Re: pun - Wow.

Thanks!

I was sort of hoping you'd talk about small shifts, but it's your space and time to do with as you like.

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I'll set that to simmer, then, and see if I can get around to a separate post on it; or at least enough to drop in a few rambling paragraphs. It'll take me some time to step into the mental framework where I can talk about me in meta.

Since you commented, your five (and of course you've done the meme, so you don't have to commentary these if you don't want to):
Literature
Dichotomy
Anna Ahkmatova
Gay Marriage*
And ... um ... Evolving Spirituality, back at you. ;-)

--
* Partially because I first met you and Rax in San Francisco, and my other major association with that city is going with kadyg to pass out flowers and chocolates to newlyweds on Valentine's Day 2004.

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One of the (more random) things that people associate with you is fast reaction times.

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I've got an interesting dichotomy going with that, honestly. I'm an infamous -- infamous, I tell you! -- waffler; I hate making decisions or saying things until I've had a chance to overthink them. By default, I live a highly considered life.

But at times, when I've internalized permission to be spontaneous, when I'm not being seized by brainlock ... yeah, I can be pretty speedy.

This is one of the reasons I love writing. It plays to my strengths.

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Also:

Math
Bridge
Motorcycles
Germany
Magic: The Gathering

Some old, some newer. Was college really over a decade ago?

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i'll likely just repost here, but now i'm curious

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AD&D
glittergoth
alt.fan.dragons
thresholds
<< >>

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1. I've been playing D&D in some form or another since I was twelve, primarily AD&D 2nd and 3rd ed., and never run a game. This is probably responsible for my ability to write amazing in-depth character portraits and not a shred of plot. It's a usually-quiet background influence on how I parse the world, source of geek jokes and bad but useful analogies. My current username, as you have pointed out, is indirectly your fault in suggesting quietly D&D-related usernames, of which I nabbed the silliest that suited me. Thank you; as time passes the name means more and more.

2. glittergoth. I try, from time to time, to be a stompy industrial dyke of a goth. The truth is, I like shiny sparkly objects and am an inherently happy person, so this attempt always fails. Usually this failure involves coating myself or my belongings in glitter. It's a fair tag. At the end of the day, I am inherently dark, and sparkly. Like stars. Or Dancing Lights.

3. alt.fan.dragons was one of the first online communities I encountered, back in the usenet days. I was intensely amused by the free-form roleplaying and geek humour rampant there, a sort that characterises all of the early internet for me, in a very nostalgic way. It was also the first place I encountered people honestly believing they were not entirely normal human wormbabies. And while, at the age of *coff* ("under-"), I knew well enough that my self-identification was not draconic, I played along and made many friends and learned much in the time before the primary medium of our communication ploded (im- or ex-, take your pick). I'm glad to have found some of my favourite people again through livejournal.

4. Thresholds is a yearly extended weekend camping retreat / gather in rural Pennsylvania. It is generically Otherkin focused, though it is run primarily by elves and both the setting and the tone of the gather follow informally from this fact. After knowing people from alt.fan.dragons for some time, I eventually found other corners of the internet for those of non-draconic inhuman self-identification. In 2000, I made an effort to visit some of the more local folks in person; one of them turned out to be the organizer for this event (now in its twelfth year), and I was convinced to attend. I met my husband there, which makes a lovely story when we try to sanitize it for co-workers and in-laws, but actually involves inhuman amounts of booze and years of poly drama.

5. http://www.flickr.com/photos/salix_lucida/sets/72157594194216332/

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Curious.

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Half Dome
Zen
Spaaaarrrrttaaaaa!
Pixie rivalry
LARPing

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Well I will have to comment to these on my LJ

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I'll nibble - I'm curious what you'll have to say. :)

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Colors
The Uncomic
Anagrams
Goatee
Draconity*


* Okay, this one's a gimme, but I'm curious to read your commentary about it.

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I'll pull the Lever of Doom, why not.

I'm also going to steal "fallen off the stove", but my impression is really more of an infinitely extensible stove that has stronger time dilation effects the farther back you go.

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Alright. :) I'm afraid these might be somewhat pedestrian -- we haven't talked in much depth since the end of the Tomorrowlands Forums, my social memory is pretty poor, and my usual memory aids (friends' journals and website depths) aren't helping me out here.

Draconity
PERL
Open Source
Physics
Myst

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In addition to using that essay to explain my philosophy to someone who thinks that belief systems other than his are wrong because they make mutually exclusive claims, I also sent it a few months ago to my spirituality discussion group listserve. I did that in part because it reflects the feelings of the group pretty well and I thought they'd like it, but also because I was hoping to gauge their reaction to the concept of draconity. Of course, one person said that she really liked the essay and was forwarding it to friends, and no one said anything about your claim of being a dragon.

Even if you're not evolving spiritually, you're probably helping others to.

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Thanks for the vote of confidence! I'm glad others are finding it useful, even outside the dragon niche; one of the best ways to be subversive is to come up with good ideas that incidentally bring people outside their boundaries.

Five:

Blackberries
Evangelism*
Community moderation
Knitting
Lake Tahoe

--
* More in the sense of something you deal with than in the sense of something you do, but given current events you can take this either way.

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I associate your name with bauxite, even though it's pronounced differently.

