Honest Scrap. Bloggers I admire, boring stuff about me.

So, thanks to Stargrace at MMOQuests.com and Peter at Dragonchasers.com for their kind words 🙂

“This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”
Not sure this blog qualifies, but, hey 🙂 Rules follow.

1. When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.
2. Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
3. List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself. Then pass it on!

Blogs that are brilliant in content or design? Well, I have to start with my daughter Allyson’s blog. She is a wonderful writer, has a great sense of humor, and posts lots of pictures of my grandson 🙂 And I read everything that my sisters Jennifer and Hillary write on their blogs. (Not linking to Hillary’s as she prefers it to be for family only). Now if only Vallerie had a blog so I could more easily bathe in the awesomeness of her family.
Blogs of fellow gamers? You’ll forgive me if some of these people have already been tagged (or even tagged me), but I’m not going to pass them over just because other people also know how great they are.
Stargrace’s MMOQuests.com has always been a huge inspiration. She doesn’t just play MMOs, she lives in them, and she has an amazing ability to bring her readers along with her. I don’t know how she does it, but I’m glad she’s there doing it.
I hardly ever agree with Syncaine of Hardcore Casual about anything. In fact, we first became aware of each other when he started comparing EQ2’s graphics unfavorably to those of LotRO, and I had to fire back with screenshots that showed EQ2 was just as beautiful, despite the poor screenshots on SOE’s site. And yet, Syncaine goes well beyond just stating a point. He explains why, and his explanations are clear and thorough, and even though we play games for different reasons, through his writing, I see, understand and appreciate his point of view.
Saylah of Mystic Worlds is my hero. I’m going to go out on a limb here and nominate Saylah as the one blogger I know who should be writing for pro sites. Why she hasn’t been snapped up by Massively or TTH or other sites of that ilk and given free reign to talk about games yet, I don’t know.
I feel like I’ve known Thomas of The Friendly Necromancer all my life, even though we just recently met. We played on the same server and in/with the same guilds in EverQuest, I knew him by another name in my first time in LotRO, and he is today’s most prominent Wizard 101 blogger, a game I love. As well as being a wonderful person on his blog, he also is a keen interviewer and from all evidence, an amazing dad in real life. If I had three words of advice for Thomas, they would be: Call KingsIsle back.
I don’t know if Taymar of MMORPG Info is pro or not. What I do know is that she is the go-to gal for information about EverQuest 2. Her guides are thorough, professional and timely. If I want to know something about EQ2, I go to her blog first before I go anywhere else. Plus, her occasional excursions into casual games or anything else she wants to write about are amazingly well written and usually pretty funny to boot.
I’d have like to have known Ysharros of Stylish Corpse a lot sooner. It was her comments I noticed first, in the discussions about the guild that would become Casualties of War. Those led me back to her blog, where she has great discussions with a whole crowd of people about MMOs and game design. Fascinating reading, all the time.
I can’t believe Peter Smith’s Dragonchasers wasn’t on my blog roll (it is now!). He gets in my list for lots of reasons. Out of all the blogs mentioned, his has the best design (though Saylah’s is pretty darn good, too). We’re about the same age and did a lot of the same things, both proud first generation gamers. I read every word he writes and would go out of my way to read more.
Kasul may not be the most prolific blogger, but he is a wonderful friend and if I see Kasul playing an MMO, then that’s the one I want to be playing, because MMOs are so much better with friends. (Kasul, why didn’t you TELL me your blog wasn’t on my blog roll???).
The first time I went to Mythokia‘s blog, he’d posted about a military parade, missile included, through the city streets. He’d write about MMOs sometimes, but what I really came to appreciate was the slices of his own life he let us see. Now he is starting his time in Singapore’s National Service when he should be designing the next great game in some prestigious university.
Honestly, pretty much everyone on my blogroll is there because I love what they write, and they are decent people besides. There are so many amazing folks in this little circle of socialization and gaming, and we are all connected in so many fascinating and new ways.
Now for ten honest things about myself? Do you really care that I like Diet Coke and cats? That’s boring. Nobody cares about the trivia. Here’s ten honest thoughts about myself that aren’t trivia.

