LJ Interests meme results

1. cats:
   I have a cat, Alladin, and I used to have a cat, Allegro. Cats replace children in my life. Cats are wonderful, purry soft creatures and you don’t go to jail if you leave them alone in the house all weekend.
2. d20:
   A lot of things in my life have been influenced by role-playing games, from my username to my marriage to most of my social interactions. d20 is a current incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons. D&D and I were both unleashed on the world in the same month.
3. ffx:
   FFX is the first and only video game since Atari’s E.T. that I have been able to win.
4. fretted dulcimer:
   I play the mountain dulcimer, also known as a fretted dulcimer. I’ve played since I was 17 years old, and I’m not bad at it. When I did the challenge, I practiced dulcimer for 15 minutes a day, every day, for 100 days. It was awesome. I started with Aunt Rhody’s Goose and finished with Bach.
5. ipods:
   I love music, but audiobooks are the main thing I use my iPod for; I listen to books in the car when I’m driving to and from work (I have an hour long commute). That and theme/atmosphere music when I’m gaming.
6. love:
   Love rocks.
7. natalie imbruglia:
   I got really into imbruglia’s first album, but now I feel betrayed by her breaking her CDs so they won’t play in my computer’s CD player.
8. reading:
   I love to read. Reading is relaxing, exhilerating, entertaining, escape, everything great and wonderful.
9. sea monkeys:
   Hah hah– aren’t they awesome? I used to keep sea monkeys when I was a kid. Now I own fish that would eat them!
10. tolkein:
    Tokin’ the Tolkein. I didn’t used to like Lord of the Rings, but when the movies came out, I gave them a second chance (before I saw the movies!) I’m glad I did– as with Harry Potter, I was delightfully surprised.

Enter your LJ user name, and 10 interests will be selected from your interest list.

Call Dentist
Call dealer to get car repaired
Start (!) conference paper
Spin yarn, finish spool (ply tomorrow?)
Clean kitty litter
5 PM: videoconference
Post to Vlog
Audioblog
Get JourneyEd order sorted out
Install s/w on Mac
Get started on contract
Follow-up on possible work

Here is the short version of how I got my username:

It was the name of a character I played in a co-ed naked role-playing game in a hot tub.

In 1993-94, I was a student at UCSC and friends with various gamers in this area. Many of these gamers are still here, by the way. Santa Cruz gaming culture is very incestuous.

Anyway, I went over to a local geek house named Darkwater for a free-form role-playing game that was starting up. As I recall, was there, too. I created a character named “Mortaine” who was a badass swordsgirl (with a light saber– this was a futuristic game), but who had certain phobias, like fear of plague. We played in the Darkwater hot tub, and since it’s a hot tub, I didn’t bother with clothing.

In any case, the nickname stuck, and when I created my username at The Enclave, a local dial-up BBS dedicated to vampire/gothy types, I used it because it sounded very gothy. When I enrolled at UCSC in Fall of 1994, I used it as my login for the email system there, too, which was much better than being mistaken for Scott Rell.

should be amused by the co-ed naked RPG link, since it’s what was printed on the back of the T-Shirts for Hampshire College’s sci fi and fantasy club, Excalibur. Excalibur, of course, being one of my two sources of non-food-related social contact outside of class when I was at Hampshire, a year before even moving to Santa Cruz!

But all things in my life circle back to RPGs. Big shocker, since I was born under the sign of the rising TSR (D&D came out the same month I was born).