5 Questions Meme
Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile."
* I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity.
* Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
* Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions
1) What was the first book you read that connected you with "adult" feelings or emotions? Could be sex, could be tragedy, could be whatever - just the first book that reading it made you feel like a grown-up.
I honestly never had a book that made me feel like I was a 'grown-up'. I certainly had emotional feelings and reactions, but I never thought of them as being adult or something I shouldn't be feeling at that age, it was just simply how I reacted.
That said though my parents bought me a copy of The Ninja By Eric V. Lustbader as a Christmas present for me when I was a sophomore in High School. I remember reading it and thinking 'wow...they must not know what's in this book if they bought it for me.' I had never read a book that had such intense sex scenes or violence in it before. So it was the first book that elicited strong emotions out of me including arousal, but it didn't make me "feel like a grown-up" or that I was experiencing adult emotions. I was just sure my parents didn't know what they had bought me and all I ever said to them was "yeah it's an awesome book". I adore the Nicholas Linnear series to this day and was thrilled to find out Lustbader picked up the Bourne books too.
2) What drew you into doing infosec stuff in the first place? I know you don't do that anymore, but I'm always curious about how people get into it.
I stumbled into it really. I didn't know what to do when I graduated with my bachelors degree. I had picked up some unix skills my senior year so I applied to the University of Michigan as a system administrator and was hired in. I really wanted to finish the masters degree I was working on at Wayne State, but phawkwood and I agreed I needed to work and support myself and get out on my own away from my parents. So I was hired in to UofM as a Unix admin and was miserable. Intimidated as hell by the people I worked with, uncertain and self-conscious about everything coupled with nasty university politics.
After a while the user advocate position opened up and since I had experience at Wayne State tracking down folks causing trouble on the system there and I really enjoyed it I thought I would be good at the job. It really appealed to me. I applied and got the position. I really enjoyed it and discovered I had an intuitive sense for security and user issues. The problem was I wanted to do more with the security aspects as a whole and not just hunt down hackers or such. My boss decided that was not part of my job description and it shouldn't be expanded. She had another person she was trying to put in that role not to mention that centralization of things was being fought there. So when I left and went to Sprint I was able to expand my experience into working with firewalls and intrusion detection systems and more.
3) I know you're "multi-cultural" or however you want to say it. How often does this affect your life on a day to day basis? I have a lot of friends who are bi-racial or bi-cultural, and I am curious about the experience, because I care about you. Being mono-cultural myself, it's a mystery to me.
Wow...that's not an easy question. It actually affects me on a daily basis. There is always something that challenges me or I have to stop and think about the situation before I react. Some of it extends from the combined Buddhist and Anishnaabe traditions/beliefs and some of it is just simply that I am a Northerner living in the Midwest. Which presents some unique challenges too. I don't feel at home in MO socially or culturally. The way people here perceive and think about their world in general and interact is very much beyond me. Then again the way a lot of people outside of the reservation I grew up with interact has been a foreign concept to me. The other thing on a daily basis is I do not like to display my spiritual practices in front of others who do not share my viewpoints. Which means in MO I am pretty much stuck. I am not in a land of others who are of the Long House tradition and even in my Buddhist practices there are very few of us out here that practice in a more traditional sense. So I practice when I am alone most of the time.
4) If you had a huge supply of money, say you won the lottery, what would you do with yourself? Would you continue working? Doing what?
What I would want to do...
Pay off all our bills, pay the student loans my parents took out for me off as well, set up a long term plan to provide for extra retirement and maybe even out last pahwkwood and I so that it could provide scholarships for children in the future, buy land and have a house built that was large enough the mil could live in there and we could live there and yet not feel like we were living in the same house. Maybe it would be two houses near each other. I don't know. One requirement is a large room that is a library with a ladder that goes around the room, a nice office, and a studio for filming. If there is enough money after that then I would like to pay my parents mortgage off and buy them a decent car. Then they would be at square one and hopefully could manage their finances decently enough from there.
I would also want to sink about 5K more into advertising the clinic. I would not stop working. That would kill me. No matter how long I live I need to work at least part time somewhere. I am a social creature and need the human interaction and I need to be creative in some way. Working provides that for me to a point.
5) What's your favorite setting for RPG, broadly speaking? Why?
Oh wow...I don't know. I truly adore the Star Wars universe for RPG because of the concepts you can really dig into and play with, but I think that is just because I have a comfort level with it really.
Amber is just as awesome because you can do anything given that everything else is a shadow reality so absolutely anything can go. You can play with any concept you want to. It leaves you with a lot of freedom.
I adore Tekumel and love it, but it is very constrained in my view. Not a bad thing, just that you have to do a lot of research and gain a lot of knowledge on how things should be before RPing in the universe. But at same time it is very detailed and I that is absolutely what I love about it. If I could RP in the universe as regularly as I do in the SW universe I would.
I'm actually going through a streak right now that I want to start creating my own universes to RP in.
