Attack of the goldfish brain
May. 10th, 2009 03:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysobel... answering questions from here; feel free to leave more. \o/
Oooh, I would love to know about your hobbies, what all you've been doing on Dreamwidth, and what your favourite colour is. :)
Hobbies: I have way too many of them. *wry grin* Lessee. There are a lot of craft-related hobbies, knitting and cross-stitch being the ones I've done the most with, but also beadwork, pathetic attempts at sewing (on the level of clothing/etc for stuffed animals), and art. (Especially with the latter two, I rarely have the skill to match what I want to do, which is ... frustrating. *grin*) I also do video game stuff: Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, even though I prefer solo play (well, or playing with people I know, but I am allergic to random groups and to most pvp interaction), Vagrant Story, Katamari Damacy (naaaa na na na na naaa na naa...), and I own a handful more PS/PS2 games (some of the FF ones, xenogears, shadow of the colossus) that I don't play as much. Singing, and I used to do other sorts of music -- violin, both solo (limited amounts) and orchestra. piano, some self-taught celtic lap harp -- but those are pretty much impossible due to physical restrictions. Reading, of course; I am the sort of person who has bookcases along almost every wall, all full, with more books in boxes and closets that I don't have room for. And writing, at least in theory. And fandom (does fandom count as a hobby?)
I am rarely at a loss for things to do, and yet I can be surprisingly bored. (Especially since a good number of the hobbies are things that I have fun while doing them, but that require enough set-up and enough overcoming of inertia that I don't always get around to doing them.)
Dreamwidth: Um, lots of pretty much everything I can get my hands on. *wry grin* The main areas (aside from, y'know, writing journal entries, and giving out invites to people, and stuff) are a) support work -- really not much of a surprise since I did LJ support for a freakish number of years (and got a little burnt out, but not in ways that affect DW support); b) documentation stuff, like FAQ-writing and cleaning up the text on the site -- again, not entirely a surprise, given LJ history; and c) coding, both the sort that involves fixing broken stuff and the sort that involves adding shinies. The coding thing is a surprise. It possibly shouldn't be, since I've always loved computers and programming (turtle logo! ♥) and am at least somewhat fluent in perl (and tended to do code-diving to figure out *why* something worked on LJ the way it did, or failed to work, or whatever). On the other hand, I hadn't done any coding in over ten years, I'm not a professional, and I never even triedcoding for LJ; partly, it felt too over-my-head, because there were all these baffling things about it that I didn't get, but mainly, LJ wasn't open to outsiders, to baby devs, to people who wanted to learn. Even if I knew what needed changing in the code, which was rare (a lot of the problems I encountered boiled down to "I have nfi why this is doing what it's doing"), I wouldn't have had a clue how, and anyway there were Real Developers who were doing the work, thank you very much, who didn't need to be bothered by people trying to help. DW has an amazingly different attitude, which is awesome \o/
Favorite color: [insert obligatory Monty Python reference] It varies between blue and purple, more jewel-toned than anything else. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with red -- bright, vivid, #FF0000 red -- which led to a very amusing-in-retrospect fit of passion from me regarding room decoration: my sister, who liked yellow, was allowed to have her bedroom walls painted yellow, and so by obvious comparison I should be allowed to have my room painted red. The fact that the yellow was a pale, light-sunshine color, and I wanted a really really bright color, was lost on me. (My parents got me to settle for leaving my walls white, and instead having red furniture, bedspread, curtains, plastic organizey things, etc.)
1.) Which dreamsheep? :D
2.) What's your vision like?
3.) WoW? What race/class? :D
1.) A knitty dreamsheep would be aaaawesome. or a cross-stitched dreamsheep. ...ooh hey, I could do up a little cross-stitch dreamsheepy thingie just for fun...
2.) *squints, pun intended* If you're asking about my ability to see: decent, with glasses (nearsighted otherwise; it was good as a kid, but now things are fuzzy without glasses, and I possibly may need a change in prescription as things are kind of fuzzy now). Very good peripheral vision, which I am aware of mainly because I can't turn my head at all, and so peripheral vision is pretty freaking useful. ...if you're asking about a metaphorical vision, prz to be clarifying >_> (I think too much sometimes.)
