Ezaryu's Application
Edit: I was suggested by a friend to add these two pictures of me to this entry. So here they are. I love cats :)
Who am I?
I'm a geek/nerd from Holland, 22 years of age (as of yesterday), totally crazy, and interested in joining. :)
Nerd hobbies include Roleplaying with friends every wednesday night, maintaining my own website, playing games, writing, drooling over good CG effects in movies and more. A little elaboration on each...
Roleplaying is currently done in the AD&D world, before our current party we were playing Demon - The Fallen, but it got boring and we eventually just stopped with that and tried for an intrigue-based story in D&D. On wednesdays we gather with the 5 of us and try to get as much done as possible, but lately we've become more and more distracted. One such reason is the new kitten that our host has got himself.
My website is about all my interests, spread across 2 domains (www.kurafire.net and www.kurafire.com) because it would be too much of a mess all on one domain. Right now, they're far from completed, I actually just launched it one day ago, filled with apologies for all the empty sections and missing content and features. Eh, I needed to get it out in the open.
Anyway, the .net site is about Web Standards and webdevelopment, but also my personal blog (on professional level - my LJ is for private stuff). I'll discuss matters like XHTML, CSS, PHP on it, but also music (Ayreon! J-pop!), games and movies.
The .com site will have a focus on Communities, with a project to make some major changes to a very popular forum-software, vBulletin, because I have a whole bunch of ideas for extra features and improvements and what not.
I've been doing some gamesjournalism in the past, writing for the first ever online Dutch gamesmagazine (which was a huge hit until all the people working on it got too busy with side- and other projects). I was one of the most active review-writers on the site, and it was a good learning experience for me. I love writing, I love games, so writing about games was something that made me cream my pants, I mean... very happy! :D
For a game genre preference, I would have to say RPG's. Xenogears, Final Fantasy (7 in particular), Chrono Trigger & -Cross, Star Ocean, Knights of the Old Republic... those games just dominate my life. They inspire me and have had the biggest impact on how I think about creative productions (like writing a story). But I also enjoy games like Metroid Prime, Unreal Tournament 2004, Robotron, Soul Calibur, Metal Gear Solid, and so forth. I'm a bit of an all-rounder, I just focus on RPG's by preference.
Whenever I'm inspired and have time, I sit my ass down and start to write. I've got my own little writing site online, that I really need to renew and update and write more content for, but that'll be taken care of in due time. In short, I'm writing 6 or so short stories that I intend to publish as a Prologue novel once they're all done. The Prologue novel will be a prologue to the big story that I hope to write out over the course of my life. This big, really big story is what I see as "my goal in life", so basically, if I get it done in the way I envision it, I'll be satisfied with what I've accomplished in my life.
As is the prerogative of any geekboy, I love kick-ass CG effets. The first Matrix movie was an ultimate bliss, it was so great to see the movie industry finally start doing things I had had in my mind for years already. They're still nowhere close to the things I have in my mind for my story, but that's mostly because technology is still not good enough for that. Or, too expensive and time-consuming anyway.
Education
Being mostly averse to school and the whole idea of school, it may come as no surprise that I don't remember things like my test results from 8-9 years ago (the only time I ever took anything like a national test). I can say, though, that, according to research, I did the equivalent of 6 years of US High School in ~4 years time.
I did a special type of elementary school when I was young. This 'alternative approach' focuses much more on creating a creative mind, making kids do creative things instead of just learning facts. We were also taught 4 languages in elementary school as of the second year: Dutch, English, German and French. Dutch and English I liked (because I grew up hearing both languages equally much), but French and German I didn't, and now I hardly speak any French and German. I can understand decent amounts of it though.
One of the most fun things from my educational history is that when I was 12 years old, our teacher was sick, and the school asked me to teach English to my own class, which I promptly did. Later on, I found out that my dad had done almost the exact same thing when he was in grade school (in Turkey).
