No Comic Day, so some random stuff
Mar. 5th, 2008 08:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6No comics today, which is good, cause the snowstorm made walking to and from work hard enough, would have been a pain to have to take the extra side trip.
Terminator was pretty good last night - I think it wasn't the best of the season, but there were great moments in both of the eps that I loved. Really hope the show comes back next year.
"He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once." The Gaiman quote is true. Downer events are worst of all. First, I'm still in my winter depressive season. Got the short story rejection. Had to help my Dad move all weekend (went back and helped again on the Sunday) and so didn't get any time to relax. And I think I might be getting sick. So, although a new writing cycle starts tomorrow, I think I'm going to beg off on it and make this an editing week (maybe even an editing month). Do some free writing when I'm inspired, but take the meter off, and try to get some other short stories in working shape to be sent off into the world and try to sell themselves.
Oh, and speaking of Gaiman, through the First Look Program with HarperCollins they had the graphic novel adaptation of Gaiman's Coraline, so I requested that. Hopefully I'll get it because yay, free book + Gaiman book = yay, free Gaiman book. That's math I can get behind.
In sadder news, Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons and the father of roleplaying games, died yesterday. Most of my flist already knows and have posted on it, but I wanted to post my own little reflections on how he impacted my life, cut and pasted from a comic forum I hang out at:
My brother and I found D&D through my father. He had been given the old red box as a gift and never used it, but we found it and took an interest, and started playing with out friends. We were very young. One of my first memories was that I only had a half day of school every day (which I guess was Kindergarten or preschool) and was waiting for my brother, who had a whole day, to get home, so we could play.
We had fun with the game, and did various things including extending the rules, creating new classes. In an episode of cultural insensitivty only a child could get away with, I recall inventing an Indian class (though spelled Indain), who was a sort of wilderness tracker (in fairness to myself, this was the original D&D, so Elf was a class). Later we moved on to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I remember being very annoyed by the fact that the books said 'for ages 10 and up' and I was not 10.
When I was in grade 2, my brother was in grade 5. We would play D&D sometimes during recess or lunch. My school had a 'reading buddy' program, where a grade 5 student would team up with a grade 2 student, and help them learn to read. My brother was my reading buddy, and we would go through the AD&D rulebooks during our time. The teacher was annoyed when we were caught, at first until we demonstrated that I could indeed read most of the book. Later teachers were surprised that I could read many levels above my grade level, something I credit mostly to D&D.
It was because of D&D's monster listings I learned that "Elf, Wood" and the like really just meant "Wood Elf" but was a convenient way of organizing. Through D&D, I began reading fantasy, which eventually lead me to a lifelong love affair with science fiction. D&D also helped me learn basic math, and gave me a connection to my brother we might not have otherwise shared. Even when we occasionally hated each other, there was still D&D we had in common.
I've wondered sometimes if too much D&D may have made me more isolated, hung a 'geek' label on me that I might have been better off without, and really, who knows? But for a shy kid who always had trouble making friends, it was my window to them, when I discovered other people who had like interests.
Because of D&D (and comics), in Junior High, I had my own group of friends to play RPGs with, instead of mostly hanging out with my brother's friends. We branched out, not just AD&D but Cyberpunk 2020, Marvel Superheroes, and others. We played during out lunch hours, and gave each other nicknames based on Dragonlance, something we all had in common.
In the early 90s, I started my own RPG Bulletin Board System online in Toronto, having convinced my Dad to let me have a dedicated phone line and the old computer when we upgraded. My groups eventually broke up, except an occasional one here or there, and to get my roleplaying fix I moved almost exclusively online. I branched out to new realms, and after playing around on a few MUDs, based largely off D&D concepts and spirit even if they made their own rules, and then found a MUSH set in the MArvel Universe I loved, and from there moved on to a few other games and made a great many online friends, some of which I still have today, and who introduced me to LJ. By this time I'd already given up on actually reading comics, but hanging out with these people day after day kept me up to date with what was going on, and eventually dragged me out of a 10 year absence from comics to read them again. If not for that old Red Box, years ago (I can still remember the cover as vividly as though it were yesterday), that might not have happened, and I would never have wound up here.