3.) Yes! And, um. ... ...yes? *wry grin* (I have altitis.) My main (79; I am kind of slow at leveling) is a nelf rogue (sneak sneak sneak sneak kathunk pickpocket backstab vanish). The alts I play more often than others are a draenei DK, two nelf druids (on different realms), a human DK, and a troll hunter. The alts I play less often but still poke at occasionally are gnome mage, nelf hunter, draenei shaman, dwarf priest, belf rogue. Alts I still have but pretty much don't play at all any more, some because they were created with my sister who then switched realms and some for other reasons: (different) troll hunter, undead warlock, tauren druid, draenei paladin, human warrior, orc shaman, and, um, others, most of which aren't above level 10.
...did I mention I have altitis? <_<
(also, er, I possibly don't need to say this, but those are scattershot across various realms. I mostly play on Feathermoon, where a lot of my LJ-WoW friends are, and Greymane, where my sister is (though it used to be Stormscale). I also mostly play alliance, as evidenced by my highest-level characters being human (61 DK), nelf (79 rogue, 43 hunter,47 druid), draenei (61 DK, 36 shaman), and one lonely little troll (42 hunter). This is because the people I know are also playing alliance. (When my sister was on Stormscale, we were doing horde, but her friends all switched to Greymane and to alliance.))
I haven't created every race/class combination, but I think I've had at least one of every class (at least for a bit) and at least one of every race. I tend towards females in every race except for belf, and racewise tend to go for nelf or draenei for alliance (sometimes gnomes, because they're cute and tiny and make me go wheeeeeee, sometimes human for the rep thing) and tauren or troll for horde (though I kind of like undeads also).
...oh, and I'm also happy to create a DK on any realm in order to play with people who want company ^_^ (insta-55 = win)
I'd love to hear more about your original fiction. (that's not technically a question, no, but I hope it's close enough.)
Ahahahaha yes that. (Okay, I shouldn't laugh, but it's kind of mostly theoretical at this point, partly because I am obsessiely perfectionist and can't get my inner editor to stfu, partly because I'm kind of in a writing dry spell atm, and partly because I'm scared of the whole publishing thing.) But anyway.
I tend towards sff, more heavily on the fantasy (or urban fantasy) side than on the science fiction side but it's all kind of this giant mushy spectrum. There's only one exception I can think of, and given that I've been writing (in a "coming up with stuff and putting words on paper" sense, not in a "getting published" sense or even a "producing a finished product" sense) since ... forever, really* ... that's kind of saying something.
(* when I was in third grade or so, I discovered plot. before that, apparently, my stories were very, er, non-structured. and then in school we learned about plot, and heroes and villains and rising tension and climaxes and endingd and whateverthehellelse, and so I wrote a story about this society of winged unicorns, and this imposter who was just a unicorn with cardboard wings that was trying to take over the throne, and I have no idea why I remember all this so vividly, but I do.)
( ... in high school, most of my "original" fic stuff was badly diguised clones of star trek and pern. the concept of fanfic had not occurred to me ... )
Of the specific projects still simmering somewhere in my brain, I have:
- a probably-novel-length idea that can't make up its mind about whether it's a YA story (protag in JH or HS) or a standard adult sff story (protag in 30s or so), that's kind of a cross between Torchwood and MIB and a few other things. Urban fantasy type stuff, interdimensional rifts, secret agencies that save the world using alien tech;
- a short story about a were-dragon (no, really, though it's less a full moon thing and more a summer/winter thing) and about trusting the people you love; it's more or less complete in my head and I really should get it out onto paper, except for how it never manages to come out right;
- a fantasy thing-that-can't-decide-what-length-it-is about a vampire slayer and a sorcere and the nature of evil, and two of the three characters are Not At All based on ashley and sydney from vagrant story;
- another of the unspecified-length-fantasy sorts of things, about forgotten magic and ghosts
- a short story, the one thing that is an exception to the "always contains elements of the fantastic" thing I have going, about two Olympic-level swimmers and about disability
- a novel-length idea that sort of started out as star wars (tpm) fanfic but evolved into origfic, that I suppose could be described as kind of a cross between Star Wars and Earthsea, and has to do with destiny and choice and all sorts of fun stuff (while it was a fanfic idea, it was an alternate universe with situations that the Force was trying to manipulate so that it would end up aligned with canon, in the sense of "something's not the way it should be and so the universe is going to try its damnedest to snap things back into place". that's a ltitle harder to manage without the reinforcement of canon [aka the way it should be], but mostly it's working better as origfic)
- an indetermined-length fantasy thing about unicorns that are supposed to be the guardians of the kingdom, at least according to legend, but that are scary and elemental and so much not like what people expect
And, er, other things that are kind of vague ideas.