Other than that, the only interesting things about me and school are my views on today's educational system, in particular the situation with IT teachers and schools/colleges that have such classes (in short: 99.9% of all Webdevelopment teachers in the world are running 5 years behind on the facts, and are thus teaching 5-year old crap to entire classes), and the fact that I did more self-education than I ever really got educated, I think. From my 8th on I was obsessed with youth encyclopedia's and the like, spending hours and hours reading up on geology, science (space == mmmmmm), cultures and history throughout the ages... School bored me most of the time, because of that, and so I ended up being involved in nearly every side-activity that the school had to offer. I was in the student council, board of directors over the building (as one of 2 students), I did mentoring for freshmen, tutoring for students in the first three years of school (even when, at one point, I was still in the 3rd year myself -- I was an exception), I helped along with the school's website, and so on.
One other side-activity from school were the MUN's, Model United Nations. These are big conferences held on various schools throughout the country (throughout the world, actually, but I never went to an abroad one) where high school students act like the United Nations. These conferences are organized, run and planned by high school students, for high school students. Adult intervention is limited to student advisory, approval panels, Boards of Directors and keeping an eye on facilities and helping out with such things.
I've participated in about 12-14 MUN conferences, starting out as a delegate but moving on to the Press pretty soon. Writing for and publishing the newspaper that such conferences have was more fun to me than debating over certain issues that not always interested me at all. After a few very successful conferences as Press Officer I was bumped up to Editor in Chief position on future MUN's, making an increasingly big impression to delegates, chairs and staff alike by constantly producing a better-than-last paper each conference. The last paper I produced, 2,5 years ago now, is still fondly referred to whenever people get the papers on an MUN and it is of inferior quality (which, I've been told from a friend of mine who's still active in MUN's, is in all Dutch MUN conferences except for THIMUN). I was asked again for the MUN conference of my old high school this year, and for fun I went there and functioned as Approval Panel, Student Advisor and overall support-coordinator.
Net-addictions? Nahhhh
Being a webdeveloper as profession, I spend my entire day at work on the 'Net. From 10 am (when we start) to 6pm (when we end), I'm online. When I get home I get online. The only times I'm not online are when I'm hanging out with friends (going to movies, RP'ing, going out).
When you're in the Web Standards part of the Blogosphere, you tend to spend a lot of time online just reading up on all the latest developments. I read about 70 blogs on CSS, XHTML and the web, or at least I try to. My vacation of a few weeks ago put me behind quite a bit, and I'm still trying to catch up to everything.
I've been online and on the web since 1994 or so, and started my own homepage in '96. I found out I really enjoyed doing websites, so I started getting more and more into it. Eventually I got my own domains and started running various successful websites. I got too busy, however, and had to leave a lot of communities behind to ensure that I would at least be able to have time for my own sites.
Other tidbits
What makes me nerdy? Maybe the fact that I made a Nerd Inside icon just for this entry. Maybe the fact that I just spent a good while trying to get into a nerd-community. Maybe the fact that I prefer to listen to Soundtracks to movies, games and anime series rather than popular music. Maybe the fact that I'm currently singing along to the Southpark movie soundtrack...even to the female vocal parts.
But maybe I'm not a nerd.
...
*ponders this for a moment*
...
*bursts out in laughter* Nah, that just doesn't sound right. :D
EDIT!!
Okay, I forgot a terribly nerdy thing to put in here. How silly of me!
I play Munchkin. I play a LOT of Munchkin. I LOVE Munchkin. We had the Dutch Open Munchkin Tournament a few months ago here in Leiden, the city where I work, and I got in third place. First place was an MIB who was participating, second place was my boss, who taught me Munchkin. Before the tournament, I hadn't played more than 5-6 games of Munchkin in my entire life. I'm an enthusiast about Munchkin. I love playing Epic Munchkin with as many sets combined as possible. I always try to win with a few bonus levels, i.e. instead of winning by reaching level 10 (or 20, in Epic games), I try to win by jumping from level 8 or 9 straight to 11 or 12. In Epic Munchkin games, I tend to win at level 24. My biggest win was an Epic Star Munchkin game, where I jumped from level 18 to 24 in one battle, killing the Clown Trooper and his Clone, while being a Space Ranger, and using my Space Ranger ability to force someone else into helping me win the battle (the Clowntrooper+clone were bumped up to a total of level 70 or 80).
Additionally, I place Munchkin-references on my website with tiny semi-hidden hints towards 'hidden content' on the site.
End of the edit.