivation in the way of company I'll go.

I was raised on "old timey" music (that's what my mother called it)....Long Black Veil, Pretty Saro, Fair and Tender Ladies, that sort of thing. I know an Appalachian version of Barbara Allen as well.

I wrote a paper on Appalachia for my Independent Study (ie, the "gifted" class) in high school. I started with the geologic history and went on from there...

I really like Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. She's talking about south Georgia, but many things also apply; here's a quote of a quote from the book:

"'Such a region was ideally suited for the clannish, herding, leisure-loving Celts,' noted Grady McWhiney in his book Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, 'who relished whiskey, gambling, and combat, and who despised hard work, anything English, most government, fences, and any other restraints upon them or their free-ranging livestock.'

History had rigged them to be Southerners."

[catalana.livejournal.com]

What on earth is "television without pity"?

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

Television Without Pity is a website that covers several television shows, and summarizes them in a snarky, unapologetic manner, criticizing them in a fannish, yet completely unfawning way. I used to be a part of that community a few years ago when I was still watching Enterprise. If you remember my reviews from that period, you'll get a flavor of the attitude that pervades those forums.

TVP was in the news for a while, since it got out that some show creators lurked on the boards waiting to see what the community thought of the show once it aired, and knew they could get the most specific, unfiltered, and most of all intelligent criticism and insults from the forum people. It wasn't just a "It sucks." We would tell you exactly why it sucked and call you out on it. And if it was good, we'd say that too.

It was a nice environment, well suited to me. But I don't have the time anymore, and, well... I don't watch Enterprise anymore.