Off Again, On Again

Yeah, I’m back. Sorry that I scared some of you. I very much appreciated the emails that you sent.

The past week or so was productive, which was my main goal, and also in the process I learned that there are other, much nicer places to spend my time online.

I don’t think I’ll be going back to RPGnet. As the Administrator told me, my image over there is fairly firmly imbedded in the group psyche as the “default villain” of the place, and it’s pretty obvious that no amount of changed behavior on my part will make a dent in that. He told me that he felt that sucked, but that he really didn’t know any way to get around it. He felt that even his moderators act based on that image, which pretty much guarantees that I’m never going to get a fair shake.

Basically, I just have to deal with the fact that my presence there will mean that I will have do a lot of what Warren Ellis once called “retard farming.” I don’t have the energy for that, so fuck it. That’s the way that 8 years of participation and contribution come to an end….with a shrug.

So…since going on my week-long break, it was announced by the BBC that Doctor Who is coming back to television, which makes me giddy with a combination of nostalgia and happiness. A nice bit of synchronicity, given, as I stated below, Fall always turns my mind towards Who.

I’ll wrap this up with a bit of blog-meme that I’m swiping from Elissa Carey:

Here are the rules. She had a list of authors. I removed any that weren’t on my shelves, and added authors that were until I had a list of ten again. You do the same, and post both lists.

Her list:

Neal Stephenson

Iain M. Banks

J.R.R. Tolkien

Robert A. Heinlein

H.P. Lovecraft

Tad Williams

Neil Gaiman

William Gibson

Mary Stewart

Stephen King

My List

Bernard Cornwell

Edgar Rice Burroughs

J.R.R. Tolkien

C.S. Forester

H.P. Lovecraft

Michael Moorcock

Neil Gaiman

Dudley Pope

Robert E. Howard

Stephen King

Oh–one more thing: The design column for Heroes of the New Wave will be returning as of next week.

Thanks again for all the kind thoughts. Sometimes you need to get away, but it’s always nice to come back.

GMS