Interests meme
Comment on this post and I will choose seven interests from your profile. You will then explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
From electricant.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=alpha+centauri
One of the computer games that had the biggest impact on me was Sid Meier's Civilization. I first played this at a friend's house, and remember playing Elizabeth and the English and having a sprawling war across Africa, destroying enemy cities with my hordes of catapults. I knew I had to have this game, and so I had to buy a computer capable of running it. I spent many hours playing this, and its sequel Civilization II (and further sequels since then as well...), and when Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri came out, I obviously had to play that as well. It was an excellent game, with new features in terms of customisable governance and unit design, as well as an intriguing SFnal setting and story weaved in to the game developments and technological research.
Of course, I've also been interested in the actual Alpha Centauri star system, it being the closest to us; being only 4 and a bit light years away means it really might be technically feasible to send a probe there within the course of a human lifetime (probably not mine, though).
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=eqtraders
Several years ago, I started playing Everquest, one of the early MMORPGs, and probably the most influential. In addition to killing things and taking their stuff, Everquest also has a user crafting system whereby characters collect raw materials and turn them into finished goods, increasing their skill and so being able to make better items. This is known as the tradeskill system, because these goods can then usually be traded to other players as a source of in-game income.
EQ Traders Corner was/is a website dedicated to this part of the game, listing recipes, giving advice on how best to increase skill, sell items, etc. While I was playing Everquest, I used this site quite a lot, and read the forums. One of my most treasured possessions in Everquest was my Blessed Coldain Prayer Shawl, an item that involved a number of lengthy quests and high-level skill in (I think) every tradeskill in the game.
I no longer play Everquest; while the tradeskill system in World of Warcraft, which I do currently play, is in some ways better than Everquest's, it doesn't engender the same sense of community that EQ's did. I did for a while try playing A Tale in the Desert, which has a vastly more complex and interesting crafting system, the game as a whole didn't really grab me. I would be very interested to play a newer generation of MMORPG with a good integration of a crafting system in to a well-realised whole game.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=erisea+pyracheiristes
Erisea Pyracheiristes was my character in Everquest; I played on the Firiona Vie server, which was the Roleplaying Preferred server, which, among other rules, only allowed a single character (as opposed to a more common characteristic of MMORPGs, whereby a player will create and play multiple characters, called Alts, and often give later characters a boost by providing them with extra equipment and resources from their higher-levelled Main, a process called Twinking). This single character focus and the Roleplaying Preferred aspect led to a more developed feeling of character for what you were playing. Erisea was a wizard, the ultimate magical damage class of Everquest. She was a High Elf, and her parents had been killed at an early age by an invasion of the Crushbone orc clan. The forests around her home city had been set alight, and her enduring memory of her childhood was of the destructive power of fire; she vowed to wield this power herself, and extract burning vengeance on the orcs. The ability to wield that power was more important than most other things to her. She learned to throw mighty fireballs from her hands, hence her chosen surname of Pyracheiristes (which is a rough and ready Greek translation of Firehands - Ancient Greek was used to represent the ancient Combine language of the in-game lore).
The name Erisea itself comes as a corruption of Eris, a representation of the chaos that birthed her worldly goals.
(The Crushbone orcs were a fairly low-level challenge in the game, but whenever I was in the area, I would tend to wander over and nuke the hell out of all the orcs even when I was high-enough level for it no longer to be a challenge.)
Erisea as a character concept is one I then carried over in to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, backstory and goals essentially unchanged. (She even created her own magic items in that game, to increase her power, to tie back in to the previous interest.) I often still use the online username Erisea.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=nomic
Nomic is a game about changing the rules. The wikipedia article will explain more about the game than I can hope to. At university, I took part in OxNomic with a number of other people, and it was really fun. It was more organised than One Thousand Blank White cards, but shared some similarities. I very much enjoyed playing that, and I would be interested in setting something similar up again. Hmm, thinking about it, I wonder if it could be done on Facebook or as an LJ community.
I was also involved in Agora Nomic for a while (which is still going after 15 years!), but that was just too complex and traffic-heavy to maintain.
The interesting thing about Nomics for me is how they evolve, and how they can be subject to interpretation. They are an interesting way of thinking about laws, and it's very easy to see, having played nomics, why politicians in favour of bad laws that defend them by saying that they won't ever be used in bad ways just aren't thinking straight.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=not+beer
I don't like beer; from much experimentation, I have pretty much concluded that if it's brewed with hops, I don't like the taste. So, in the spirit of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I have an interest in Not Beer.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=the+idea+of+beer
Lots of people like and appreciate beer; some of these people appear to me not to be irredeemably stupid. Some of those put forward good discussions of the relative merits of one beer over another, reasoning I can understand. But I don't like beer (see above). I would like to like beer thanks to the discussions of these people, I would like to be involved in those discussions, to be able to compare beers, to be able to enjoy one of the supposed great pleasures. But I'll have to make do with wine, cider and spirits. Fortunately, that's not much of a hardship.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=toponyms
This is actually a bit of an in-joke instead of the correct use of toponyms. Back in university, I was a frequent contributor to the newsgroups ox.test and ox.talk. The Usenet practice of using acronyms to reduce typing and comprehension was extended by these groups by turning acronyms back in to words, and specifically in to place names, or what looked like place names. Thus, HTH (Hope This Helps - usually used sarcastically), became Hethe or Heath and WTF might have become Watford (although it might not - I can't really remember now.) Colin Batchelor coined these toponyms. This should hopefully clarify nothing.
