(no subject)

[the_rck]

Since I signed up for the most recent multi-fandom friending meme, I thought I should write a little introduction to myself, just in case anyone pops over here from there.

Note 25 Sept 2015: I'm dealing with breast cancer right now, and I talk about it uncut. I'm doing well and not in any danger, but I know that many people would rather not read about it. I should be past everything but the tamoxifen by the end of this year.

I am female, cis, het, and white.

I am disabled. Mostly, it's anxiety, both generalized NOS and agoraphobia, but I also have physical issues that affect my life. I'm unable to drive. I can't watch anything on a large screen for fear of a severe migraine. I can only walk about a quarter of a mile at a time. I have fibromyalgia (mostly in remission), asthma, allergies, GERD, and migraines. If I'm careful, the physical stuff doesn't flare up. I exercise four days a week when I'm well, doing a couple of programs on one of our PBS stations, Body Electric (which is a bit too hard) and Sit and Be Fit (which is too easy). The programs are on M-F, but Thursdays, I have a cleaning lady in and can't interrupt her to do the programs.

I'm sort of vaguely Christian, culturally as much as anything, and I consider myself a panentheist. A panentheist is a person who believes that all things in the universe are a part of god but that god is bigger than the universe. Whether or not god is bigger than the multiverse, I don't know. I'm also not entirely sure how panentheism fits with belief in Christ-- Being part of god isn't anything special, after all. I'm also deeply uncomfortable with original sin (I can deal with a need for salvation because people are people, but original sin doesn't work for me).

I am married and have one child, an eleven year old girl. I write a lot about Scott and Cordelia. I volunteer at Cordelia's school and with her Girl Scout troop. We've been married for twenty one years now.

I write fanfic. I do a lot of exchanges most years. I haven't done so many this year because I was hoping to work on my very long WIP, Rheotaxis, but I've been kind of stuck on that since January, so I don't have much to show for my trouble. Most of what I write is G or T rated, but I have written some M and E stories. I write fairly slowly. In a good year, I post five or six chapters or stories.

I've written a lot of stories for Weiss Kreuz, an anime/manga series about four attractive young guys who are florists by day and assassins by night. There are also mad scientists and villains with psychic powers. (All of my E rated fics are for Weiss Kreuz.) I've also written quite a bit for the Chronicles of Narnia. Beyond that, I've written a lot of stories in a lot of different fandoms, mostly Yuletide sized fandoms.

The Pretender was my first online fandom, but I came to it when it was starting to fade and only found an archive or two (big archives, I'll grant you, but still just archives). Once I'd run through what I could find for The Pretender, I started looking for other things to read (this was right after I lost my job due to disability, so I had a lot of time on my hands). I'd seen four episodes of Weiss Kreuz and thought that was enough to let me read fic. The fic I read hooked me enough that I sought out the rest of canon. Weiss Kreuz got me to look at mailing lists, but I think I really missed the time when those were big. I don't remember how I first found fannish content on LJ; somebody must have linked their journal from their fic website, and I must have thought, 'Hey, I have LiveJournal. I can follow that up.'

I'm kind of looking around for a new fandom or fandoms, but Tumblr and Twitter still baffle me, and I'm not so big on most TV and movie fandoms. Mostly, I don't get what other people see in actors widely considered attractive. I'm willing to be convinced by recommendations of excellent fic, however. I am mostly reading gen or low rated het or slash these days. I haven't much wanted to read or write anything explicit since my daughter got old enough to read over my shoulder (not that she's generally interested, but she could at any time, so). I'm also not big on stories that are primarily romance; I want other plot.

I used to read a lot, but I haven't been so much in the last couple of years. It's a combination of online distractions and anxiety. The anxiety means that I simply can't deal with a lot of books of the sort I used to read. There are a few authors whose works I can reliably read, but none of them write things I'm particularly proud to have read: Mercedes Lackey, Jayne Ann Krentz/Jayne Castle/Amanda Quick, Alexander McCall Smith (only the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. I can't read his other series), Donna Andrews, Kerry Greenwood, Nancy Atherton.

I run LARPs (and used to write them). I run single session games, mostly (almost always) at conventions. I've only recently gotten back to it after a long break due to my daughter being small. I have about fifteen games that are ready or close to ready to run, the smallest for 14 players, the largest for 30 players. In between about 1985 and 2000, LARPs were all the writing I did.