1. I’m not smart, and never have been. Often times when I thought I was being clever, it would turn out I was the dumbest person in the room. For that reason, I try to accept that other people know a lot more about any given subject than I do, and that if I summarily dismiss something as being obviously wrong, it’s likely I’m the one in the wrong. A couple of weeks ago, on the way to visit my stepmom in New Hampshire, I was listening to an advertisement for CaliforniaPsychics.com on the radio and I thought to myself, “that’s wrong, these people are being scammed.” But then I went past the assumption that I was smarter than the people who use this service and asked myself what I was missing. Maybe the people who use this service appreciate talking to someone about their life and problems, because don’t things get a lot clearer when you talk them out instead of keeping them inside? Especially to someone who isn’t trying to judge you and is only a voice on a phone? I understood then that I had, once again, been the stupidest person in the room, that the psychics were performing a valuable service, and their clients weren’t deluded bumpkins. And also, I should have let my friend Deb do my astrology chart when I had the chance.
2. I will be 48 in August. My mother lived to 51. My dad lived to 70. Split the difference, and I figure I have maybe twelve years left. What do I want to do in those twelve years? My goal in life was to see both my children in good situations, and I’m halfway there. My son will likely be in prison for five years, leaving me just seven years to find a good place for him, as he can’t really take care of himself. But beyond that, I’m looking at these last years of my life as a time to try and be a better person.
3. I have never rolled the dice of my life and regretted the results. The only things I do regret are those times when fear kept me from trying something new. Every time I conquered my fear and took my chances, I was better for it.
4. I have met so many wonderful people through gaming. I’m a first generation gamer — the first generation that grew up with video games, and the first generation that could call themselves gamers in the modern sense. I have friends from Asia, Europe, South America, the UK and Ireland, Canada and throughout the US. They’ve become a part of my life and I hope I’ve become a part of theirs. I married a gamer. My kids are gamers. We are a global community, we chafe at borders. In our worlds, it’s not what you are, but who you are.
5. That said, I am glad MMOs weren’t around while my kids were children, so I never had to choose between attending a raid or taking my kids on a bike ride to Elkhorn Slough or a hike to the top of Jack’s Peak. Those are the memories I treasure the most in my life.
6. I never finished college. I can list you off some excuses. I couldn’t afford it. I was getting married. I moved to California. Children took all my time. Didn’t know what I wanted to do. Didn’t need a degree for my line of work (wrong). College couldn’t teach me anything I didn’t know or couldn’t learn myself (see point #1). Was too far to commute. And when CSUMB came within a mile of where I lived and I had no excuses left, I just decided I didn’t want to. It’s hard to even start on how wrong I was on every single point.
7. I became a programmer the day I asked this geeky boy in class about the roll of punched paper he was holding, and he showed me the computer lab with two chunk chunk chunking teletypes and a straight out of the movies DEC PDP 8/e minicomputer complete with whirring tape readers and blinking lights. He showed me how to make the computer print my name back at me, and when I asked him if I did something wrong, would the computer blow up, he assured me that it would, and that it would be beautiful. I started typing in the programs from BYTE Magazine and Creative Computing, and though I didn’t quite know what everything did, I liked how you could just tell the computer what to do in plain English if you started off the line with the word REM. My first computer game was called “Splat!”. You approached a cliff, you jumped at a given angle and speed, and you were judged on your, well… splat.
8. When I’m around crowds of other people, I feel like I’m not there at all. The longer I’m around them, the more I can feel myself disappear. Weekends are my time to recover, and often it’s Sunday before I can bear to go out again. What energizes me is time spent with close friends or family. This is why I avoid comic and game conventions if I can. Way too many people.

Well, that’s enough honest thoughts about myself for one day.

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