From electricant.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=alpha+centauri
One of the computer games that had the biggest impact on me was Sid Meier's Civilization. I first played this at a friend's house, and remember playing Elizabeth and the English and having a sprawling war across Africa, destroying enemy cities with my hordes of catapults. I knew I had to have this game, and so I had to buy a computer capable of running it. I spent many hours playing this, and its sequel Civilization II (and further sequels since then as well...), and when Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri came out, I obviously had to play that as well. It was an excellent game, with new features in terms of customisable governance and unit design, as well as an intriguing SFnal setting and story weaved in to the game developments and technological research.
Of course, I've also been interested in the actual Alpha Centauri star system, it being the closest to us; being only 4 and a bit light years away means it really might be technically feasible to send a probe there within the course of a human lifetime (probably not mine, though).
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=eqtraders
Several years ago, I started playing Everquest, one of the early MMORPGs, and probably the most influential. In addition to killing things and taking their stuff, Everquest also has a user crafting system whereby characters collect raw materials and turn them into finished goods, increasing their skill and so being able to make better items. This is known as the tradeskill system, because these goods can then usually be traded to other players as a source of in-game income.
EQ Traders Corner was/is a website dedicated to this part of the game, listing recipes, giving advice on how best to increase skill, sell items, etc. While I was playing Everquest, I used this site quite a lot, and read the forums. One of my most treasured possessions in Everquest was my Blessed Coldain Prayer Shawl, an item that involved a number of lengthy quests and high-level skill in (I think) every tradeskill in the game.
I no longer play Everquest; while the tradeskill system in World of Warcraft, which I do currently play, is in some ways better than Everquest's, it doesn't engender the same sense of community that EQ's did. I did for a while try playing A Tale in the Desert, which has a vastly more complex and interesting crafting system, the game as a whole didn't really grab me. I would be very interested to play a newer generation of MMORPG with a good integration of a crafting system in to a well-realised whole game.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=erisea+pyracheiristes
Erisea Pyracheiristes was my character in Everquest; I played on the Firiona Vie server, which was the Roleplaying Preferred server, which, among other rules, only allowed a single character (as opposed to a more common characteristic of MMORPGs, whereby a player will create and play multiple characters, called Alts, and often give later characters a boost by providing them with extra equipment and resources from their higher-levelled Main, a process called Twinking). This single character focus and the Roleplaying Preferred aspect led to a more developed feeling of character for what you were playing. Erisea was a wizard, the ultimate magical damage class of Everquest. She was a High Elf, and her parents had been killed at an early age by an invasion of the Crushbone orc clan. The forests around her home city had been set alight, and her enduring memory of her childhood was of the destructive power of fire; she vowed to wield this power herself, and extract burning vengeance on the orcs. The ability to wield that power was more important than most other things to her. She learned to throw mighty fireballs from her hands, hence her chosen surname of Pyracheiristes (which is a rough and ready Greek translation of Firehands - Ancient Greek was used to represent the ancient Combine language of the in-game lore).
The name Erisea itself comes as a corruption of Eris, a representation of the chaos that birthed her worldly goals.
(The Crushbone orcs were a fairly low-level challenge in the game, but whenever I was in the area, I would tend to wander over and nuke the hell out of all the orcs even when I was high-enough level for it no longer to be a challenge.)
Erisea as a character concept is one I then carried over in to a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, backstory and goals essentially unchanged. (She even created her own magic items in that game, to increase her power, to tie back in to the previous interest.) I often still use the online username Erisea.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=nomic
Nomic is a game about changing the rules. The wikipedia article will explain more about the game than I can hope to. At university, I took part in OxNomic with a number of other people, and it was really fun. It was more organised than One Thousand Blank White cards, but shared some similarities. I very much enjoyed playing that, and I would be interested in setting something similar up again. Hmm, thinking about it, I wonder if it could be done on Facebook or as an LJ community.
I was also involved in Agora Nomic for a while (which is still going after 15 years!), but that was just too complex and traffic-heavy to maintain.
The interesting thing about Nomics for me is how they evolve, and how they can be subject to interpretation. They are an interesting way of thinking about laws, and it's very easy to see, having played nomics, why politicians in favour of bad laws that defend them by saying that they won't ever be used in bad ways just aren't thinking straight.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=not+beer
I don't like beer; from much experimentation, I have pretty much concluded that if it's brewed with hops, I don't like the taste. So, in the spirit of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I have an interest in Not Beer.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=the+idea+of+beer
Lots of people like and appreciate beer; some of these people appear to me not to be irredeemably stupid. Some of those put forward good discussions of the relative merits of one beer over another, reasoning I can understand. But I don't like beer (see above). I would like to like beer thanks to the discussions of these people, I would like to be involved in those discussions, to be able to compare beers, to be able to enjoy one of the supposed great pleasures. But I'll have to make do with wine, cider and spirits. Fortunately, that's not much of a hardship.
http://www.livejournal.com/interests.bml?int=toponyms
This is actually a bit of an in-joke instead of the correct use of toponyms. Back in university, I was a frequent contributor to the newsgroups ox.test and ox.talk. The Usenet practice of using acronyms to reduce typing and comprehension was extended by these groups by turning acronyms back in to words, and specifically in to place names, or what looked like place names. Thus, HTH (Hope This Helps - usually used sarcastically), became Hethe or Heath and WTF might have become Watford (although it might not - I can't really remember now.) Colin Batchelor coined these toponyms. This should hopefully clarify nothing.