I play table top role playing games. Right now, I'm in a D20 Babylon 5 game that my husband's running. We experimented a bit with FATE (new characters, new setting), but that didn't altogether work. I've GMed Amber diceless, GURPS (very, very lite), an old version of the World of Darkness, and a sort of make it up as you go along percentiles based game. I haven't GMed anything since around the time my daughter was born. I have done some journal based role playing, all on LJ, and enjoyed it quite a bit. I wouldn't mind doing that again.

I can't play most board or card games because they set off my anxiety. We have discovered, though, that I can play cooperative games, so we've been seeking out and acquiring those. My husband loves board and card games and so do a number of my friends.

I link find for metanews (also under the same name at LJ and Tumblr). I go through half of our blog list on Feedly and all of what turns up on Pinboard with a search for 'meta.' I do that every week with a deadline of the end of the day on Tuesday. Every so often, I have responsibility for making the actual posts of the links we've found for that week. I've been doing this for a few months now.

I sort of vaguely collect Tarot decks. I haven't added much new in the last few years, but I used to look for them. The main thing stopping me now is a reluctance to spend money. I haven't done a Tarot reading in about ten years. I used to like using either the Hanson-Roberts deck or the Sacred Rose deck. I did a reflected Celtic cross most of the time. As a reference, I used a book called The Feminist Tarot (I didn't agree with everything in it, but I liked some of the card interpretations). I never experimented much with the decks I own that deviate from the standard symbolism. The readings I did were largely meditative rather than predictive.

In high school and college, I did a lot of theater. I did both acting and tech work. My favorite role was the Wicked Witch of the West in a production of The Wizard of Oz. I terrified little kids. I once wrote a play and had it produced. The play wasn't particularly good, and we didn't get many actors trying out for it, so I acted in it and did a pretty lousy job. I really, really shouldn't have done that.

I used to work in a university library, first, as an undergraduate, in a variety of different units, then, full time, in serials cataloging and after that in Exchange and Gifts. I still have decided opinions about proper alphabetization. I started grad school in information and library science, but my health wouldn't permit me to continue while holding a full time job, and I needed the health insurance that came with the job.

I majored in creative writing as an undergraduate and almost double majored in theater. Now I wish I'd done something with history or possibly literary anthropology because I loved both. At the time, I was focused on getting through quickly so that I could go to library school. I gave up the double major to go part time during my last year and pick up a lot more hours at work.

I am politically liberal. I'm politically very liberal. I'm not very politically active, due to the anxiety, but I always vote, and I try to research local issues before I vote.

I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan and have since 1985. Before that, I went to middle school and high school in a small town in southwestern Michigan. Before that, we lived in Ann Arbor.

I have two sisters and a brother. One sister is in Atlanta. One sister, my half-sister on my father's side, is in New York City. My brother, my half-brother on my mother's side, is in Kalamazoo. It's a little weird having a sister and a brother who aren't related to each other at all. I have five nieces and nephews, four of them on Scott's side and one belonging to my sister in Atlanta. My mother and step-father live in Baton Rouge. My father and step-mother live in New Mexico. I have one surviving grandparent, my father's mother. She lives about three hours north of Ann Arbor.

Comments

[minim_calibre]

I miss LARPs.

Gaming in general, really, but especially LARPing.

[the_rck]

I never played many LARPs (I'm not the world's best player. I'm much better at writing them), so I don't miss them nearly so much. I was used to running a new game once a year and spending the rest of the year writing the dratted thing. I do miss writing LARPs. I just can't do that and write fic, and I love the community around fic.

I do regret never getting involved in any on going LARPs. That seems likely to be an entirely different experience.

I used to have two or three table top games a week. That was before any of us started having kids. Funny how one can't commit every Saturday from noon to midnight to gaming after one has a kid. We can't always manage alternate Wednesdays from 7 to 10.

[havocthecat]

I gave it up for about a five year stretch, and then had an unwilling several year hiatus when a game ended, but I've come to terms with the fact that I'm a huge gaming nerd and will be LARPing when I'm 80.

[the_rck]

I may need to devote time to writing new LARPs at some point. I just want to finish my big WIP before I even think about it.

I have no idea if there's a local LARP group. I suspect there must be, given the local university, but I wouldn't have the slightest clue how to find them.

