jducoeur

Pointless but pleasant meme, lifted from hfcougar who got it from gyzki, and adding a few (because it's that kind of game):

To play along, make a post with the following statements in order of when they occurred in your life (feel free to add/remove/edit as appropriate). Just the first occurrences of each, and only ones you were old enough at the time that you remember it.

Have done:

Become gainfully employed.
Graduate from high school.
Move out of parents' house for good.
Buy own computer.
Start college.
Join the SCA.
Get drunk for the first time. (Depends on definition of "drunk".)
First real relationship. (Depends on definition of "real".)
First SF convention.
First sex.
First Pennsic.
Meet future spouse.
First Real Job (tm). (Depends on definition of "Real" -- here, I'm counting it as, "Not working for my father", but I was working pretty hard by age 15.)
Graduate from college.
Buy a car.
Get married.
Offend someone horribly online.
Buy a house.
Get laid off.
Get a 401(k).
Get a cell phone.
Try to start a business.
Drive cross-country. (I'm counting south-to-north here.)

Haven't done (yet):

Move across the country for a job / school.
First graduate-level degree.
Go to live in another country.
Have kids.
Kid move out.
Retire.

Playing along with the latest meme (I'm always a sucker for this sort), here are five questions for me from marysdress:

( 1) If you couldn't write code for a living, what would you do? )
( 2) Name one organization you haven't joined and want to. )
( 3) If you could go back, would you major in anything different in college than you did? )
( 4) You can change one thing about the SCA - what is it? )
( 5) Invite five people from history over to dinner. Who are they? )
ETA: I'm not promising questions -- I simply don't have time to do a lot of them, and I find question-asking fairly hard. But if you want some, say so and I'll try...

Okay, the "five words" meme is just the sort I most like. So reflecting on a list from rising_moon:

structure: That which I am both attracted and repelled by.

I have just enough of the OCD geek in me that I am often driven to organize and systematize, but past a certain point I find structure incredibly boring. Highly structured writers will draw my attention for a while, and I admire the structure, but it doesn't take long before I find myself looking afield for the sort of poetry that breaks my brain open and lets a little sunshine in.

kicky: The way music should be.

I often describe myself as a musical omnivore, in that I love an enormous range of genres, but the reality is that I lean *very* strongly to anything with a good beat. It can be folk music that you clap along with; 80s New Wave (the height of modern wiggle-dance music); classical with sizzling violins; heavy metal with elemental but driving guitar riffs; or pretty much anything in between. My iPod has one pseudo-genre, "Road Music", that is defined mainly by level of kickiness, which accounts for about 90% of what I bother to rip. (Within that genre, I use stars to indicate how much I like it. Three stars is good enough for work; four stars is for driving, when I actually want to listen and sing along; five is mostly the kickiest music ever recorded.)

design: An activity that I do less and less nowadays, intentionally.

Programming influences my thinking deeply, and the trend in my programming over the past decade has been steadily away from advance design, and more towards exploration and emergent understanding. I've slowly come to the conclusion that, for almost any *interesting* problem, trying to understand it well enough to design it correctly takes almost as long as just stumbling in and writing a first draft. The trick is to leave enough time so that, once I have written that first draft and now understand what's actually going on here, I can go back and refactor until the design emerges from the soup. The end result, if I get that time, is usually a better-designed system than I'd have had if I had tried to understand the crystalline lattice upfront.

silverwing: It's a household! It's a verb! It's a household *and* a verb!

House Silverwing shaped my thinking to quite the considerable degree. Steffan and I turned friendly back-and-forth debate into something between a recreation and an art form. The heart and soul of Silverwinging is understanding that the point of the exercise is *not* winning -- indeed, if you try to win the argument, you've pretty much missed the point. Rather, the goal is to work collaboratively, sort of like a team of sculptors chipping away at a gigantic piece of stone. I may be standing on one side at the beginning and you the other, but we gradually circle the topic, chipping away at it. And it's hard to predict where we will be standing when a shape finally begins to appear.

ritual: The best of pedagogical tools.

