Nerdin' it up!

I adore puzzles.  I spend a bunch of my free time doing crosswords, sudoku puzzles, kakuro puzzles, hanjie... pretty much any type of puzzle is cool with me.  When I was studying for the LSAT, I actually really enjoyed doing the Logic Games sections (questions like "6 people have to sit around a table, A can't be next to B, C has to be by E, etc.).

I really like math.  Since I'm not actually studying it in university I don't get to do very much interesting math any more, which makes me sad, but when I was in high school I was in the Math League, and it was so much fun, no joke.  We just had the best time.  Plus, my team made it to Provincials!

I think puns are hilarious, and we all know that puns are the nerdiest type of joke.  I'm not particularly good at coming up with them, but I always feel like I laugh way more than is appropriate whenever someone else makes one.  I also tend to catch unintentional puns even when no one else notices them at all.

I like to learn about really obscure/bizarre history.  For example, I've read a ton of Wikipedia articles about historical elephants, cryptids, feral children, conjoined twins, and sideshow performers, amongst other things.

I read some pretty nerdy fantasy novels.  Aside from the standard ones like The Lord of the Rings or Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, I have read a ton of Dragonlance books, as well as many from Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series.  Possibly my most obscure fantasy novel obsession is Robert Holdstock's Ryhope Wood series, which I read most of when I was in high school, and was always upset that my local library didn't have all the books in the series.  Since then, they have gotten rid of some of them, rather than acquiring the missing ones, and it upsets me that I can no longer even re-read them, let alone finish the series.  I realize this is probably for a good reason like they were lost or stolen or damaged or something, but still.  Still.

Also I am a huge nerd about board games.  I love board games!  Some of my favourites are Ticket to Ride, Scattergories, and Identity Crisis.  This past summer I played a bunch of retro games from the 70s that one of my friends borrowed from his grandfather, and they were fantastic.  Stop Thief was especially good, it has an 'electronic crime scanner' and it is just endlessly amusing.

I have two nerdy pursuits where I am definitely out-nerded, but I really enjoy them and would like to become better at them: Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering.  I played DnD a little bit in my first year of university, but my group was kind of disorganized and awful, so it wasn't that great, but this past Christmas one of my friends from back home put together a game for a few of us, and it was a lot of fun.  The same friend also has gotten really into Magic lately, and he's been teaching the rest of us how to play, and I've enjoyed it so much that it has made me want my very own deck!

Where I'd like to be in life

When I started thinking about this week's theme, my initial reaction was, "I dunno, what do I want?", so I decided to backwards engineer this list by thinking about what my ideal life would look like, and then deciding what things I would need to get there.

1. (a continued) social life. While I have a small group of close friends - which is the way I like it - with me moving in a few months most of those relationships will be a little trickier to maintain, and I won't have much of any social network starting in this new city. So I'd like to make sure I find new people to hang out with. This is both exciting and a nerve-wracking. I'm a bit awkward. And as I pointed out last week, I've surrounded myself with people who I can take at face value and not have to second guess their intentions, so as I move into a new social circle that might cause some confusion and misunderstanding. I may try to find a new Dungeons and Dragons group, but even that's rife with possible problems; this isn't like a guild in World of Warcraft where you can hide behind a screen, since you're interacting in person with another 4-5 people, you have to actually be able to get along with all of them.

2. A BIG move. As much as a big deal as I'm making about moving, that's only about an hour and a half away, and it's a city I'm decently familiar with even if I don't have many acquaintances. I'd really like to move a significant distance sometime in the next few years, though exactly to where I don't know yet. Definitely a city, but I'd like for it to be farther from home; after living, working, and going to school in a rural area for 21 years, it's definitely time for a change.

3. Direction. As with Katie, I feel somewhat drift less right now. I'm not entirely sure I want to do this job for the rest of my life, though it's fulfilling for now, and I'm already starting to get people asking me whether this is "it" for my career. I don't know? It'll probably be something along these lines, but who knows where I'll end up or what I'll be doing in 10 years. For now, I'm okay working this job, since I think it's cultivating useful skills (even if those are just people skills and practice working in an office), but at some point I'll need to figure out if this is what I want to do with my life, and if I'm even good at it; I've only been at this for about three months, so it's hard to predict how skillful I might be in the future.

4. Inventive creativity. This one is more specific than simply wanting to do more creative endeavors. I'm at the point in some of my hobbies - most notably knitting and baking - where I feel like it would be possible for me to create some of my own designs/recipes, but it's just so much easier to follow someone else's directions. I'm not even sure what I might make would be any good. I've been debating transitioning from my personal blog into a craft blog, but I have all sorts of qualms; I'm not good enough, I don't have enough time, why even bother when there are so many others out there.... But one of my core driving factors is that I love finding out how something works or how to do something and sharing that with someone else. It's why teaching was so appealing, it's part of why I like my current job, and that's part of why blogging interests me. There may just come a point where I need to suck it up and give it a shot, doing so because I enjoy the process and not just to get pageviews.

5. Fiction. I've realized that I am generally happier when I have something to read or watch. Specifically, a work of fiction. Whether it's Terry Pratchett or a sci-fi book borrowed from a friend, I think the draw is that it takes me out of my everyday routine and reminds me that there are other stories out there (a.k.a. not everything revolves around me). Fiction reminds me forces me out of my little bubble to remind me that I really am very tiny in this universe, and also sparks my imagination. What if Lord of the Rings was gritty and (semi) realistic? Or if in a galactic empire, there was a substance required for all space travel that was produced on one small, desolate desert planet where efforts to alter the ecosystem could wipe out the supply? What if hobgoblins, trolls, dwarves, vampires, zombies and magic exist all on the same planet and, specifically, all within a single metropolitan city? What if sexism was reversed and we were genetically engineered to reproduce through cloning with only slight aid from males, so that males and people born through traditional sex where oppressed minorities (and even better, what happens when a male from Earth shows up?) All of these have fascinating possibilities.*

So... those are things I need in my life. Some may be hard to find, others as simple as picking up a book.

*By the way, in case you're interested, those were simplified summaries of Game of Thrones, Dune, any of Terry Pratchett's books but especially the Watch series, and Glory Season, which I'm only partially through and having trouble putting down to do anything productive.

Moist von Lipwig

I'm a reaaaally big fan of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. It spans almost 40 books at this point, but I love that you can hop in at basically any point. I happen to get most of the books from the library, and I love that as I go along when I see mentions of other characters I get to be like "ooh! ooh! I know them!".

I also really like that while the entire series parodies a whole bunch of topics, it's still original. It's not like the Scary Movie franchise or other comparable parodies where people just yank scenes from well-known books/movies, mash them all together, throw in some curse words and yell "look! It's funny!"

There are many recurring characters, loosely compiled into their affiliations either with the country witches (who do more psychology than witchcraft) or the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork, who can be no less slimy than the people they arrest.

I just finished a story arc about a relatively new character, Moist von Lipwig; a con artist who is hung under his alias, but the (benevolent?) dictator Vetinari uses a trap door to keep him alive. In both Going Postal and Making Money Moist is commissioned to take over defunct and poorly running government offices - the Post Office and Royal Bank, respectively. Moist is different from the other characters we've met, with a taste for adrenaline and flair for the ridiculous, and all sorts of shenanigans ensue.

I would say more, but I don't want to give spoilers :)

It's been great reading about all of your guys' favorite books this week!