And, oh, there were so many adventures I'd have missed along the way.
Thank you, Gary Gygax, for everything.
Terminator was pretty good last night - I think it wasn't the best of the season, but there were great moments in both of the eps that I loved. Really hope the show comes back next year.
"He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once." The Gaiman quote is true. Downer events are worst of all. First, I'm still in my winter depressive season. Got the short story rejection. Had to help my Dad move all weekend (went back and helped again on the Sunday) and so didn't get any time to relax. And I think I might be getting sick. So, although a new writing cycle starts tomorrow, I think I'm going to beg off on it and make this an editing week (maybe even an editing month). Do some free writing when I'm inspired, but take the meter off, and try to get some other short stories in working shape to be sent off into the world and try to sell themselves.
Oh, and speaking of Gaiman, through the First Look Program with HarperCollins they had the graphic novel adaptation of Gaiman's Coraline, so I requested that. Hopefully I'll get it because yay, free book + Gaiman book = yay, free Gaiman book. That's math I can get behind.
In sadder news, Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons and the father of roleplaying games, died yesterday. Most of my flist already knows and have posted on it, but I wanted to post my own little reflections on how he impacted my life, cut and pasted from a comic forum I hang out at:
My brother and I found D&D through my father. He had been given the old red box as a gift and never used it, but we found it and took an interest, and started playing with out friends. We were very young. One of my first memories was that I only had a half day of school every day (which I guess was Kindergarten or preschool) and was waiting for my brother, who had a whole day, to get home, so we could play.
We had fun with the game, and did various things including extending the rules, creating new classes. In an episode of cultural insensitivty only a child could get away with, I recall inventing an Indian class (though spelled Indain), who was a sort of wilderness tracker (in fairness to myself, this was the original D&D, so Elf was a class). Later we moved on to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. I remember being very annoyed by the fact that the books said 'for ages 10 and up' and I was not 10.
When I was in grade 2, my brother was in grade 5. We would play D&D sometimes during recess or lunch. My school had a 'reading buddy' program, where a grade 5 student would team up with a grade 2 student, and help them learn to read. My brother was my reading buddy, and we would go through the AD&D rulebooks during our time. The teacher was annoyed when we were caught, at first until we demonstrated that I could indeed read most of the book. Later teachers were surprised that I could read many levels above my grade level, something I credit mostly to D&D.
It was because of D&D's monster listings I learned that "Elf, Wood" and the like really just meant "Wood Elf" but was a convenient way of organizing. Through D&D, I began reading fantasy, which eventually lead me to a lifelong love affair with science fiction. D&D also helped me learn basic math, and gave me a connection to my brother we might not have otherwise shared. Even when we occasionally hated each other, there was still D&D we had in common.
I've wondered sometimes if too much D&D may have made me more isolated, hung a 'geek' label on me that I might have been better off without, and really, who knows? But for a shy kid who always had trouble making friends, it was my window to them, when I discovered other people who had like interests.
Because of D&D (and comics), in Junior High, I had my own group of friends to play RPGs with, instead of mostly hanging out with my brother's friends. We branched out, not just AD&D but Cyberpunk 2020, Marvel Superheroes, and others. We played during out lunch hours, and gave each other nicknames based on Dragonlance, something we all had in common.
In the early 90s, I started my own RPG Bulletin Board System online in Toronto, having convinced my Dad to let me have a dedicated phone line and the old computer when we upgraded. My groups eventually broke up, except an occasional one here or there, and to get my roleplaying fix I moved almost exclusively online. I branched out to new realms, and after playing around on a few MUDs, based largely off D&D concepts and spirit even if they made their own rules, and then found a MUSH set in the MArvel Universe I loved, and from there moved on to a few other games and made a great many online friends, some of which I still have today, and who introduced me to LJ. By this time I'd already given up on actually reading comics, but hanging out with these people day after day kept me up to date with what was going on, and eventually dragged me out of a 10 year absence from comics to read them again. If not for that old Red Box, years ago (I can still remember the cover as vividly as though it were yesterday), that might not have happened, and I would never have wound up here.
And, oh, there were so many adventures I'd have missed along the way.
Thank you, Gary Gygax, for everything.