* I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity.
* Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
* Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions
1) What was the first book you read that connected you with "adult" feelings or emotions? Could be sex, could be tragedy, could be whatever - just the first book that reading it made you feel like a grown-up.
I honestly never had a book that made me feel like I was a 'grown-up'. I certainly had emotional feelings and reactions, but I never thought of them as being adult or something I shouldn't be feeling at that age, it was just simply how I reacted.
That said though my parents bought me a copy of The Ninja By Eric V. Lustbader as a Christmas present for me when I was a sophomore in High School. I remember reading it and thinking 'wow...they must not know what's in this book if they bought it for me.' I had never read a book that had such intense sex scenes or violence in it before. So it was the first book that elicited strong emotions out of me including arousal, but it didn't make me "feel like a grown-up" or that I was experiencing adult emotions. I was just sure my parents didn't know what they had bought me and all I ever said to them was "yeah it's an awesome book". I adore the Nicholas Linnear series to this day and was thrilled to find out Lustbader picked up the Bourne books too.
2) What drew you into doing infosec stuff in the first place? I know you don't do that anymore, but I'm always curious about how people get into it.
I stumbled into it really. I didn't know what to do when I graduated with my bachelors degree. I had picked up some unix skills my senior year so I applied to the University of Michigan as a system administrator and was hired in. I really wanted to finish the masters degree I was working on at Wayne State, but phawkwood and I agreed I needed to work and support myself and get out on my own away from my parents. So I was hired in to UofM as a Unix admin and was miserable. Intimidated as hell by the people I worked with, uncertain and self-conscious about everything coupled with nasty university politics.
After a while the user advocate position opened up and since I had experience at Wayne State tracking down folks causing trouble on the system there and I really enjoyed it I thought I would be good at the job. It really appealed to me. I applied and got the position. I really enjoyed it and discovered I had an intuitive sense for security and user issues. The problem was I wanted to do more with the security aspects as a whole and not just hunt down hackers or such. My boss decided that was not part of my job description and it shouldn't be expanded. She had another person she was trying to put in that role not to mention that centralization of things was being fought there. So when I left and went to Sprint I was able to expand my experience into working with firewalls and intrusion detection systems and more.
3) I know you're "multi-cultural" or however you want to say it. How often does this affect your life on a day to day basis? I have a lot of friends who are bi-racial or bi-cultural, and I am curious about the experience, because I care about you. Being mono-cultural myself, it's a mystery to me.
Wow...that's not an easy question. It actually affects me on a daily basis. There is always something that challenges me or I have to stop and think about the situation before I react. Some of it extends from the combined Buddhist and Anishnaabe traditions/beliefs and some of it is just simply that I am a Northerner living in the Midwest. Which presents some unique challenges too. I don't feel at home in MO socially or culturally. The way people here perceive and think about their world in general and interact is very much beyond me. Then again the way a lot of people outside of the reservation I grew up with interact has been a foreign concept to me. The other thing on a daily basis is I do not like to display my spiritual practices in front of others who do not share my viewpoints. Which means in MO I am pretty much stuck. I am not in a land of others who are of the Long House tradition and even in my Buddhist practices there are very few of us out here that practice in a more traditional sense. So I practice when I am alone most of the time.
4) If you had a huge supply of money, say you won the lottery, what would you do with yourself? Would you continue working? Doing what?
What I would want to do...
Pay off all our bills, pay the student loans my parents took out for me off as well, set up a long term plan to provide for extra retirement and maybe even out last pahwkwood and I so that it could provide scholarships for children in the future, buy land and have a house built that was large enough the mil could live in there and we could live there and yet not feel like we were living in the same house. Maybe it would be two houses near each other. I don't know. One requirement is a large room that is a library with a ladder that goes around the room, a nice office, and a studio for filming. If there is enough money after that then I would like to pay my parents mortgage off and buy them a decent car. Then they would be at square one and hopefully could manage their finances decently enough from there.
I would also want to sink about 5K more into advertising the clinic. I would not stop working. That would kill me. No matter how long I live I need to work at least part time somewhere. I am a social creature and need the human interaction and I need to be creative in some way. Working provides that for me to a point.
5) What's your favorite setting for RPG, broadly speaking? Why?
Oh wow...I don't know. I truly adore the Star Wars universe for RPG because of the concepts you can really dig into and play with, but I think that is just because I have a comfort level with it really.
Amber is just as awesome because you can do anything given that everything else is a shadow reality so absolutely anything can go. You can play with any concept you want to. It leaves you with a lot of freedom.
I adore Tekumel and love it, but it is very constrained in my view. Not a bad thing, just that you have to do a lot of research and gain a lot of knowledge on how things should be before RPing in the universe. But at same time it is very detailed and I that is absolutely what I love about it. If I could RP in the universe as regularly as I do in the SW universe I would.
I'm actually going through a streak right now that I want to start creating my own universes to RP in.