yakalskovich | ganked from sdelmonte

tag

1. Milliways, of course. After a while, one wants to see what the people one threads with are doing.-
2. Filking. I wish I lived anywhere near there and could come to a house filk. I don't sing much, but somehow feel I would utterly love to sing along with other fen at a filk.
3. You're a grown and sensible person with a job and a life. Nobody would ever dare tell you to get one! Fandom, and RPage, needs such people to ground it.
4. Barry leaving. That was truly sad and very memorable.
5. Well, it might be a bit too deep for a meme, but did you ever have any misgivings about the fact that I am German? I wouldn't have blamed you in the least for that! In fact, when I picked up Teja, I made certain that the dubious historical associations of his canon was in his app and in his user info, and if you or a few other people I could name had protested (as I reiterated here) against a pup with such a taint (however undeserved, at careful analysis) in the bar during the first fortnight or so, I would have dropped him at once!
6. You don't use different icons much, so it doesn't really apply. But I like how you look at people from your icons as yourself.-

I will admit that I have had a general discomfort with Germans in the past, but as I have become more and more part of the filk world, I have met a lot of Germans and worked to get past preconceived notions. Beyond which, I know that things really are not like they once were.

Teja never gave me any pause as a German folk figure. He's clearly something separate as you play him from any uses or misuses of the figure by any more recent regime.

German filkers, of all things? Hmmm, I might be able to find some here after all. It just sounds like a good thing to do that is conducive to general peacefulness and good cheer.-

I suggest you look here for some info on that topic.

*waves* Hello

1. You're a Milliwayser; what I said to Alex.-
2. 'Hi Fi!'
3. I can drop a random classical reference I remember from my school and uni time, and you get it and run with it immediately.
4. Broken!Will referring to Teja as a 'scary king'. For some reason, that tickled my funny bone enormously.
5. How did it happen you ended up in New Zealand, of all places? To study Ancient Greek there, of all things?
6. The little black cat, all lost and a bit scared.

Its a slightly long story. I'd graduated from university in 2003 and tried to get a job in the US and it wasn't happening and the guy I was dating at the time was planning on going to Korea to teach English the next year.

Now traveling always helps me figure things out so I started looking around and decided on working in New Zealand for a year and I fell in love with this country.

Though my visa expired so I went home and decided I was ready to go back to grad school and wanted to come here. At the time I was dating a guy who lives in Wellington but also Victoria has a really good classics program. And so I'm here and almost finished a masters.

Ahhhh, blokes were involved at some stage! Also, you seem to be a person that likes to travel, so that is all understandable and makes sense. Still New Zealand sounds such a cool place! There are penguins on beaches in some place! What could be cooler.

Friend of mine lived there for a year and worked in a backpacker hostel on a penguin beach.-

I really like it and have enjoyed my time here and yes blokes were involved but not hugely. The first one more got me thinking, yes traveling is a good idea.

The second one was complicated but I love Wellington and he's a friend now. Penguin beach, so probably somewhere down in the South Island then, that's where all the penguins are at least. I lived in Dunedin the year I was working.

Yes, South Island; somewhere near Christchurch, I think. Whe I first met her, she had just come back, and we always listened to some Christchurch radio station via the internet while we worked. It was night for them, then, and they had the best music...

*wave* Tek!

1. You used to be in the Wraeththu chat on Saturdays, long ago; when I got back from the con in Stafford and got my LJ, of course I friended you!
2. Portuguese
3. The way you're into so many different cultures and languages not your own; we Europeans are led to believe that is rare in Americans.
4. You comment of 'Aww! Girlfriend went stabbity' on that post where I was translating bits of Teja's canon; it made me giggle all day.-
5. You're very much a fandom person; why did you not take to RPage?
6. The cat. I always approve of cat content.-

5. You know, I always felt bad about that.

The main reason I dropped out of the RP game so quickly, after you went to all that trouble of setting me up, will probably sound so ludicrous as to be...well, a very ludicrous thing. Just as I was getting settled into RPing, I was hit by a norovirus. Seriously. I mentioned it briefly on my lj, but didn't want to go into detail, as having the Norwalk virus is just as disgusting as they say, if not more so. And every time I looked at the page and thought about logging in, I would get a flashback to being that drastically ill and I would think "Erm, not right now." And then I got out of the habit.

