yet more questions

[jazzfish]

I'm sure you all know the drill by now, but just in case:
1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
2. I will respond by asking you 5 questions of a very personal nature.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, ask them 5 questions.

From desfido, probably the most difficult set of questions I've been posed since I applied to Jefferson:

1) I'm sure you've been asked this before, but what would your five desert island games be (assume appropriate people to play them with are stranded with you, but not in a way which makes them useful for escape)?

In no particular order:

• Go, for depth
  
• Race for the Galaxy (plus expansions), for quick fun
  
• Sleuth, for thinkiness
  
• Traders of Genoa, for complex negotiation
  
• Britannia, for strategy and long 'experience' wargaminess (note: if I'd played Titan more, it might have taken this spot)

2) What are the five best decisions you've made in the past five years?

• Moving into my own place.
  
• Going to work for $company.previous.
  
• Going to work for $company. (Includes "leaving Blacksburg" and "moving to the DC area.")
  
• Paying more money to live in a good location (close to work, easily accessible from the Beltway).
  
• Couples counseling with uilos, which grew into individual counseling after five months.

3) What are the five worst gaming experiences you have had (in terms of an individual play, specific time playing, bad games, or any other such reasonable interpretation)?

• Avalon Hill's Assassin, the first game I ever walked away from. The rules were bad, the gameplay was worse.
  
• The seventy-minute Fluxx prelim game in 2003. I wanted to shoot the players. All of them. Even the ones that were trying to speed things up.
  
• My game-destroying crash in my very first IIT.
  
• SoulCalibur with ndkid during a party. I had stopped having fun at being beat up and unable to retaliate (knockdown's a bitch), but didn't get up and walk away, so my frustration mounted.
  
• Joe the Asshole's legendarily painful D&D game. It's funny in retrospect.

4) What are five characteristics, abilities, or tendencies which, in your opinion, most define who you are?

• I'm lazy, in the perl sense. If presented with a problem I'd much rather expend more time and effort to solve the general case, instead of working out the special circumstances for this iteration.
  
• I'm terrified of and paralyzed by the possibility of failure. Actual failure is even worse.
  
• I analyze everything. This is incredibly useful for gaming and for general problem-solving, and causes difficulty when dealing with emotions.
  
• I'm an introvert who can pretend to be an extrovert for short periods of time.
  
• I communicate. I want to be understood and to understand. Writing's a natural extension of this ability and desire.

5) Who are the five people who have had the most significant impact upon your thinking?

• My parents. I'm putting an awful lot of effort towards knocking them off this list. In particular they're largely responsible for the second and third items in #4.
  
• Ursula K. Le Guin. Directly, with her translation of the Tao te Ching. Indirectly, through a class on her writing that I took in fall '03.
  
• Len Scigaj, my first serious English prof. He gave me the Imagists and the Moderns
  
• My current boss has taught me more about tech writing, and thus about good writing in general, than I've learned from just about anyone else.
  
• I think it was Matthew Yglesias's blog where I first encountered the phrase "Taxes are the price we pay to live in a civilised society," which as much as anything gave me some amount of guidance when I was mentally flailing about in spring '04. So, he counts.

---

And from befers:
1) Did you always want to return to Northern Virginia after college, or did you end up back there by happenstance?

Hm. I've got no particular love for the DC area (I hate the traffic and the climate is only barely tolerable). When I graduated I was looking at a number of other potential places, as well. However, DC was close to B'burg, and I already had a decent social network in place (and, most importantly, uilos was there). So: partly happenstance, mostly design, and definitely not permanent.

2) I figure your username comes from the Howie Green book you quote on your LiveJournal. Why does that moniker hold so much meaning for you?

History, mostly. I started using 'jazzfish' for my online handle in summer '96, after scathach gave me a copy of the book.

3) Are there things about your time at Jefferson that you think are unique to that place/time?

I'm not sure how to answer this question. Troupe was unique, but in a way that was still unique a few years later. The BBS culture died out with the birth of the Internet; that's not place-specific, except in that if I hadn't had geek friends I'd never have gotten started. Cloak People, maybe.

4) Why did you pick Virginia Tech?

It had a good engineering program, I already knew a whole bunch of people there, and I could apply early-decision and not have to worry about it any more for the rest of senior year.

5) What one thing could you not live without?

Sweet, sweet oxygen. Only slightly less literally, physical affection from those I love.