The thing about Masonic ritual is that it *teaches*. That's the whole reason we do it. On the one hand, the immersive ritual teaches the candidate a bunch of basic moral and spiritual lessons, using the tools and implements of architecture to do so. By associating the lessons with concrete objects, we help him remember them: you never look at a square or a level quite the same way again after you've become a Mason. And in the performance of ritual, we remind ourselves of those same lessons. Everything is learned by doing; ritual allows us to Do in ways that we might not otherwise.

It's not so different in the SCA, although it's a bit subtler. We have so many rituals ingrained in us, and each reminds us of the priorities of our Society. Perhaps the finest is the peerage ceremony (which we appropriated from Calontir, I believe, and I am forever grateful to them for it). In the sponsoring of the candidate, we remind ourselves and all those around of those basic principles of Chivalry, Beauty, Courtesy and Service that make up the substrate that the SCA is built on. It may not make a huge difference, but each little reminder makes the rest of the day that fraction better...

[Yes, yes -- as always, I'm late to the meme. But I always like this sort of thing. Courtesy herooftheage, although I see that a lot of others have picked it up. Answering before I read other peoples' lists.]

List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you: list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Don't take too long to think about it.

(Italicized commentary added afterwards.)

1. 1984 -- The book that scarred me and influenced my thinking more than any other. That was made even worse by reading It Can't Happen Here shortly after: the two books synergize scarily.
2. The 21 Balloons -- A young reader's book that isn't nearly well enough known.
3. I, Robot -- Okay, in retrospect Foundation probably made more of an impression, but this was the first to come to mind. I was a big Asimov fan as a young teen.
4. The Tripods trilogy -- Detecting my fondness for paranoid SF?
5. The Warrior's Apprentice -- Not the best of the Vorkosigan books, but delightful.
6. The Humanoids -- Completed the path started by 1984. One of the creepiest books I've ever read.
7. Francis Willughby's Book of Games -- Gotta get some SCA-topical stuff in here, and this is my absolute favorite on games.
8. Illuminatus! -- The reason I became a Mason. Seriously.
9. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator -- Arguably my very favorite book of my childhood.
10. Sandman -- Have to include *some* graphic novel.
11. Orchesography -- Not the best period dances, but the best period book *about* dance.
12. Inferno -- I *adore* it, and have many editions, although I am especially fond of the down-to-earth Ciardi translation. (Especially the footnotes, which appeal to the student of politics in me.)
13. Amphigory -- I wanted a humor book; I'm curiously amused that this was the first one to come to mind.
14. Inherit the Wind -- One of my two or three favorite plays, and one that made an especially deep impression.
15. To Your Scattered Bodies Go -- Okay, no, I don't know why. But it did stick with me: indeed, that slang "Yaas" I use so often comes directly from Mark Twain in the Riverworld series.

Not by any means a deep list of the books that made the deepest impressions on me, but not a bad off-the-cuff collection of ones that have made a real impact...

Wow, this meme is ridiculously long. But I'm always a sucker for these sorts of things, so taking this from rufinia:
( Lots of SCA Q&A )

I don't do memes often, but I like the more self-reflective ones. And I did get tagged by the_resa on this one, so I think I'll play along.

1. Post about something that made you happy today even if it's just a small thing and even if it's just a one-line post.

2. Do this everyday for a week without fail.

3. Tag 8 of your friends to do the same.

(I really don't do the tagging thing. But I encourage others to try it out, if you haven't already -- I think it's a good exercise. We too often get wrapped up in the cranky, and reminding ourselves consciously of the good stuff is healthy.)

So I'll start off with one that's more about the past few days: a weekend of good parties.

