Some of the People I Know

I know many people, and some of them happen to have web pages, and of the people I know (or once knew) who have web pages some of them are on this page. Most are not. It's been a very organic process. If for some reason you have come here with a burning need to know who I hang out with on a regular basis, look at the horde listing, which may give you some hints.

Ambar

I met Ambar through PernMUSH sometime in the autumn of 1991. She has red hair, many cats, several horses, and great force of personality.

Angie Clough

Blue-haired Angie, source of glitter and deviled eggs! Angie has immense quantities of energy which she uses to read, game, turn her hair fabulous colours, addict her friends to anime, wear interesting costumes, and several dozen other things.

David Bader

I spent an amusing month hanging out on IRC before I started mudding. While there I met David, who was using the handle Wavey. We had a lot of good conversation, sent each other some snail mail (including a beautiful card with a monarch butterfly on it, which I still have), and then went our separate directions. I think of him fondly, and occasionally we still exchange email.

Chrisber

Christofer Bertani, who has a very keen name, a very obnoxious cat, and powers of snide that, fortunately, he uses only for good. With his hair down he looks like Lord Byron.

Jim Butcher

I met Jim at a LaRP in 1990; he fed me and then let me beat him up with a foam sword, which is certainly the mark of a true friend. To my great delight people have realised he's a wonderful writer, so now I can go into a bookstore and buy a Jim Butcher novel. Or several of them! Life is so neat.

Regis Donovan

Everybody knows Regis, but I didn't know that when I met her. She helped Chuck convince me to join elbows, and has been a great pusher of Lush products despite the fact that it usually takes me at least six months to pay her back. She moved to Boston to be closer to her sweetie, which is a sensible decision but will, I suspect, cut down on my annual Regis-viewing at Orycon.

Bryant Durrell

Bryant is the reason I know many of my current friends, as he helped me to realise that California is my true home and that I needed to get the hell out of Oklahoma as soon as possible, for which I am eternally grateful. Now he's in Boston so I never see him, but he's a clever and fun person and has an inexhaustible supply of semicolons.

Rachel Gollub

I met Rachel by crashing her 24th birthday party -- not something I would have done if I'd realised at the time that she's referred to as 'Short Deadly Rachel' for a reason. After a brief period as my next door neighbour she and her sweet&goofy husband Jeremy and their adorable daughter Miriam moved to Palo Alto, where they recently produced a second daughter!

Fred Hicks

One day on AmberMUSH, out of the blue, Fred started roleplaying with me. This grew and grew and grew until suddenly Fred and I were happily spending all of our online time together. Eventually we both went and got real jobs and quit having time to RP, but it was certainly fun while it lasted.

Ken Shields

Any words of admiration one says about one's fiance is likely to be viewed with suspicion, so I think I'll stick with saying that I love Ken with all my heart and I'm really, really glad he asked me to marry him.

Lydia Leong

When I was fifteen I wanted to grow up to be Lydia. Now I just want to finally make it to GenCon, where we have a standing appointment to share a room and discuss the evils of men at great length.

Liralen Li

Liralen lives in Colorado with her adorable son Jet, her extremely nice husband John, and many Land Rovers. She's a Renaissance woman, which means that she writes, codes, games, plays soccer, knits, spins, travels frequently, muds, cooks, runs a mailing list, and occasionally even sleeps despite having a nine-month-old baby. Despite rumours she is not actually superhuman, just exceptionally cool.

Marith

Marith has been my best friend for a very long time now, which is wonderful. We both love to analyse books and movies, gossip about our friends, puzzle over our own motivations, and eat well. She's very artistic and creative, has a wonderful colour sense, and an extremely kind heart. Without Marith life would be hopelessly boring; who else would not only listen to me talk about Sailor Moon for hours on end, but then ask to see the show?

Jim Murdoch

Jim is the sort of person you can talk to for hours and hours on end about the cuteness of cats and the importance of the letter E.

Lance Nathan

I've known Lance for about eleven years now, although it's only a few years ago that we finally met in person. Our taste in plays & poetry are extremely similar, except for the fact that he hasn't yet reached true enlightenment & thus doesn't understand the glory which is Christopher Fry. Nonetheless, his ability to read Auden over the phone remains unsurpassed.

The Other Gretchen

Gretchen is the Light Goddess of Snide. She's also a sysadmin, a geek, a gamer, an excellent cook, a pusher of fine teas, and the possessor of red hair so fierce it has its own name -- Fang. She and her husband Brad live in a beautiful Victorian house in Santa Cruz, and have recently acquired a Giant Yellow Dog named Moose.

Al Petterson

Al & his lovely wife Sherilyn live in Roseville with their three frighteningly adorable children, Robin & Katie & Joshua. When people visit Al rewards us by running Mage, which is some of the best face-to-face roleplaying I've ever had. Plus they provide me with frozen grapes; what more can a houseguest desire?

Sean and Stephanie

I met both Sean and Stephanie on PernMUSH; Sean during the summer of 1993, Stephanie early in 1994. Now they've gone off and gotten married, and have no time to mud, but I still think of them often, and see them occasionally when I'm in Chicago.

Jon Singer

I've been told that Jon Singer is a nexus, and thus everyone knows him. Having had the chance to spend a few random hours with him at Orycon, I can certainly see why. He's a fascinating person who in the short time we interacted chemisty-geeked extensively with Jim, discovered that my purple hair fluoresces, showed off rare earth glazes, and gave me a great deal of information about cherry trees, ducks, mushrooms, and playing gamelan somewhere on the East Coast. Pretty much every conversation I've ever had with him has left me wanting to chat with him more.

Jennifer "Moira" Smith

Once upon a time in the 80's I knew Jennifer on BBSes, but then she went off and got married and moved away and, well, that was that. Except a few years later I started mudding, and discovered Random (whom I'd also vaguely known from BBSing) and went 'Hey, wait, I know your wife.' To which he replied 'Yah, and she plays Pern too.' So there you have it.

Russ "Random" Smith

Random is the first person I can honestly say I met through mudding. It is because of Random that I had an okstate account, and it is because of Random that I decided I wanted to be a sysadmin. Thus, all blame and/or credit goes to him.

Brian Tanaka

I worked with Brian at SGI, where we had long discussions about strange Swiss sounds and octal frogs. I haven't seen him in forever but we do exchange brief flurries of email from time to time.

Trip

Once upon a time when I had just moved to California and had no job and no money and no confidence about acquiring either, Trip would randomly decide to go pick up fast food around the same time every day and would always bring me back some. Thus I did not starve to death before I got a job. Not only is Trip a genuinely nice person, but he is really intelligent, very creative, and has an amazing sense of humour, making him easily one of my ten favourite people in the world.

Raymond Wood

Ray is a very strange, very keen person whom I can spend hours and hours and hours talking with about computer games and anime and books and game mechanics and ancient china and dozens of other topics. We have lunch on a regular basis, and there's a rumour that he might end up living nearer to me than Santa Clara, which would be awfully cool if it happened.

Harold Zatz

I met Harold many years ago, by not-quite-crashing his housewarming/New Year's Eve party. He is Dapper and Surreal.