Also I was really shy about whether I was doing the "right" kind of character interaction, or whether I was messing other people up too badly with my comments, and I enjoyed it a lot, but it was kind of scary. Even with support, it's hard to break into an established community that already has strong bonds with each other and a history. It's easy to disrupt that, or feel as though you might be disruptive, even if you're not.

Oh, all sorts of disruptive stuff went on in the old Discworld RPG that would never be allowed anywhere else; people were expected to jump right in and mess with the others. In other games, it's called god-moding, and very much a no-no.

I hope I might interest you in Milliways eventually. For some reason, there never was a Wraeththu contingent there. They may be able to sex it up with nobody but another har, but they can interact just fine! Also, one can play a charrie without getting them involved with anyone; I have had Teja in Milliways for three months now, and he's still not started anything with anybody. He is very slowly getting to a point where he may change that, but I take that very slowly, and also, it's plotted and intended that way.

So, how about it? **tempts**

Oooh, I'd love to! I assumed it was a closed community, so I never thought much about it. Perhaps I'll lurk and get a feel for the atmosphere there. Thank you.

No, anybody an apply there. Just read it a bit (you might 'threadstalk' Teja, for example, to get a point of reference, keeping an eye on his tagged entries; or indeed any other character, to narrow things down a bit) and then, when apps are open again (from the 1st to 7th every month), you app somebody that you want.

I might tempt you with Myrtia (the 'girlfriend went stabbity', you know), but to be honest, narrative causality is so strong, that between he 19th century canon, and the 21st century values of Milliways, her plot line is completely on rails; she has what one would call insta-plot, and not much freedom in her development, should she come to Milliways. On the other hand, she'd be easy, for a first character; her canon is limited, you know all there is to it, and you couldn't do much wrong with her.-

3. I think a lot of that is due to my childhood. I was always very into those "Children From Other Lands" type books when I was a kid, and that was encouraged by my family. We had a vast doll collection that had been built up over the years from my grandparents' globetrotting. We also had a lot of French children's books and children's books about Norway from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My grandmother's father was a professor of French, and also when she was a small child she found a treasure-trove of books in French in an abandoned house somewhere that she "adopted". As an adult, my grandmother loved to read nineteenth century French novelists like Stendahl. My grandfather's mother was from a bilingual English/French family, although he himself was not fluent in French (he could speak it, though). His mother was also friends with a Norwegian-American publisher, so she got a lot of books from him.

Since we lived in San Francisco, it was quite common for us to go into Chinatown and Japantown and Little Italy for dinner or something like that. That lead to buying books and dolls related to those cultures, so I developed an interest in Japanese culture and folklore quite early, long before I got into anime. Also, my grandparents were Vedantists, so they had a lot of books about India and Hindu philosophy, including Indian comics in English retelling stories like the Ramayana. My grandfather was a professor of philosophy and English, so things like Buddhist philosophy and Shakespeare were important parts of my background as well.

As well as that, we travelled a lot. When I was five, we went to London and then drove through France. When I was six, we went to Hawaii (not out of the US, but definitely a different culture). When I was seven, I visited London and Bristol, where I spent a week at an infants' school, then the Netherlands and Switzerland. When I was eight, we went to Italy. So early on, I learned that not everyone in the world speaks English, and that it's helpful if you can speak as much of another person's language as possible, because if you're lost and jetlagged and need a bathroom, accurate information is key.