First up with outlander's housewarming party. The house really is pretty, and she brought together a fun and disparate crowd, mixing SCA, filk, contra and her fellow teachers. As always for her parties, there was a constant flow of hot food, which didn't quite manage to steal peoples' attention away from the fluffy white kittens that she is fostering. (I love my cats dearly, but there is nothing so cute as really young kittens.) msmemory and I were dressed to the nines, in formal gown and tuxedo, and could only stay for an hour, because we were then off to...

The Mistletoe Ball, down in Taunton. This was an OES function, and I'll confess that I wasn't entirely looking forward to it: it came dangerously close to Mandatory Fun. (Since she is a muckety-muck in Eastern Star this year, her level of social commitments is high.) But it was a pleasant time, improved by a DJ who was better than I expected -- in between the dances intended for the seventy-somethings, she squeezed in a set of music from the past 20 years, so us under-50s could get up and boogie a bit. (There's nothing like a little ballo dimenio to improve my mood.) And while the two of us turned out to not quite fit the red-and-green-with-pointsettas theme that most folks followed, I thought we cut an elegant black-and-silver figure all evening.

Then, yesterday morning, was ladysprite's birthday (observed), over at China Pearl. I haven't had dim sum in too long, and this was the right way to do it -- in a big enough crowd of friends that we could just order haphazardly on the theory that *somebody* would eat it. Much random chatter and fun was had, passing plates and topics of conversation around the big double table. (And as a kicker, it turned out that another SCAdian crowd was at a nearby table, so we got to chat a bit with folks like Siggy and Alia who I don't see often.)

Very much what I needed. I just plain don't see enough of my friends socially these days, so it was delightful to have such good excuses to do so. My thanks to the hostesses for a very good time...

Since a bunch of people did play along with the "guess the song from the first line" game yesterday, I should give the full answer key:

1. "My shoes went out with a pair of red hot high heels last night" -- My Shoes, the Bobs [One of those fun, catchy, weird songs that the Bobs are so good at.]

2. "Tonight's the night we'll make history, as sure as dogs can fly" -- AD 1928/Paradise Theater, Styx

3. "Who are you" -- Who Are You, the Who [The gimmiest of the gimmies: arguably ambiguous, but the obvious answer was correct in this case.]

4. "Now I dialed 911 a long time ago" -- 911 is a Joke, Duran Duran [jadasc got the song, but as it happens my iTunes was weirdly stuck on Duran Duran yesterday, so it was their version.]

5. "Captain's on a holiday, first mate has gone away" -- Mr. W, Ookla the Mok [The song I think of as the "Mister Worf rap". ladysprite was the only person to get this, as I'd figured she would be: she's the one who originally turned me on to Ookla, the world's best SF-geek rock band.]

6. "Don't let's start, this is the worst part" -- Don't Let's Start, TMBG

7. "Movin' on the floor now babe, you're a bird of paradise" -- Rio, Duran Duran

8. "Put down your remote control, throw out your TV Guide" -- UHF, Weird Al [A favorite of mine: while I'm fond of much of Weird Al's music, his original stuff is often my preference.]

9. "Six o'clock in the morning, I feel pretty good" -- Cathedral, CSN [Caught by oakleaf_mirror. This is one of my really old favorites, a song I still find particularly haunting.]

10. "How's everybody doing tonight -- you, you, and you (way in the back)?" -- Kooza Dance, Cirque du Soleil [A bit obscure simply because it's so new, but keshwyn caught it. This is the beginning of Act II, the big Las Vegas Day of the Dead number.]

11. "Any dolt with half a brain can see that humankind has gone insane" -- My Eyes, Dr. Horrible [Lots of people got this one, which is pretty much what I would have expected from my flist.]

12. "Ecce gratum et optatum ver reducit gaudia" -- Ecce Gratum (club version), Qntal [shalmestere made the entirely reasonable guess that this was from the Carmina Burana, but in fact it is a brilliant piece of electronic club music from the album Illuminate. I blow hot and cold on Qntal, but this one is fabulous.]