I tend to gravitate towards werecritters -- werewolves being the obvious ones, and the weredragon, but also I've done things with wereswans, werecats, and, er, one character who is pretty much a werething (the animal he turns into changes month-to-month; when he admits his situation to the person he's gotten romantically involved with, by way of showing video of the previous night, said person cracks the fuck up and goes "...I'm dating a *were-poodle*?". the goldfish month was fun too.) -- and towards magic. I prefer fantasy to standard fiction in part because I have problems not including fantasy elements (there was a long period where I kept accidentally thinking of the werewolf novel as *not* sff, because the werewolfness wasn't the point of the story, even though family/pack dynamics were), and also because settings that I make up won't have anyone going "...but that's not right!". In an ideal world, I would love to be able to travel, to live at least for a while in other places so that I could, say, believably write something set ... er, anywhere other than where I'm living, and even that's a little dubious ... but I literally can't.
(Writing, for me, is partly -- not entirely, not even majorly, but partly -- about getting to do the things I can't do. My characters can have lives in ways that I can't, they interact with the world and with other people in ways that I can't, can be what I can't. Which isn't to say that I'd want to trade with them, necessarily, since their lives tend to suck in some respect or other, but it's ... a sort of a way to live vicariously. And play with reality.)
Which question have you been asked least often ?
If you are limiting it to the set of questions asked in context of this entry, probably that one. If you aren't (if potential questions count), probably "what the fuck are you doing with that squid?".
Well, there are others that are tied, but, y'know.
Oooh, I would love to know about your hobbies, what all you've been doing on Dreamwidth, and what your favourite colour is. :)
Hobbies: I have way too many of them. *wry grin* Lessee. There are a lot of craft-related hobbies, knitting and cross-stitch being the ones I've done the most with, but also beadwork, pathetic attempts at sewing (on the level of clothing/etc for stuffed animals), and art. (Especially with the latter two, I rarely have the skill to match what I want to do, which is ... frustrating. *grin*) I also do video game stuff: Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, even though I prefer solo play (well, or playing with people I know, but I am allergic to random groups and to most pvp interaction), Vagrant Story, Katamari Damacy (naaaa na na na na naaa na naa...), and I own a handful more PS/PS2 games (some of the FF ones, xenogears, shadow of the colossus) that I don't play as much. Singing, and I used to do other sorts of music -- violin, both solo (limited amounts) and orchestra. piano, some self-taught celtic lap harp -- but those are pretty much impossible due to physical restrictions. Reading, of course; I am the sort of person who has bookcases along almost every wall, all full, with more books in boxes and closets that I don't have room for. And writing, at least in theory. And fandom (does fandom count as a hobby?)
I am rarely at a loss for things to do, and yet I can be surprisingly bored. (Especially since a good number of the hobbies are things that I have fun while doing them, but that require enough set-up and enough overcoming of inertia that I don't always get around to doing them.)