And in addition to *that*, I got used to the idea of learning at least smatterings of different languages in school at an earlier age than is common in the US, where languages are normally begun in the pre-teens. I went to a private school in first grade (six years old), which focused on teaching ballet with academics sort of as a sideline. You can't study ballet without learning French, so French lessons were mandatory (I was extremely poor at them). We moved the next year, and I went to a public school. Languages weren't officially taught there, but my second grade class (seven years old) had a teacher (what was her official title? Damn, I can't remember) who worked with the "mentally gifted minors" who made up my class. She taught us very basic Spanish. No languages in third grade, but I hit the jackpot in fourth grade, where a wonderful woman who was the mother of one of the students taught us German. This was completely unofficial, and she was not affiliated with the school faculty; she and our teacher simply felt it was a good idea for her to teach us as much as she could while her daughter was still in that class. I learned far more German than I had French or Spanish, and fell in love with the language, an illicit affair which lasted through my first two years of university. I also messed around with Italian and Russian on my own, but never got very far.

Oh, and my grandparents were champion shutterbugs, who never let a moment go undocumented by the camera. When they weren't actually travelling, they had slideshows of everywhere they'd been already. They would talk about their experiences there, what the people were like, what the food was like, funny stories about things that happened. I absolutely adored those nights. And they had been EVERYWHERE, except for Eastern Europe, South America, and Antarctica.

Ah! The "Resource Teacher"! That's what we called the lady who taught Spanish. She did odds and ends of all sorts of things, mostly arts-related.

And now that I've googled it, I know that a "resource teacher" is a teacher who works with special needs students. That explains the eclectism of her job.

So she taught other stuff as well when there was no special needs student around to specially tutor?

I honestly don't know. It's possible. I was seven at the time, I wasn't exactly keeping track. : )

This was back in the halcyon days when California had the best public schools in the US. Before the tax cuts were voted in and the rot started. Yes, I'm bitter about it.

I haven't been out of the US since 1984. 1984! I really miss that, sometimes.

All of it sounds really interesting; and it explains a lot. Is there no way you might travel with the choir, though?

ECC, as it happens, may well be traveling to Vienna, Prague, and Budapest in the summer of 2009. I don't see how I can afford it, though. I plan to be with Soromundi for their twentieth anniversary, so it should be easier to avoid the temptation.

OMG. Vienna and Budapest. I've wanted to go to those places all my LIFE. And I've been reading so much about Prague, I'm interested in there, too. Argh. Argh. I can't let myself think about it.

I think I've already done this once on your LJ, but we can do it again if you like.

Won't be posting anything much to my LJ though until next week.

1. Milliways, originally -- but we've done lots of other stuff since then.
2. That picture of your workspace with 'The Complete Handiman'
3. You sense of humour, your patience, the way you draw...
4. After three years of talking online almost eevry day, and innumerable words of RPage co-written, there's a lot. But there's, for example, the way you announced that you're 'ancient' when we first talked in December 2004, or how totally charmed I was when I got your drawing of Sooty in Gil in the mail two years ago. Or when we looked at each other's houses via Google Earth. Or when we hatched the Vine Square plot and suddenly had that great humming storytelling motor on our hands, so to speak...
5. Do you know who was the first instance of your recurrent character archetype of the Small Dark Humble One (like Milli!Gil, Charlie, or even Toli)?
6. The Sky Disc icon

LOl, we have written a lot - in IM and RP and MM, some of which I like to think may be a notch or two more complex than the average 'let's see what happens' role play.

Question 5 - I've been thinking about that and I think I can trace him back through Restituere Gil and my days of RP ficcing where Remus had a lot of those attributes and beyond to a story set in the Warhammer 40K universe called The Imperial Ideal. Private Kreig, my hero in that, had been a top-sergeant but sort of lost the plot when he got the news that his wife and kids had been killed. He was a bit of a Sue in that he managed to meet every challenge but it was never effortless and he grumbled a lot about it. When asked how he knew what to do he'd growl 'they sent me on a course'. Dear me that was written a long time ago.

Yep, I was explaining about that to

carolinw just today, too. Milliways is a game -- MM is Open Source Story Telling on quite a different level.-

ganked from sdelmonte

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