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Not long after I started joining Internet dragon groups in my college days, I discovered that Chris Rowley had published Bazil Broketail (about a combat dragon and his boy) and gotten some modest press. I spent a year or two worrying that people were going to assume I had stolen the name rather than independently come up with it. (In fact, there was a "Bazil" in alt.fan.dragons for a short time, named after the book, and people did confuse us. There's also a Byzil floating around dragon circles these days, though I haven't met or talked with xir.)

I didn't have it nearly as bad as Dragonheart, whose nom de draque predated the movie by years but who nevertheless fended off accusations of plagiarism pretty much continuously thereafter.

As for other uses of my name: I seem to have picked one that's remarkably resistant to reuse. Within the last ~10 years, the drug Baxil was developed, though it's by no means a household name and in fact my crappy website still out-PageRanks it. There are a few pets named Baxil out there, at least one of which I've confirmed was named after me ("because the name sounded cool"). BAX Global is a moving company, but I don't think they have a specific Illinois (or Israel) branch. And there's a Baxil Hall at a campus in Pennsylvania, which appears to be completely unrelated to anything else I can Google.

Anyway! Your five, which are colored a bit by the brevity of our acquaintance:

Citrine
Tarot
Self-actualization
LOLcats
... and, running short on ideas, I think I'm going to go with "Siege" the word, because I'm curious to hear the etymology of your name/handle.

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[Note: Some of the entries in my journal to which I have linked are locked to the Metaphysics (and Pyschology) friends group I maintain.]

Citrine -- I first encountered this stone about two and a half years ago, and didn't think much of it at the time. Eventually, however, I realized that the incredibly diverse effects of the stone that people were telling me about were all related; specifically, they related to the kind of energy that citrine produces, which causes blockages to break up and helps attachments to detach.

Tarot -- Once upon a time, I was convinced that the Tarot was an appropriate tool for me. It might still be, but I think I need a deck (Tarot or some other "oracle" deck) that speaks more to me and who I am inside; the Thoth Tarot is a bit too pretentious for me, even when it provides extremely obvious answers. I tried thinking up my own, but shatterstripes' Silcon Dawn Tarot also has something to say. Plus, haikujaguar's Balance Cards (a personal set, words on otherwise blank cards so she can produce a more appropriate image for the querent) intrigue me.

Self-actualization -- Let's just say that this is all about me becoming not just enlightened, but an active element in my own life.

LOLcats? Heck, I just read 'em and make 'em and enjoy 'em and share a few now and then!

Siege -- Somewhere in my journal, I explained this once already, but I can't find it right now. Basically, I was once upon a time looking at creating a character for a furry story who was a (masculine) shapeshifter; and the linking identity was that all his shapes were grey. Grey fox, grey wolf, greyish coyote, grey mouse, grey kangaroo. A quick shuffling through my father's Latin/English dictionary produced "canus", meaning grey, and being a pun on "canis". So the character I wanted to create was going to be named Canus Grey (=CG).

Then I heard a story from some friends of a high-school athlete, a football player who scored the winning touchdown for his team in an important "rivals" game. The letters on his jersey were "C J", and as he ran down the field, outpacing all the tacklers who tried to get him, the crowd chanted "C-'j, Cee'j, See'j, Siege!" And thus CG became Siege (though later, when I dropped that character onto FurryMUCK and did a bit of editing on his attributes, I kept the original name in my %n).

Edited at 2009-03-19 05:47 am (UTC)

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To deliver the traditional response to an exemplary pun: *groans* (:

(I much like the vocab moment, too!)

(Also, I've been passing up the five-associations meme just because too many flistians have been in on it; I think this bonus-commentary is exactly what I need! Sign me up!)

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One minor pet peeve I have about memes is that, while many people are aware of the notion of memes as living things, few people bother to take the next logical step: if memes are alive, memes must evolve. If you have an adaptation to contribute to it to make it survive better in the environment of your friends list, add it in! The next generation will benefit from your induced mutation. (I don't always do this, but the few that I have problems with and pass on unaltered are because I feel more like mocking it than helping it.)

Your five:
Swing Sets
Atheism
Magic: The Gathering
Writer's Block*
Nomic

--
* The LJ thought-prompter, not the creative affliction.

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Ha! I like editing memes myself. Answers here.

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My word: Spork.

(Deal with that one, why don't you)

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Ah yes: the spork. The TITANIUM spork. The titanium spork OF DESTINY.

I only have one spork. It's enough. Even one TSOD is too much spork for most people. This is because TSODs are condensed AWESOME, in a portable and utilitarian form.

Even one spork is too much awesome for Johnny Law. It's too much awesome for the frame backpack that carried it on the PCT. If I continue to keep that spork, someday it will be too much awesome for the local spacetime continuum, and the earth will EXPLODE with awesome, and when it does, I will kiss my spork goodbye with salty bittersweet tears running down my face, sad to see it go but knowing that I got to spend my brief and fleeting life in the presence of such glory, and IT WAS ALL WORTH IT.

*ahem*

Your five, picked arbitrarily because there were so many good ones:
Gay marriage
Twine
Llamas
Covered bridges
Toques

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So, what would happen if Leonard Nimoy ate salsa with a titanium spork? Are excellence and awesomeness additive? Could the universe survive? Would this bring on The Rapture? Or at least A Rapture? And why does this sound like the end of an episode of Rocky & Bullwinkle episode?

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If Bullwinkle is pulling salsa out of his hat, something's definitely exploded due to overwhelming AWE (Awesomeness With Excellence) quotient.

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Heh, wish you could have made it all the way up to the Cascades, I would have walked a bit with you.

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