[havocthecat]

Honestly? I oftentimes find games on Facebook, even though I don't actually like or use the site for anything other than LARP groups. I could ask around if anyone knows of any LARP groups in Ann Arbor. I have other friends up that way.

[the_rck]

I'd be interested to know. I don't know if I could swing regular LARP sessions, but an occasional one shot could be a lot of fun, especially if I can find people who're willing to let me run occasionally.

[the_rck]

Oh, and I thought of something else-- I have found that I can scratch my gaming itch to some extent with journal based role playing. I don't know if you've run into that. It seems to be pretty common, at least on LJ. Have you run into it?

[minim_calibre]

I did some back in '03, but it petered out after a couple of months. (Wow, that's 11 years ago. Yipes.)

[zhelana]

Thanks for the link! I am hoping to rebuild my reading list now! :D

[summerstorm]

Wait, how do you run LARPs? Tell me more. (I have a not so secret dream of LARPing Lara Croft one day.)

[the_rck]

I can talk about how I run LARPs, but there are a lot of different ways to run LARPs. As an example, historical re-enactment is a LARP of sorts.

Groups and GMs split on several things--

1) Costuming. Some do; some don't. Those that do often go toward the expensive end of things.

2) Duration. I run one-shot games that take 3-8 hours, depending on how much time we have in the space and what people are willing to commit to. I've seen one shots that ran more like 48 hours. There are also campaigns that have gone on for years.

3) Character generation. Some games, the GM writes the characters or uses a set of characters created by someone else. In those cases, each character starts out with tight connections to other characters and to the setting. Some games, each player makes their own character. The latter games tend to be larger and to run longer. They also need people to play NPCs because the GM(s) don't have the plots built into the characters. Occasionally, you'll run into a group that plays regularly but doesn't do a lot of set up/planning so that characters are summed up in a few words-- "You're the captain." "You're the princess hiding from the rebels." "You're the demon trying to take over the world." -- and so is the scenario-- "You're all on a lifeboat the size of this room, somewhere in deep space." This last set may have no formal rules and no real GM and tends to go a lot more like kids doing a let's-pretend game.

4) Props. My rules system uses index cards to represent all props. I color code them. I went that direction because almost all of my games have been played in spaces where other people might wander through and/or even unrealistic looking weaponish things were banned. Some groups use more theatrical props.

5) Combat. My system does combat as a verbal interaction. I've seen rock, paper, scissors used for determining which things work/who wins. I've also seen pulling different colors of marbles out of a paper bag. Some systems use padded 'swords' called boffers or use nerf guns and have character abilities rest on player abilities. Paint ball games and laser tag are on the border of LARPing, just a bit out beyond the boffers. The SCA fighting goes this direction, too.

6) Size. I think the smallest LARP I've played had about 8 players and the smallest I've run had 12. Those were both single session games that ran under 4 hours. I have heard that there are small groups who do long running games, but I'm not sure how those would work, logistically speaking because the LARPs I design are inward facing with all of the conflict built into the characters and situation. When those things resolve (often by blowing up), there isn't much to pick up and go on with. A long running game with a small cast would have to have much of the conflict be external in order not to get boring for the players. Very large games have to either run for a very long time or to have almost no character based plot pre-planned. If 300 people are playing, the odds of any specific characters encountering each other are low enough that nothing should depend on it happening. My experience is that those tend more toward in character scavenger hunts or things like Ingress Anomaly events.

Clear as mud?

[summerstorm]

No, this is great! I actually just realized I had a lot of wrong assumptions about LARPing. Like I thought it was all fannish for some reason, but it's RPing, so OF COURSE most of it is situational, like tabletop RPG games. That's just not something I'm super familiar with so I always thought of it as an extension of cosplay -- like historical reenactment but based on media. Probably because that's what I want to do. And there's so much more than that.

I always had trouble with forum, writing-based RPGs because I always wanted to control all the characters, LOL. I think I'd do better with a proper GM, I might even enjoy something like D&D now that I know more about it (and I played some other tabletop RPG-type thing with a friend in the Netherlands a couple years back when I stayed with her for a week, and that was fun), but what I really want to do in all honesty is less LARPing and more like a photoshoot. A really strange photoshoot. In a museum with laser grids. It's really specific.