Dreamwidth: Um, lots of pretty much everything I can get my hands on. *wry grin* The main areas (aside from, y'know, writing journal entries, and giving out invites to people, and stuff) are a) support work -- really not much of a surprise since I did LJ support for a freakish number of years (and got a little burnt out, but not in ways that affect DW support); b) documentation stuff, like FAQ-writing and cleaning up the text on the site -- again, not entirely a surprise, given LJ history; and c) coding, both the sort that involves fixing broken stuff and the sort that involves adding shinies. The coding thing is a surprise. It possibly shouldn't be, since I've always loved computers and programming (turtle logo! ♥) and am at least somewhat fluent in perl (and tended to do code-diving to figure out *why* something worked on LJ the way it did, or failed to work, or whatever). On the other hand, I hadn't done any coding in over ten years, I'm not a professional, and I never even triedcoding for LJ; partly, it felt too over-my-head, because there were all these baffling things about it that I didn't get, but mainly, LJ wasn't open to outsiders, to baby devs, to people who wanted to learn. Even if I knew what needed changing in the code, which was rare (a lot of the problems I encountered boiled down to "I have nfi why this is doing what it's doing"), I wouldn't have had a clue how, and anyway there were Real Developers who were doing the work, thank you very much, who didn't need to be bothered by people trying to help. DW has an amazingly different attitude, which is awesome \o/
Favorite color: [insert obligatory Monty Python reference] It varies between blue and purple, more jewel-toned than anything else. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with red -- bright, vivid, #FF0000 red -- which led to a very amusing-in-retrospect fit of passion from me regarding room decoration: my sister, who liked yellow, was allowed to have her bedroom walls painted yellow, and so by obvious comparison I should be allowed to have my room painted red. The fact that the yellow was a pale, light-sunshine color, and I wanted a really really bright color, was lost on me. (My parents got me to settle for leaving my walls white, and instead having red furniture, bedspread, curtains, plastic organizey things, etc.)
1.) Which dreamsheep? :D
2.) What's your vision like?
3.) WoW? What race/class? :D
1.) A knitty dreamsheep would be aaaawesome. or a cross-stitched dreamsheep. ...ooh hey, I could do up a little cross-stitch dreamsheepy thingie just for fun...
2.) *squints, pun intended* If you're asking about my ability to see: decent, with glasses (nearsighted otherwise; it was good as a kid, but now things are fuzzy without glasses, and I possibly may need a change in prescription as things are kind of fuzzy now). Very good peripheral vision, which I am aware of mainly because I can't turn my head at all, and so peripheral vision is pretty freaking useful. ...if you're asking about a metaphorical vision, prz to be clarifying >_> (I think too much sometimes.)
3.) Yes! And, um. ... ...yes? *wry grin* (I have altitis.) My main (79; I am kind of slow at leveling) is a nelf rogue (sneak sneak sneak sneak kathunk pickpocket backstab vanish). The alts I play more often than others are a draenei DK, two nelf druids (on different realms), a human DK, and a troll hunter. The alts I play less often but still poke at occasionally are gnome mage, nelf hunter, draenei shaman, dwarf priest, belf rogue. Alts I still have but pretty much don't play at all any more, some because they were created with my sister who then switched realms and some for other reasons: (different) troll hunter, undead warlock, tauren druid, draenei paladin, human warrior, orc shaman, and, um, others, most of which aren't above level 10.
...did I mention I have altitis? <_<
(also, er, I possibly don't need to say this, but those are scattershot across various realms. I mostly play on Feathermoon, where a lot of my LJ-WoW friends are, and Greymane, where my sister is (though it used to be Stormscale). I also mostly play alliance, as evidenced by my highest-level characters being human (61 DK), nelf (79 rogue, 43 hunter,47 druid), draenei (61 DK, 36 shaman), and one lonely little troll (42 hunter). This is because the people I know are also playing alliance. (When my sister was on Stormscale, we were doing horde, but her friends all switched to Greymane and to alliance.))
I haven't created every race/class combination, but I think I've had at least one of every class (at least for a bit) and at least one of every race. I tend towards females in every race except for belf, and racewise tend to go for nelf or draenei for alliance (sometimes gnomes, because they're cute and tiny and make me go wheeeeeee, sometimes human for the rep thing) and tauren or troll for horde (though I kind of like undeads also).
...oh, and I'm also happy to create a DK on any realm in order to play with people who want company ^_^ (insta-55 = win)
I'd love to hear more about your original fiction. (that's not technically a question, no, but I hope it's close enough.)
Ahahahaha yes that. (Okay, I shouldn't laugh, but it's kind of mostly theoretical at this point, partly because I am obsessiely perfectionist and can't get my inner editor to stfu, partly because I'm kind of in a writing dry spell atm, and partly because I'm scared of the whole publishing thing.) But anyway.
