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Old 04-23-2006, 02:07 PM   #13
Shane
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Join Date: Apr 2006
Posts: 159
Shane is on a distinguished road
Pretty weird. I guess it started with reading Jaws. That because Jaws was my first novel.

No, it goes back to the first book I remember ever reading that had no pictures - "The Biggest Bear on Earth". And I'll tell you why. The Biggest Bear was a story told without any sort of conversational intercourse at all of the inner life of an Alaskan brown bear, or Kodiak (They apparently didn't call them that back then). It was more or less my first experience in really losing myself in a story and taking on another role, even if only by virtue of being led through it by someone else. I wish I could find that book.

From there, predictably, Tolkien, D&D. Then GURPS, and then sort of in a parallel fashion, SPI hex based war simulations and Avalon Hills "Diplomacy" plust rpg's dragging me inexorably towards miniatures, which culminated in a great deal of time and money spent on the now largely defunct "Warhammer Epic" or something like that, which was Warhammer's answer to mechs and which I found supremely more fun to play because of the elegance of the system making a lot of the paperwork unecessary.

I got out of the Navy in '93 and immediately tracked down the 'internet' I had been hearing about. MOO's were my first distraction, and coding a few objects on BayMOO made me think for ages that sooner or later I would get into a mud or MOO and code a lot of stuff, but alas, so far I have never done so.

I played Ancient Anguish, which is still alive and kicking if not any longer truly at the cutting edge as I percieved them to be back then. Due to a spate of mass mud-mail advertising invasions perpetrated by the admin, I too fell into the Threshold trap, and played there off and on for years, but there's something more than a bit off there, and what with it being pay to.. keep the admin off your back or whatever, well... Let's not get off topic. I've tried dozens of muds now. I discovered MUSH'ing just in the last three or so years, and enjoyed it a lot more than I would have anticipated, but I do prefer to have the game to play along with my rp.

Coffeemud has been promising, and I should probably check back in there more often than I do, but right now I am addicted to Accursed Lands, a sort of spinoff of Dartmud (which still exists and is as abominably hard to wedge yourself into as ever, it seems). I love it, but the complexity of what they are trying to achieve seems to keep it in perpetual Beta. Still, as an online community, it is my favorite to date.

Yeah, I also enjoyed drama in high school, was in several plays and a couple of musicals. I like writing, but lack the discipline to crank out lots of stories and even so much as save them. I have a collection of my least embarassing poems that I have transferred faithfully from hard drive to hard drive for over a decade now. =) Muds are my outlet for my daydreamy, creative side I guess.
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