Yeah, its a meme.

[swestrup]

thebabynancy said:

Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them.

So, I did that, and here are the interests she chose, and my answers:

• bujold: Lois McMaster Bujold is an accomplished S.F. writer, and someone who's books I regularly enjoy. She has also mastered what I find to be the hardest part of writing: understanding how different people will have completely different interpretations of the exact same events, due to their different histories and personaliites.
• extropianism: I'm still a member of the Extropian Mailing List, although I've never actually been a card-carrying Extropian. Its mainly because the original Extropian principles involved Transhumanism (which I'm all for) combined with Libertarianism (which I'm not so much a fan of). Lately the founders have mellowed somewhat, and so extropianism is coming closer to agreeing with me, than vice versa.
  
• ian m banks: Another S.F. author worthy of great praise (and who's first name I've just discovered is Iain, not Ian -- Oh the shame!). He's one of my favorite authors, being responsible for the Culture novels. I don't read his mainstream stuff though, as its mostly horror and I don't do horror.
  
• red dwarf: When my younger brother tried to describe to me the strangeness that was Red Dwarf, I thought it sounded really bad. How wrong I was. It was a wonderfully silly and funny science fiction series, and I'm sad it ended the way it did. It now also reminds me very much of denizsarikaya as the Cat character was one of her most favorite characters of all time.
  
• roger zelazny: Isaac Asimov was my first favorite S.F. author. Roger Zelazny was the second. I have tried (not always succeeding) to get get my hands on absolutely everything he's written. He's probably best knows for his Princes of Amber novels, but my all time favorite of his is Jack of Shadows, followed closely by Lord of Light.
  
• sandman: Neil Gaiman's Sandman is what I was thinking about when I put in this entry. I have all of Gaiman's sandman books in hardcover, because I loved them so much. When one of the books controversially won the world fantasy award for literature, I agreed whole-heartedly with the assessment because, graphic novel or not, it was the best piece of literature of any category that I had read in the previous five years.
  
• voyeurism: I would think the desire to look at naked women would be pretty much self-explanatory.
  

Comments

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

If you like Bujold's writings you might give her Chalion series a try. It's not SF but Fantasy, but it's some of the best Fantasy I've ever read. She really knows how to give everything a little twist in juuust the right way.

Btw, would you mind explaining the following interests: fluxx, world building and ubiquitous computing
I'm sure I can look some of that up but I'd like your take on them ;-)

[swestrup]

fluxx in a great card game from IIRC Looney Labs, where each card you play changes the rules of the game. The object is to play in such a way that the rules say that you've won. sps and I spent much time coming up with additional cards to add to the deck (you can order blanks for that very purpose) and we think our deck is now better than the latest edition.

World Building is that part of Writing and RPG Scenario building where you sit back and try to figure out the history, geography, politics, economics, sociology, and sometimes even the basic physics of the setting for a game. I often spend far longer on this aspect of game creation than on building a scenario, because it lets me improvise in a consistent way when the players do something weird.

Ubiquitous Computing, is the idea that computers will eventually be so common that your underwear will be woven out of them. They'll be so commonplace that you won't even notice them anymore, much the same way you don't really notice electric motors these days. The question is: what will this imply for how people interact with their environment, when so much of it is soft and programmable?

[skjalm.livejournal.com]

Looney Labs

Based on the company name alone I already like that game :-)
From your description it sounds like lots of fun. I'm a great fan of card and board games where the basic rules are very simple but where the game's content makes for variety from game to game.

where you sit back and try to figure out the history, geography, politics, economics, sociology, and sometimes even the basic physics of the setting for a game.

Yeah, that was what I thought. Just wasn't sure. Have you anything on paper for the various worlds you've thought up? It's always fun to see what other people come up with. A few years ago I designed the flodien world with huge maps (not in electronic form, though) and some background and lists of example names for the different races and so on. We only played in the world two or three times, but it was really fun to go through all the motions of designing the world.
Btw, have you ever looked at ProFantasy's products? I can't figure out if they'd be worth the price or not...

[swestrup]

Oh, and I plan to read the Chalion books, once I have some income again, or I can find them at the Library.

[arymede.livejournal.com]

Duly commenting.

[swestrup]

Okay, here they are:

artemis, blue-tongued skinks, fushigi yuugi, nose hill, poee, scathach, shinto.


And bth, I never knew you were into Moxy Fruvous! I love those guys!