I tend towards sff, more heavily on the fantasy (or urban fantasy) side than on the science fiction side but it's all kind of this giant mushy spectrum. There's only one exception I can think of, and given that I've been writing (in a "coming up with stuff and putting words on paper" sense, not in a "getting published" sense or even a "producing a finished product" sense) since ... forever, really* ... that's kind of saying something.
(* when I was in third grade or so, I discovered plot. before that, apparently, my stories were very, er, non-structured. and then in school we learned about plot, and heroes and villains and rising tension and climaxes and endingd and whateverthehellelse, and so I wrote a story about this society of winged unicorns, and this imposter who was just a unicorn with cardboard wings that was trying to take over the throne, and I have no idea why I remember all this so vividly, but I do.)
( ... in high school, most of my "original" fic stuff was badly diguised clones of star trek and pern. the concept of fanfic had not occurred to me ... )
Of the specific projects still simmering somewhere in my brain, I have:
- a probably-novel-length idea that can't make up its mind about whether it's a YA story (protag in JH or HS) or a standard adult sff story (protag in 30s or so), that's kind of a cross between Torchwood and MIB and a few other things. Urban fantasy type stuff, interdimensional rifts, secret agencies that save the world using alien tech;
- a short story about a were-dragon (no, really, though it's less a full moon thing and more a summer/winter thing) and about trusting the people you love; it's more or less complete in my head and I really should get it out onto paper, except for how it never manages to come out right;
- a fantasy thing-that-can't-decide-what-length-it-is about a vampire slayer and a sorcere and the nature of evil, and two of the three characters are Not At All based on ashley and sydney from vagrant story;
- another of the unspecified-length-fantasy sorts of things, about forgotten magic and ghosts
- a short story, the one thing that is an exception to the "always contains elements of the fantastic" thing I have going, about two Olympic-level swimmers and about disability
- a novel-length idea that sort of started out as star wars (tpm) fanfic but evolved into origfic, that I suppose could be described as kind of a cross between Star Wars and Earthsea, and has to do with destiny and choice and all sorts of fun stuff (while it was a fanfic idea, it was an alternate universe with situations that the Force was trying to manipulate so that it would end up aligned with canon, in the sense of "something's not the way it should be and so the universe is going to try its damnedest to snap things back into place". that's a ltitle harder to manage without the reinforcement of canon [aka the way it should be], but mostly it's working better as origfic)
- an indetermined-length fantasy thing about unicorns that are supposed to be the guardians of the kingdom, at least according to legend, but that are scary and elemental and so much not like what people expect
And, er, other things that are kind of vague ideas.
I tend to gravitate towards werecritters -- werewolves being the obvious ones, and the weredragon, but also I've done things with wereswans, werecats, and, er, one character who is pretty much a werething (the animal he turns into changes month-to-month; when he admits his situation to the person he's gotten romantically involved with, by way of showing video of the previous night, said person cracks the fuck up and goes "...I'm dating a *were-poodle*?". the goldfish month was fun too.) -- and towards magic. I prefer fantasy to standard fiction in part because I have problems not including fantasy elements (there was a long period where I kept accidentally thinking of the werewolf novel as *not* sff, because the werewolfness wasn't the point of the story, even though family/pack dynamics were), and also because settings that I make up won't have anyone going "...but that's not right!". In an ideal world, I would love to be able to travel, to live at least for a while in other places so that I could, say, believably write something set ... er, anywhere other than where I'm living, and even that's a little dubious ... but I literally can't.
(Writing, for me, is partly -- not entirely, not even majorly, but partly -- about getting to do the things I can't do. My characters can have lives in ways that I can't, they interact with the world and with other people in ways that I can't, can be what I can't. Which isn't to say that I'd want to trade with them, necessarily, since their lives tend to suck in some respect or other, but it's ... a sort of a way to live vicariously. And play with reality.)
Which question have you been asked least often ?
If you are limiting it to the set of questions asked in context of this entry, probably that one. If you aren't (if potential questions count), probably "what the fuck are you doing with that squid?".
Well, there are others that are tied, but, y'know.