silveradept | Instead of your news, a human interest piece.

In lieu of an actual news post tonight, instead, a fluff piece that tells us more about me than anyone probably wanted to know. So.

The interests meme resurfaced in properly zombie-like fashion, and

miyarificus gave me things to talk about. I think many of these are the same as when I last did this some significant time ago.

1000 blank white cards - The quintessential Discordian game. Start with 1,000 blank white cards, draw however many you like into your hand, and then grab a pen and start writing and drawing. Each card has to have an action and a drawing on it to be valid. (Photos may be acceptable substitutes in a pinch). Cards may give points, take away points, or grant abilities and powers, or whatever else you would like them to do. Much like a Whose Line Is It anyway game, the points don't necessarily matter. If you write yourself an "I win!" card, though, expect someone else to write and play a "No, ya don't." The better game is to write the most interesting and fun cards you can, and have those selected as cards to keep for when the next game comes out.

CRFH!!! - College Roomies From Hell!!!. The three exclamation points stand for quality. A long-running webcomic by Maritza Campos chronicling the misadventures of six college roommates starting with a gas leak igniting their entire dormitory complex and going through Misery Journeys, copious alcohol consumption, Killer Cooking, the Satanists next door, all under the watchful eye of one highly overprotective, but highly powerful, parent. Sort of. Been going on for many years now, all the way through the brith of a child and a whole lot more.

Boardieverse - Related to the item above, the Boardieverse is the place where the avatars of the Forums come to life and... watch over the unfolding events of the cast of CRFH!!! The Boardieverse has evolved its own mythology, often involving subtle winks and nods in trying to match what happens in the strip to the mysterious shadowy forces outside it, including the Divine inhabitant of Deck Zero, the Creatrix of the whole thing. Boardieverse is currently in its Third Age, after the Age of Magic resulted in the Incident where the Board got roasted and the Age of Really Big Science-Fiction-y things, which warped in and helped rebuild and produce the orbiting space station keeping an eye on the world below. It's a hybrid age, and each group sort of gracefully fades where needed, to take care of the mundane things like directing operations, while the newbies go out and Do Stuff.

Knights of Jubal - Another comic-derived organization, this time stemming from the comic Clan of the Cats. It'll probably be easier just to quote...

Jubal is a character in the comic strip "Clan of the Cats", by Jamie Robertson. Jubal is in love with Chelsea, the main character of the strip. On two occasions, he has jumped in front of her and taken a bullet in order to save her life.

This caused quite a stir on the message boards, and one particular reader, GoldWolf, raised the question of whether Chivalry has died out or not.

All of the follow-up postings and discussions made two things clear.

1. Chivalry is still valued by people in today's society
2. Despite this, it is dying out.

One of the readers, Silver Adept, suggested an "Order of Jubal". The idea was developed a bit further and, with some artistic help and a good deal of borrowing from myth and legend, the noble Order of Jubal was born.

The Order headquarters at http://ivbalis.com.

Pencil boards - Back when I was just getting into the anime/manga fandom, I found these semiflexible thin plastic objects that were used as backing for paper so as to avoid tearing through it or making marks on the next page, and these are apparently in use in Japan by at least the school-aged. As with anything, they can have any sort of image on them that you want, from popular anime characters to the various parts of kana writing. I still enjoy them and would like to have more of them, but as I am now away from lecture hall, where they were most useful things, I haven't been up to obtaining and using them as much. They'll probably come back into my collecting ways... once I get some money.
Trombone - My instrument of choice. Picked for me at the fifth grade because I had long arms that could work a slide properly. Kept with it ever since and have managed to parlay that skill into marching with a great university marching band (as well as playing pep bands and various other bands), and at least once into a paying gig. My trombone is a very large part of my identity. As money permits, I'll probably find one second-hand and have someone fix it up into good playing condition. So I can then start playing stuff again, somewhere. Possibly paying, again. When I have time, you know.

Wom-Wom Coconut - Also part of a comic, The Egregious Adventures of the Wom Wom Coconut, who we actually haven't seen much of lately, in comparison to Space Durian and Bat Radish. Funny enough, my ability to Feel the Wom came about because of the CRFH!!! interest listed above, which uses a particular tagline - "The Horror. The Funky, Funky Horror." Because funky horror was an interest, if you'll look at the domain name for the comic, you can see where happy circumstances came together.

Mixing with an icons post that

ilyena_slyph wanted...

Trombone!kodoma - the default icon, and still one of the best representations of me there is in graphic form. The original was stolen from a section shirt at my university, and it has since been prettified by the fine folks on the CRFH!!! forums. Mixing my love of anime (and Ghibli films in particular) with my instrument of choice, it's me. Would probably need a book floating behind or something to be totally completye, but that makes for busy icon space.

M-Div Logo - Speaking of the CRFH!!! forums, as part of the Boardieverse described above, I'm the chief of the Magitech Division, or M-Div for short, the old remnants of the magic-users who dominated the early age of the Boardieverse, right before the Adversary steamrolled the base we had and left it a ghost town. The logo itself is a fairly recent innovation, after I decided I needed one, for some purpose, probably involving a collaborative fiction somewhere.

Llewellyn himself - Chief Diagonal Pumpkin Non-Hippopotamus Dragony Thingy-Dingy-Flingy Llewellyn the 19th, in the process of dispensing wisdom. Unfortuantely, because of icon space requirements, said wisdom has been cropped. Llewellyn comes from the webcomic Ozy and Millie, which has finished its run but is available still on the web and in print at http://www.ozyandmillie.org.

Dragon Bomb - the sign of the Dragon Illuminati, also from Ozy and Millie. Although, this one has been slightly modified - the original has one horn, I've added another. Perhaps to represent a different faction of the Illuminati, or another division thereof, or perhaps just as yet another conspiracy perpetuated by the Dragons.

Heartless - The sign of the Heartless, Ansem the Wise's creation when he looked into trying to manipulate and learn more about the darkness in people's hearts. The Heartless have become a force to be reckoned with by the time we join Sora in Kingdom Hearts, thanks to the takeover of the computers at Hollow Bastion, and they are mostly commanded by the Disney villains one must fight in the game. Later on, we find the Heartless are one faction in a fight to control the worlds... that's a different icon, though.

Chiriko - Actually created because I was playing the role in a sadly-defunct role-playing game - I thought that playing Chiriko would be a good fit, with both of us being smart kids pressed that way by our peers, although poor Ou has much bigger destiny chips playing than I ever will. For the game and the reboot, I wanted to play him and the game so that it would work a little differently than the canonical story, and I made him a restless dreamer, plagued with images of prophecies that he had to find answers to. It was fun being able to play him as both a wide-eyed innocent klutz, with lots of book learning but very little on how a big city works, and as this child with aamzing brains, when prompted properly.