jazzfish | more questions

More questions. These got kinda long.

From

thanate:

1) Why gaming? (which sort is best?)

For me, "gaming" is three different things.

Role-playing gives me a chance to play Pretend in a shared world, to tell stories and learn about characters. It's the best sort of gaming because it lets me stretch my creativity, and at its best it can astonish and delight and shock and catharsize me.

Board games, especially the kind I prefer, tend to be pretty cerebral affairs, with competition but not necessarily direct conflict. They let me indulge my competitive nature, and they're something I'm good at. Board games are the best sort of gaming because I'm up for board gaming pretty much any time, where role-playing is something that can be draining.

I don't play many video games these days. When I did, it was for a combination of the role-playing (participating in an unfolding story) and board-gaming (competition and something I'm good at) reasons. They're an adequate substitute when I don't have access to board gaming, or when I'm feeling asocial.

2) Was what was wrong with college mostly depression & environment, or was there an education-based part as well?

What was wrong with college was that I hadn't been able to establish an identity for myself in high school: all I had was "what my parents want" or "in direct opposition to what my parents want." College wasn't so much a chance to get a degree as a chance to find/define myself in ways that weren't related to my parents. In the absence of an immediate parental approval stick/carrot, I didn't have a sufficiently compelling reason to keep up in classes (hey, i'm smart, i can totally skate by on just showing up for the final), so my first semester was bad-but-barely-passable.

Having to explain my bad grades to my parents made things worse, so I got (more) depressed, and less willing to go to class and do work, making me more depressed when grades came around, etc etc. After spring '97 I took the Dean's Vacation, and also had a huge fight with my parents culminating in me moving to B'burg and taking a job in fast food to support myself. A year later I tried going back to school full-time and had pretty much the same experience. It wasn't until fall 2001, starting with part-time classes, that I was able to hold it together.

I mean, there's also the fact that I despise problem sets and other things that look like busywork, which made me a poor fit for engineering from the start, so in that sense it was "education." But then, I was only in engineering because that was the kind of son my parents wanted me to be, and I never got to any courses covering anything that was clearly beyond my comprehension even after putting forth actual effort. (Diffy-q might have done it, had I stuck with engineering.) I was a much better fit in the English department, particularly the upper-level courses. Len Scigaj's Modern Poetry class was the only one I didn't fail during the failing years.

(Side note: I'm a little reluctant to class it as "depression," although I was on Prozac for 2-3 years [can't recall if I started in spring '94 or spring '95, stopped spring '97]. During my abortive stint in counseling in fall 2003, one of the smartest things my therapist said was "let's tackle some of this other baggage first, and then if you're still unhappy we'll look into medication." I was [am?] certainly depressed, but I'm not sure whether or not it's due to a medical condition or just environmental and psychological factors.)

3) How did you end up in your current job?

Sheer luck. I stumbled into a tech writing job nearly ten years ago when

narquelion talked me into applying for a position at the trainwreck that Exegetics quickly became. That plus the hell of Synapticad shortly thereafter convinced me that this was work that I could do, even if those environments were especially toxic. When I finally graduated college my part-time testing position with VirPack became a full-time one (salary! benefits! a cube!) but it didn't take long for me to realise that, no, I didn't want to stay in either Blacksburg or small companies.

I spent about a month resume-bombing all the tech writing and testing job ads on Craigslist in several cities where I had some semblance of a social network. This was the first place to make me a reasonable offer. I had a potential interview in Seattle for a job as a tester but by that point I was tired of the job search and of testing.

4) How is the actual work part (as opposed to people, or being in the wrong climate)?

It's not so bad. Some of it's interesting; very little is outright boring, and the boring stuff give my brain a break. Plus there's generally times when I can go do something more technical (fixing RoboHelp problems or whatever) if I need a break from sorting through the latest round of changes to how caching works or new features in some admin tool.

A year or so ago a friend offered to put my resume in at his workplace, since I sounded pretty unhappy/frustrated with my job. Thing is, as I told him, the things I'm unhappy with here are things that I think I'd be unhappy with just about anywhere, and (based on experience elsewhere) the worst of those things are mitigated here by virtue of having a pretty good boss and a culture that encourages developers to actually answer questions.

5) Why writing?

I don't know.

Because I've spent my whole life trying to explain the inside of my head to baffled observers, so out of necessity I'm good at putting words in order.

Because words come easily to me on paper, or rather on the screen. Because I've been playing interactive fiction since I was eight, which puts you in the role of protagonist and also, in a way, creator.

Because books were better friends than people, growing up. Because Foundation and The Two Towers and The Dark Is Rising (and, later, Ender's Game and Jack of Shadows) changed my life and I wanted to be accepted by the people who'd done that for me, and the way I could see to get that was to write my own. Because one day I must have looked at the wondrous wall of Extruded Fantasy Product on the Waldenbooks shelves in Fayetteville and thought "Hey, I can do that too!"

Because at the age of eleven it gave me something to dream for, and at the age of thirteen I let that dream get squashed. Maybe I haven't yet figured out whether it's really something that I want to do at thirty-three or just something that I wanted to do then and haven't let go of.

"Choose any of the above, and you may be right." -Roger Zelazny, "The Engine at Heartspring's Center"

From

nixve:

1. So what's your second-favorite (after Changeling) role-playing game?

ha. Changeling is some wonderful ideas entwined with a magic system that's simultaneously brilliant (the Arts/Realms concept) and horrid (Glamour, specific Arts). (Changeling is sort of the polar opposite of Mage, which has a magic system I mostly adore in a setting I don't care for at all. Hm...) My best unfinished chronicle is still that Changeling game, so in that sense I guess it counts as a "favorite."

I think after Changeling would come Lacuna, but only because it's hands-down the most successful thing I've run. (Possibly because it only went for one session. Even the legendary Amber games had their slow points and off sessions.) Honestly, most anything that's rules-light and story-heavy would be fine with me.

("The game that someone else is running and I'm playing in" is also a perennial contender for this spot, although it's been long years since I've been happy with any of the non-Changeling games I've played in. Hm, except for the Ganakagok one-shot last Origins.)

2. What is your ideal political system in which you would want to live?

Jeez, I don't know. With representative democracy, there's the problem that for any individual voter, not getting involved or paying attention is a rational decision, because the ability of one person to make a difference in a large-scale democracy is minimal. And the representatives require some outside group (like, say, the people in question) to keep an eye on them, otherwise they start serving themselves instead of the state. But it's not like I have any better ideas.

I'd like to try living in one that's structured after the social contract as described in this post from Digby's place.

3. If you had an unlimited budget for buying art, what would you want to hang on the walls?

Probably not much. Bookcases (and game-cases) take up a lot of wall space. Magritte's Homesickness. Nice prints of Escher's Three Worlds and Blake's The Ancient of Days. Something by Mucha, something by Ansel Adams. I'd most likely keep much of what I already have, for aesthetic and sentimental reasons.

4. If you could have any book made into a movie which would it be?

Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, because that has so very much potential for awesome.

5. What do you hope is your legacy?

I don't much care about a legacy, achieving immortality through my works or deeds or genetic material. I want to make the world I live in a better (happier, kinder, truer) place; if that results in it still being a better place when I'm gone, then that works for me.

There's a story of a (Taoist? Buddhist? Zen?) monk who was asked what happens when you die. The monk laughed and said something like "When I die the worms will eat my flesh!" I think that's about the best legacy that can be hoped for. I want my legacy to be the harvesting of any organs that might be useful to someone else and a rendering down of my remaining organic matter to fertilizer.