Interview meme
• A meme:
→ Comment with “Come at me, bro”
→ I’ll respond by asking you five questions, so I can get to know you better.
→ Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
→ Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.
These questions are from ashmedai:
1. If you do grow a garden one day, what would be some must-haves, crops you’d absolutely want to grow yourself?
Carrots. Both the small snack-size ones (because they make good snacks) and the chunky ones that go well in stews and Japanese curry. And every working day, I have diced tomatoes and cucumber with my salad, so it would be good to grow those too.
I’m not sure how hard it would be to grow sweet potatoes, but we use those in the curry too, and it would be good to grow those too.
2. You love RPG and gaming, but I have NO clue about it. What got you into it, and what are some of the things you love about it?
I got introduced to RPGs when I was 14 by a classmate who insisted I would like it. He was going to run a game at his house (at the other end of the city) for some friends (some of which I knew, some of which I didn’t know) and I was invited too. It was about 45 minutes by bicycle to get there, and the first day my mom brought me by car. The rest of the week, I cycled there to play in the game, because he was totally right: I did like RPGs.
We played Rolemaster, and I got to play a Hobbit Thief, because that’s an easy role to fulfil within the party with few special rules. We played through a published scenario, “Adventure at Minas Anghen”, from the module “Haunted Ruins of the Dunlendings”, which is set in Middle-Earth. Fifteen minutes in, I experienced my first character death!
All of the people in that group were a member of the Eindhovense Rollenspel Groep, and I joined that too. I got to play a lot with them.
What I love about RPGs is the unbounded nature of the game. With computer games, you can never step out of the boundaries set for you, but in an RPG, moderated by a human Game Master, you can! Thinking up a character in a particular setting, getting to experience an adventure, making choices about the world and your character that matter (in that world, at least), that’s what I like about it. And the communal story-telling and social aspects (with the right group…) make playing an RPG a very special experience.
3. You list tea - what are your favorite kinds or brands, and what makes them so good?
My go-to tea is the Keemun Congou from Simon Levelt, a Dutch tea and coffee trading company. It’s our “house tea”, and I just never get bored of it. It has a rich, deep taste, but it doesn’t have a lot of tannin nor caffeine, so it’s easy on the stomach and can be drunk throughout the day. It’s just the best.
4. You have beautiful cats. How and where did you meet them?
Our previous cat was a black cat that was deaf, which we got from a shelter when it was around nine. It was really my partner’s cat: it was always hanging out with her, and while it seemed to like me enough, it was her that he loved. All the same, I was pretty heart-broken when we had to let him go: his kidneys were failing and he clearly was done with life like that. Force-feeding him was a traumatic experience for me.
Then only a couple of weeks after, I realised that I missed having a cat around the house. We talked it over, and we reached the conclusion that it would be best to have two cats: back then, we were on the road a lot, so our new cats would have company while we were gone. We also agreed that we would get cats from a shelter: there’s enough cats being found and/or abandoned. We looked at the adoption site of the humane society and found a few sets of cats that belonged together at a shelter that was reasonably close.
We went to visit there, and I didn’t want to bring our cat carrier with us, because I was afraid that we would act on impulse and return home with cats without being really prepared. The first set we visited hung out in a room with a lot of other cats, and there was a volunteer in that room there. She was there to take pictures of the cats to put up on the adoption site, and she pointed out the cats on our list to us. Klik insists that it was because I still had some liverwurst from lunch on my fingers, but I’m not sure - but I easily gained the trust of this first pair, and before long I was giving them both head scritches. When I stopped, they mewed at me to continue - something that hadn’t happened before with these two.
We looked at other pairs on our list, but the decision had already been made. In the car back, I regretted the decision to not bring the carrier with us, but we got the house in order and collected them from the shelter a few days later.
5. I think we all have moments in our lives we’d like to re-live over and over again. What are some of yours?
As cliche as it is, I think I’m going to go with our wedding day. It was a whole day that was totally about us, and everybody had a good time. The weather was fine, the locations were good, we had good food… It was wonderful.
Thanks for the questions!
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.