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ckd1. Leave me a casual comment of no particular significance, like a lyric to your current favorite song, or your favorite kind of sandwich, maybe your favorite game. Any remark, meaningless or not.
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in your own post.
5. When others respond with a desultory comment, you will ask them five questions.
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yhlee asked:
1. Do you name your computers/other gadgets/cars/etc.?
Computers, most definitely. My various work (though not, I should make clear, "work") computers have each been named loiosh since I first had a job that would let me name my own machine. Other computers and gadgets also get named, sometimes with a theme if there's a group of them, sometimes not. The themes tend to be based on SF, for some reason; so, for example, a set of machines might be named barrayar, beta-colony, and sergyar. I don't name cars, not owning any.
2. What is the first sf/f novel you remember reading?
It's fairly certain to have been one of the Heinlein juveniles. Probably Citizen of the Galaxy, possibly Have Space Suit Will Travel. It was certainly at least 25 years ago.
3. How long have you been going to conventions?
20 years, but so not continuously. My first convention was Boskone 24, the Boskone From Hell. I have in fact been to every Boskone held in Boston since then. (This means I've been to two Boskones that were "the last Boskone in the Sheraton".) I went to several Lunacons after that, then fell off to a sporadic rate of hitting Lunacon/Boskone/Arisia depending on the GoH, but going to less than one con a year on average. When Boskone moved back into Boston, I took that as an impetus to start attending cons more regularly again.
4. Whence the shark?
It was a vendor give-away at a technical conference (it has a logo on the belly, though I suspect the company has long since disappeared; the conference was in 1998). At the time, I was about to start a new job; I'd already accepted the offer, and got a chance to spend some time with my soon-to-be-coworkers on my soon-to-be-ex-employer's dime. (This wasn't sneaky or anything; the office I worked in was being closed down, but they were willing to pay for the conference anyway.)
While talking to one of my new colleagues, I mentioned that I had just purchased a digital camera not long before. By way of demonstrating it, I needed something to take a picture of, so I plopped the shark on a copy of the conference proceedings.
Many years later, I was trying to find a suitable icon for my LiveJournal. I wanted something that wasn't a picture of me, but also wasn't a comic/TV/movie character or the like. While paging through iPhoto, I saw that picture and thought "hmm, that would probably look okay cropped and scaled to 100x100". It did.
Since then I've added a few themed icons, though I really should make time to create more of them, since I have well over 100 icon slots to use up.
5. What new-to-you sf/f writers have you discovered within the past year?
Sadly, I haven't been reading new writers (or even new books by old writers) as much lately as I would like; I'm not sure I've discovered anyone new to me in the past year. Running back a bit farther (and excluding the folks on my flist), James Alan Gardner has been doing some really good stuff. Expendable is a well-done story based on an idea that came from a joke; he's since expanded the universe, with different POV characters in each of the later novels. The later ones are better, but you really need to read Expendable first at a minimum; the Expendable, Ascending, Radiant sequence will cover the "main" story, but the other books are certainly worth reading as well.
Various interesting panelists from Boskone and Readercon are on my check-their-books-out list, but haven't actually made it to the actual to-be-readgiant vortex of DOOM stack. (click click) I just added one of them to the library request list; let's see if that works.
I like that this one is self-tagging, since I really dislike the whole concept of "tagging" people to respond.
2. I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation and offer to ask someone else in your own post.
5. When others respond with a desultory comment, you will ask them five questions.
yhlee asked:1. Do you name your computers/other gadgets/cars/etc.?
Computers, most definitely. My various work (though not, I should make clear, "work") computers have each been named loiosh since I first had a job that would let me name my own machine. Other computers and gadgets also get named, sometimes with a theme if there's a group of them, sometimes not. The themes tend to be based on SF, for some reason; so, for example, a set of machines might be named barrayar, beta-colony, and sergyar. I don't name cars, not owning any.
2. What is the first sf/f novel you remember reading?
It's fairly certain to have been one of the Heinlein juveniles. Probably Citizen of the Galaxy, possibly Have Space Suit Will Travel. It was certainly at least 25 years ago.
3. How long have you been going to conventions?
20 years, but so not continuously. My first convention was Boskone 24, the Boskone From Hell. I have in fact been to every Boskone held in Boston since then. (This means I've been to two Boskones that were "the last Boskone in the Sheraton".) I went to several Lunacons after that, then fell off to a sporadic rate of hitting Lunacon/Boskone/Arisia depending on the GoH, but going to less than one con a year on average. When Boskone moved back into Boston, I took that as an impetus to start attending cons more regularly again.
4. Whence the shark?
It was a vendor give-away at a technical conference (it has a logo on the belly, though I suspect the company has long since disappeared; the conference was in 1998). At the time, I was about to start a new job; I'd already accepted the offer, and got a chance to spend some time with my soon-to-be-coworkers on my soon-to-be-ex-employer's dime. (This wasn't sneaky or anything; the office I worked in was being closed down, but they were willing to pay for the conference anyway.)
While talking to one of my new colleagues, I mentioned that I had just purchased a digital camera not long before. By way of demonstrating it, I needed something to take a picture of, so I plopped the shark on a copy of the conference proceedings.
Many years later, I was trying to find a suitable icon for my LiveJournal. I wanted something that wasn't a picture of me, but also wasn't a comic/TV/movie character or the like. While paging through iPhoto, I saw that picture and thought "hmm, that would probably look okay cropped and scaled to 100x100". It did.
Since then I've added a few themed icons, though I really should make time to create more of them, since I have well over 100 icon slots to use up.
5. What new-to-you sf/f writers have you discovered within the past year?
Sadly, I haven't been reading new writers (or even new books by old writers) as much lately as I would like; I'm not sure I've discovered anyone new to me in the past year. Running back a bit farther (and excluding the folks on my flist), James Alan Gardner has been doing some really good stuff. Expendable is a well-done story based on an idea that came from a joke; he's since expanded the universe, with different POV characters in each of the later novels. The later ones are better, but you really need to read Expendable first at a minimum; the Expendable, Ascending, Radiant sequence will cover the "main" story, but the other books are certainly worth reading as well.
Various interesting panelists from Boskone and Readercon are on my check-their-books-out list, but haven't actually made it to the actual to-be-read
I like that this one is self-tagging, since I really dislike the whole concept of "tagging" people to respond.
