I'm not sure, but I have this urge to write out of character. It'll probably go away in a few days, but I figure I'll burn a couple of minutes anyway since I can't get used to losing an hour. Damn you Benajmin Franklin!
Let's see...
I guess I should talk about myself. I hate talking about myself! So all you're going to get right now is the following short bio that's prone to frequent digression:
I'll start with some basics. I'm a 25 year old graduate student. My degree is in chemistry, but I don't know a damn thing about it. You put me in a chem lab and i'll guarantee someone is going to lose an eye or a limb or in the least the ability to spread their genetic code. No, what I do is more engineering and physics stuff. I work with big lasers and even bigger magnets and crazy equipment that has 25 dollar screws on it. But they have to give me a degree, and it has to have a name, so they lump it into chemistry because somewhere way back when this stuff was being thought up, there was a chemist. So I guess i'm a chemist. Technically. Because I was quite indecisive after I got my first degree, I decided to postpone responsibility and go to grad school to collect a few more letters after my name. I found myself here in Texas, where the scenery is so-so, the weather is hot and everyone drives a bigger truck than the next guy. I have a truck, but i'm apparently the next guy because damn if I can't see over anyone when i'm trying to turn right at the stoplight. My reasons for coming here: a good program, good money, and a girl. No more mention will be made of the latter henceforth, but suffice to say the first two reasons still hold my interest here (and don't read into that. I'm very much heterosexual). I think that about sums up what you need to know for anything else I write to make sense. If more info is needed, i'll do my best to fill in the gaps.
With that, here's a little history about how I came to find myself writing this little history about my history. I like to think that if fate hadn't stepped in way back during my second year in college, I would never have known things such as MUDs or Blogs or the internet existed. Well maybe not the latter thanks to Al Gore, but the first two for sure. To sum up a fairly decent story: I was paired up with an oddball roommate in college who loved video games and role playing. I admit there was a little tension between us: I honestly thought he was a freak, and still do, though a pretty nice guy otherwise. He had an assortment of oddball friends, what you could safely call the misunderstood. One scene that still lies burned in my mind is walking into his room and seeing him and about six of his friends wearing makeup and strange costumes. It took me a good ten seconds to figure out that my roommate was the one wearing the purple wig and fishnet stockings. Ugh. All I wanted was notes from the class I skipped the day before and now I was subjected to this? I finally got the notes and an explanation: he was into live action role playing, then it was something called Vampire, and they would have a huge group meet at night in the local park to act it out. Later he got into making PVC swords coated in foam and getting together with his cronies to terrorize the campus with live action combat. They actually got the club approved as an official campus recognized organization, but that's another story. Though I still to this day don't quite see the allure in live action role playing or beating each other up with foam sticks, I did make a compromise my second year with that roomie, and decided to try and understand. And among other things that I could simply not appreciate then, there was one thing that I was at least willing to give a go at: online text based gaming. He was very much into MUDs and well, I am a firm believer in giving anything reasonable (the key word here is reasonable) a shot, so I tried it, and honestly I couldn't read fast enough to keep up. Reading for fun? What kind of crap is this?
Eventually I gave it another go, about six months later, because then my pride was at stake for quitting so fast. Plus he seemed to enjoy it immensely, so why not? That was the summer of 1998 when I logged into a fairly new and popular mud named Waterdeep and created a character named Clausius. I used a client called pueblo--the first free one I could find, and began to learn the ropes of text based gaming. I have to give myself a little more credit here: I used to love reading those choose your own adventure stories in grade school, and so this wasn't that far of a stretch for me. Plus, I had a hell of a lot of free time then, as most of my classes were general education requirements. I also led a more sedentary lifestyle then and never really got into watching TV or reading for fun, so all that free time was spent in front of my new computer: a blazing fast pentium 133. Oh baby, this thing runs windows 98! (Had I been a little older, I suppose I would have a little more room to talk here, but this is my bio, not yours you old fart!). Eventually, I started liking it, and kept up with it about an hour or two every night. Aside from a few times where I up and drop it for other stuff, as is the case now, I remained loyal to Waterdeep. I'll get to the now part later. There's a lot of empty space to fill in between first.
That routine carried me through most of my undergrad. Toward the end, studies became a little more serious, and you would think my play time would diminish, but I tend to play the hardest in the midst of deadlines. Incidentally, a very big deadline is quickly approaching, and here I am typing away. So pretty much you can guess the rest. Creative writing is one of those things I still try to keep up, if for no other reason than to keep my sanity. There's not a lot of room for creativity in scientific publications (though probably more than you think. A few brief departures to the absurd are generally acceptable if the science is sound).
Call this practice. Call it retribution for spending 7 years of my internet life in anonymity. Maybe someone will read these entries and say, hey wait! That sounds just like this dude I went to college with. And wait! I wore a purple wig and fishnet stockings once! If it happens it happens. I'm decisively a closet mudder though, so I doubt anyone I ever knew will read this, but if they do, drop me a line. I'd love to hear what's going on with you now.
I think I said this would be short earlier, but I lied. I do that you know. Anyway the actual bio is short, so I guess we can call this a fib. Or relative to some other stuff, this is pretty short. Whatever you want to call it. I don't care if i'm labeled a dirty liar.