Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. (Please note: If you simply wish to comment on something I've said but don't want to participate in the meme, that is fine. I will only give you five words if you specifically comment you with 'Words!')Now, there are some words here that I have done in the
first or
second iteration of this meme already; but I was curious as to what yet another Milli!mun would give me.
RP: I never played the tabletop version, or computer games (much). I was utterly clueless when I stumbled upon the old Discworld RPG in February 2004. I laughed my head off at the Patrician (as played by BNF
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copperbadge) going on about V-day, and apped Margolotta the teetotal vampire lady. Then, more charries followed. I probably did everything wrong that anybody can possibly do wrong in RPage. I was never given a manual of the most basic dos and don'ts. Godmoding, terrible sues, random OCs, blurring of IC/OOC divide -- I all did it, more or less. But I learned. The genre of 'journal-based role-playing' was just inventing itself, and we were among the seminal places that later siphoned off their muns into Milliways; another was one called 'Restiturere' from which
essayel came. While the Disworld RPG fell silent, Milliways boomed (in its first autumn of existence it had 60 to 90 EPs per day!), and even though I had a DW-RPG pup over there from the first morning of its existence (crossovers from other RPGs were allowed back then, and
villainny, one of the two founders of Milliways, had been in the DW-RPG as well), I only let myself be lured over there in November 2004, agreeing to play a villain for somebody else for two or three weeks. That villain was
asar_suti, and the rest, as they say, is history. Some of that history is not for public consumption; suffice it to say that I am still there, and so is 'Suti, while other people are long gone and forgotten, and
yet other people I used to have problems with have evolved into friendlies, if not outright friends. And I think you do need bad experiences that teach you. I could never deal well with bitches before starting RPage; now,
I eat them for breakfast at work and they
come back to thank me.
Goth: Yes, please. Big-G Goths, and little-G goths. I'm a bit of both. My family came from an area where the Goths settled for a century or two on their way south from the Baltic sea (if you go with the Jordanes version of their history), and there are people that claim Goths ousted from Italy settled in Bavaria, among other footsore ragtag of the Barbarian Migration (which is a half-joking definition for what the Bavarians really are, as they weren't known as a tribe before they settled here, at all). I balk a bit at the idea that the snarky bastards in the Miserable Village might be desendants of Teja's people, but on the other hand, the Lady Lena and the people in the tiny village where my cats are from? I can totally see it in them. In any case, here was part of Theodoric's realm all right; Felix Dahn makes the point while desribing people at the great assembly at Regeta which elected Witichis by saying they had come from as far as
Augusta Vindelicorum, which is
Augsburg. Which made me snerk, as Munichers find "Augschpurg" faintly funny...
History: We have that here as a matter of course. And while not everybody is always much aware of it, I have grown up to pay attention to the past, and its important influence on the present. I have grown up with the stories my grandmother told about her childhood, and I have grown up looking for pieces of
Samian ware in vineyards along the Rhine, where my father, who is an archaeologist and used to work for the state of Hesse until he retired, suspected that Roman
villae rusticae ought to have been. He has this theory that they weren't just private manor houses/large farms, but (up there near the Germanic
limes, beyond the Rhine) also look-out posts against a possible invasion from a breached
limes, and a network spreading civilisation into the hinterlands of the empire. So, he has studied maps a lot and has theories where (judging from known
villa sites) more
villae ought to be, to make the lookout posts complete, to be able to see the next
villae up and down the lines, and to close the net. So, finding Samian ware on a
suspected site was a great achievement! I died with envy at around age ten or eleven when my friend who had come with us for lack of anything better to do found a piece at an important and otherwise virgin site, and I didn't! Also, I have an uncle who is a historian, and have translated articles for him and colleagues of him, which I gave up after one lady made an utter mess of it, kept changing text that I had already translated, and never paid in full. I decided I no longer needed capricious, disorganised professors randomly screwing up my life with their demands, taking large chunks out of it for comparatively little pay.
Reenactment: I don't really re-enact; the Nazgul and I merely visit appropriate events in costumes we try to get historically correct.
Kaltenberg we missed this year due to torrential downpours; now we have high hopes for Maxlrain at the end of September, where we would go with the Lady Lena in whose stalble my cats were born. I think I'll make another
peplum before that, though. While the dress is all right, I really have all sorts of misgivings about the outer garment...
Germany: I live there. German is my first language, but I started learning English when I was three, from a great-aunt just returned from a year in Washington with her husband, who was a professor of mathematics and taught at Georgetown for a year. He has a
Wikipedia entry, but only in German, sorry. It doesn't mention, though, that he was married twice, and that he met his second wife while they both worked for the German opponents of
Bletchley Park. My great-aunt was that fiendishly clever, and later wrote her PhD thesis about
Cassiodorus; she was a classicist. It all comes circling back, definitely. Anyway, she taught me English early, and I never ever use the plea of 'not my first language' when interacting with people. Starting at age three gives you no excuse there. Otherwise, it is interesting to live in Germany; there's lots of history here, most of it not actively awful, and situated as it is in the middle of Europe, and one of the founding members of the EU, there is an interesting future, while not really going through 'interesting times' right now.
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