so as possibly alluded to in my previous post, much like my esteemed hermano jsmg, i’ve been wary of becoming a cranky old man in the wide world of social networking and the internet version 2.0.

there’s a constant tension between the present and the past. on the one hand i like to hold on to my old school street cred. you know, the use of pine (an improvement over elm!) and remembering manually putting together multipart mime downloads from usenet using tin. hell, at one point over a decade ago i had a .sig file for usenet posting. i gophered into wisc.edu to download .voc and .mod files. long before wow, when blizzard was just that quirky company that made warcraft: orcs and humans, i was off on bbs’ playing majormud. i used telix and wrote salt scripts to level me up. old school.

funnily enough, that sort of thing doesn’t count for much in the modern era. yes, i have vast quantities of street credit, but internet inflation is even worse than that in the real world. what was sufficient to buy me adulation a decade ago now only pays its dividends in derision. (just because pine’s quoting breaks gmail that doesn’t make pine bad.)

anyhow, in addition to making an awesome podcast, you can also find me on your favorite social networking sites. by which i mean facebook. technically i’m on myspace although i never log on anymore. having more than 5 friends on myspace is a liability because the odds increase exponentially that one f them is going to get hacked and spam your comments, bulletins, and messages with crazy advertisements and invitations to their secret nude webcam.

i’ve also started messing around with twitter though i confess that i can’t quite work up the will to have 140 characters of wit every twenty minutes. i am following some pretty smart (and funny people) though that show how the medium can be manipulated well: r. stevens, of diesel sweeties; lore sjoberg, of wired alt text and formerly brunching shuttlecocks; and john hodgman, of everything awesome in the last five years (but especially his book, the daily show, and being bruce campbell’s literary agent). like my pownce account, however, i’m guessing that i’ll largely be a data consumer and produce very little.

for a slightly nerdier thing that i’ve been working with, i’ve also set up my own openid provider. unfortunately, it seems like everything is an openid provider - i think even your safeway club card provides openid now. unfortunately nobody accepts the damn things, and even those that do seem to do it in this janky, half-assed way. not quite the promise of easy access to a million systems with just one secure login, is it now?

the last new technology that i’ve been playing with is actually an entire company, doing no evil into my life nearly constantly. i’ve googleized my life in a dozen ways: it started with dropping bloglines like a bad habit and switching to google reader - if only for it’s integrated friends lists. similarly i’ve got a couple google calendars, a bunch of files in google docs & spreadsheets, and my very own appspot hello world application.

meanwhile, i’m hopefully contributing to web 3.0, the personalized, decentralized, peer-to-peer world by creating a decentralized social networking application. it’ll be done eventually, although at the current coding rate it’s been… slow going.

maybe i’m still slightly hip.

the flobots are really great. oddly enough, this up-and-coming hiphop act reminds me of no other band more than cake, especially on their lead-off single, handlebars.

once you get that song good and stuck in your head, you’ll probably be looking for some other, non-musical auditory enjoyment delivered directly through your cochlea to your brainstem. might i suggest listening to one of the newfangled internet podcasts that are available for your listening pleasure?

at the top of the list i narcissistically must place the rulezero.org podcast, featuring none other than myself, jon safety monkey grover , and paul the blogless springer. i know i’ve pimped it out before, but we’ve shortened up our format and we’ve got a few new episodes up for your listening pleasure. check out episodes 9 and 10 - you don’t even have to be obsessed with video games to like it now as much, although it still helps to like nerdy crap.

next up is the podcast that has (somewhat ironically, given the title) been hurting my podcast self-esteem since i first started listening to it. you look nice today brings the “three guys chatting about whatever” game to a whole new level. it even features interludes with john hodgman between the humorous lols from their twitterin’ principals: lonelysandwich, scottsimpson, and hotdogsladies.

lastly, and you kind of have to be a real nerd like me to like this one: the penny arcade podcast. it’s fair to say that this was one of the two biggest inspirations for my own podcasting desires (the other being the now defunct daily affirmation with kris and scott (scott and kris)). it’s a rambling look into the minds of creative folks as they sit around working.

frightening, but it’s true. many of you know the story of where this url came from, along with my instant messenger accounts, my email addresses, and yes, even my bbs logins from back in the day. i pulled the handle, quite fortunately, from my second dungeons and dragons character.

with the passing of gary gygax it seems at once mandatory and yet cliche to discuss one’s d&d characters and their introduction to the hobby - to take someone’s legacy and reduce it to their impact on your fictional character. but yet, in a real way roleplaying games were his legacy, and the man remained a gamer to his death.

my introduction to roleplaying games actually came about through an entirely different angle. one summer i came across a copy of the robotech rpg, a series i was enamored with. i picked it up and read through it, and then begged my mom to purchase it for me along with the requisite dice set - two each of d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20. (in the intervening two decades i’ve managed to lose four of those dice.) with just myself and my younger brother interested in it, our games were loose interpretations of the rules at best, but i kept devouring the stats and plotting grand adventures across the cosmos. in robotech, of course, my name suited the characters best - i could really imagine myself growing up to be a veritech fighter pilot just like rick hunter - so why invent a persona for a character?

eventually i was curious about the origins of role playing games, and luckily the public library had a set of several first edition advanced dungeons & dragons books behind the counter. unfortunately, they weren’t available for checkout. in their stead i checked out the dragonlance series of novels, and when it came time to return them i would wander down to the library while my family ran errands and sit studiously reading the rulebooks. i attempted to create my own characters for the fantasy world as i understood it, a mixture of hyboria and krynn and my own imagination. of course, advanced really meant advanced, and i found myself fumbling over rules and conflating concepts between the two very different approaches to game design. the end result, however, you can see above. i’d crafted a half-elven cleric-fighter-magic user named, brilliantly, leeardathas half-elven. he was a master of magic both arcane and divine, and handy with a flail to boot. minmax much?

eventually i picked up my own copy of the 2nd edition player’s handbook and my next character had a slightly more creative name, or at least one i’m more willing to own as a domain.