I'm going to be using this as a place to dump random thoughts and musings on various subjects, from tabletop games to literature to the Fear mythos. Reviews, rants, essays, and the like will all show up here. This is where I'm going to drop the mask that I might pick up in my other blogs or on other sites and explain a little bit about why I think what I think.
But first, a little background information.
I'm a twenty-year-old male college student. I was born in Massachusetts, raised in Colorado, and currently residing in the Midwest. I am a massive geek, I have Asperger's syndrome, and I love to read and write.
I’m good at symbolic and formal logic, I like to think that I’m good at analyzing narratives and building stories, and I have an amazing memory for geeky things. I rarely forget things that I’ve read or seen in a movie, and I can quote pretty much everything verbatim from memory. I play tabletop RPGs, trading card games, board games, tabletop war games, and video games like an addict. It’s probably because I’m an addict. Also, I have Asperger’s syndrome, which makes me very blunt and somewhat socially awkward in exchange for having a tremendous capacity to focus on topics which catch my interest.
My favorite authors are Terry Pratchett, writer of the brilliant fantasy-satire series called Discworld, and H. P. Lovecraft, creator of the Lovecraftian horror genre and the Cthulhu mythos. My favorite books in the Discworld series are Night Watch and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, while my favorite Lovecraft stories are “The Music of Erich Zann” and “The Dunwich Horror”, with “The Colour Out Of Space” in a close second.
Other writers that I am particularly fond of are Garth Nix (mainly for The Keys to the Kingdom, a great young-adult fantasy series), Neil Gaiman (Coraline is one of my all-time favorite novels), Stephen R. Donaldson (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever), and Dan Simmons (The Hyperion Cantos).
In terms of music, my favorite bands (and songs) are Queen (“Save Me”), Jethro Tull (“Locomotive Breath”), The Rolling Stones (“Sympathy For The Devil”), and Clutch (varies, but probably “Mice and Gods” or “Rising Son”).
My favorite movies… well, there’s a lot of those, but the ones that leap immediately to mind are The Prestige, Aliens, Terminator 2, Die Hard, High Noon, Hot Fuzz, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, The Princess Bride, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
For video games, I am a huge fan of Brütal Legend, as well as Team Fortress 2, Bioshock, Fallout, Advance Wars, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., and lots of others besides.
In terms of tabletop games, I love role-playing games just as much as board games. My favorite RPGs are, in no particular order, Spirit of the Century, Hunter: The Vigil, Changeling: The Lost, Eclipse Phase, Deadlands: Reloaded, and many others. Board games, I often play Operation: TANNHÄUSER, HeroScape, Arkham Horror, and Talisman. I also play Warhammer, though I play its fantasy version rather than Warhammer 40,000. The Skaven are my army of choice.
My current writing project is In The Shuffling Madness, a fictional blog set in the Fear mythos universe. More information on the Fear mythos can be found on its TVtropes page, as well as at its official forum. On both sites, I go by Foolamancer.
While I'm on the subject of my username, I'll take a second to explain why I call myself that, and where I got my avatar. The username is a twofold reference: first and foremost, it is a callback to one of my earliest Dungeons & Dragons characters, a wizard. This wizard specialized in the use of spells like feeblemind, that messed with the opponent's senses and mental abilities. I don't remember why. I just thought it was funny, and eventually somebody in my gaming group came up with the term "foolamancer", and let me create a custom spell called summon bigger fool that would summon a human with an Intelligence and Wisdom score lower than the lowest example of each within a thirty-foot radius from the caster. Secondly, it's a shout-out to Erfworld.
My avatar was a Christmas present from two members of one of my online gaming groups. I play an online Changeling: The Lost game, and my character, Brom Bones, is the character depicted in my avatar. Two other members of that group commissioned a picture of him from a DeviantArt user as a Christmas present, and I just thought it was awesome.
So... that's me! Exposition dump over with. The next post will have some more actual meat to it.
