Anime and Addendum

So, in addition to fantasy gaming influences from CRPGs, I'm influenced by a long running but currently shallow addiction to anime.

So, I started with Bastard!! It's mailing list just lost its original owner and her webpage was shut down. This is what made me think of this. I'm just getting old, I guess. Bastard!! was a heavy-metal name stealing fantasy anime with flame swords, beholders, efreeti, vampires, dragons and ninja. Other fantasy titles included Chivas 1-2-3 (which I bought sight unseen without realizing who the main voice actor was or what it was about - that is, hundreds of dollars on LDs from Japan without knowing I'd like it), Fortune Quest, Violinist of Hamelin, Escaflowne, Ryu Knight, Master Mosquiton, Maze, and Ninja Scroll.

But! My main obsession besides fantasy anime is bizarre anime. Assemble Insert, Butt Attack Girl Gottoman, Combustible Campus Guardress, Chuuka Ichiban (Chinese Food is #1!), Blame!, Dragon Half, Compiler, Eatman, Hell Teacher Nuube, Memories, Kyoukara Orewa, Kachou Ouji, Serial Experiements Lain, Macross Plus, Perfect Blue, Ping Pong Club, Riding Bean, and Robot Carnival (just the wooden mecha vs. the brick mecha vignette).

In case you missed it, I finished my (cathartic?) gaming history (or at least the stuff I'm willing to divulge now).

Miscellany

I found a whole bunch of good icons at The Lost Worlds from Legacy of Kain and Soul Reaver.

I'm currently intrigued by Five Suit Card Decks. Stardeck has my eye, but Empire and its Six Suited ways disgust me.

So, what can I think of off the top of my head with five suits? Well, five elements, obviously (both the kind with Air and with Metal). So let's modify that:

Suit - Element, First Impressions, Personal Relationships, Element Rich Areas, Emissions

• Hearts - Blood, Pity, Love, Waterfalls, Steam
• Clubs - Blaze, Antipathy, Lust, Hearth, Embers
• Spades - Spirit, Awe, Wanderlust, Cliffs, Gusts
• Diamonds - Crystal, Jealousy, Dependence, Caves, Sparks
• Stars - Steel, Neutrality, Self-reliance, Heavens, Luminescence

I'm impressed. That took about an hour and I like the results.

Man! Mark's such a cop-out!

Yeah, I know. Another post without continuing my narrative about my gaming history. Work's just been the worst lately. Maybe I need a revitalizing potion. Wait, here's one ...

Turns out I'm not as much of a geek as I thought I was. Here's where the screen cap came from.

I just gotta geek out

I know you're all looking forward to the next installment about LARPs, but I just gotta geek out. I love the art Wizards gets its hands on and I love love love shadow magicy stuff.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/iw/20060302b&page=2

My Gaming History, Part Three

"Come on, man, this is weird. And probably stupid," I said.

Still, I wasn't not going to go, it was the only thing in town that I felt comfortable going to (because my friends were playing). It was my first LARP.

Fact: Only recently have I wanted to roleplay anything that made me feel uncomfortable, and I still won't do that with people I don't know first.

My LARPing experience is one of the three or four impetuses (impetii?) I can think of that caused me to drop out of college*. My LARPing was a narcotic. I drove all over the state to play and gather players, I found ways to my LARP all over the place. I made really ... fucked up relationship choices ... and I think it was mostly to do with a warping of my idea of the way society worked from my LARPing. This is not hyperbole. My LARPing (and I call it my LARPing because others' LARPing could have been different - some of this was truly internalized, all me) was an outgrowth and mutation of bad mojo, immature (immature as in a bud is an immature flower) reckoning of how people are supposed to interact with each other, and the worst possible fandom. My LARPing did one and only one thing that I appreciate and employ today.

Fact: My LARPing allows me to go and talk to people without (undue) social anxiety. This is as little as asking for help in stores and as big as joining Meetups in other cities.

I'd love to give specific examples of how my LARPing occurred and what I did and didn't do. But I'm not prepared for that, really. Not yet, sorry.

Finally, after dropping out of college, I got a job. I got a girlfriend. Right after Claire and I got together I formed/joined a gaming group that has lasted as a group since then and still meets on Sundays. This is the same time I found the Forge.

Fact: The only reason I went to the Forge, and the only reason I am frustrated with gaming today is that I want to try new things and game with groups that want to have fun the entire time (and aren't content with long periods of not having fun).

I game at least once a month with some new friends, and have begun to bring my wife with me. I'm having the best, most fun, most socially functional gaming of my life. The End?

* (Note: I honestly don't feel bad about dropping out of college. I'm currently back in night school at Wesleyan, and I should be done by either Spring of 2007 or 2008. Dropping out forced all the real-world reality I needed to get the funk out from between my ears and start being responsible and happy.)