13. "I'd drive a million miles to be with you tonight" -- Everybody Have Fun Tonight, Wang Chung [The song whose epilepsy-risking video exemplified 80s MTV.]

14. "At first I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking I could never live without you by my side" -- I Will Survive, Gloria Gaynor [I hadn't even realized until the discussion on this one that it was a cover, and there are several versions of it. A couple of people were surprised to find disco on the list, but Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a favorite movie of mine, and much of the soundtrack is in my "Better" playlist.]

15. "I'm never relaxed, even when I say I am" -- Hell Above Water, Curve [Perhaps not surprisingly, the heavy metal parts of the playlist were the bits that nobody guessed. Of course, this may have to do with the fact that the lyrics are almost incomprehensible: I had to double-check this one online to decipher the line.]

16. "Sometimes I feel I've got to (BAMP BAMP) run away" -- Tainted Love, Soft Cell [Now with annotation from new_man.]

17. "Shake, shake, shake, signora, shake your body line" -- Jump in the Line, Da Vinci's Notebook [Lots of people knew the song, but asdr83 gets the extra point for correctly guessing that I'd have the DVN cover on my playlist.]

18. "Well, come on darlin', the stars are burnin' bright" -- The King and Queen of America, Eurythmics [I will admit surprise that nobody guessed this one: I consider it a classic, but I'm a big Eurythmics fan.]

19. "The Breakfast Creek hotel is up for sale" -- Dream World, Midnight Oil

20. "When they all come crashing down, midflight" -- The Only One, Evanescence [See previous comment about heavy metal.]


Putting that all together, it's a pretty good encapsulation of my musical tastes: a deeply mixed bag of geekiness, metal, 80s and 90s classics, some humor and some angst, all tied together by a strong beat...

Following gyzki, new_man and probably innumerable others by now (mostly because I was curious what the results would be):

"iTunes on shuffle, first lines of the first twenty songs (skipping instrumental pieces, and ones in languages I don't understand). In the Age of Google, this isn't really a challenge anymore, just a peek into part of my life. My eccentric little life." That said, feel free to guess at tracks in the comments -- honor system to do it without looking them up. Some are gimmes, some less so, nothing *really* obscure, although I'd be surprised if anyone gets all of these without looking them up.

In this particular case, chosen from the "Better" playlist, which is the stuff I'm particularly fond of. Aside from one group that surprisingly showed up twice (I don't actually have that much of theirs), it's not a bad representation of my rather eclectic tastes...

1. My shoes went out with a pair of red hot high heels last night
2. Tonight's the night we'll make history, as sure as dogs can fly
3. Who are you
4. Now I dialed 911 a long time ago
5. Captain's on a holiday, first mate has gone away
6. Don't let's start, this is the worst part
7. Movin' on the floor now babe, you're a bird of paradise
8. Put down your remote control, throw out your TV Guide
9. Six o'clock in the morning, I feel pretty good
10. How's everybody doing tonight -- you, you, and you (way in the back)?
11. Any dolt with half a brain can see that humankind has gone insane
12. Ecce gratum et optatum ver reducit gaudia (okay, it kind of violates the "languages I don't understand" clause, but it's my favorite track from one of my favorite albums)
13. I'd drive a million miles to be with you tonight
14. At first I was afraid, I was petrified, kept thinking I could never live without you by my side
15. I'm never relaxed, even when I say I am
16. Sometimes I feel I've got to run away
17. Shake, shake, shake, signora, shake your body line (bonus points for guessing by whom)
18. Well, come on darlin', the stars are burnin' bright
19. The Breakfast Creek hotel is up for sale
20. When they all come crashing down, midflight

Okay, more interesting than average, so I'll play this one.

1) Copy this list into your journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Italicize things you would like to try.
( Fun with food )

Okay, here's one more for the "things I've done that you probably haven't" meme, since a couple of mine have required ritual remorse and replacement. (And because some other lists reminded me of it.)

• Broken a bone in a trampoline accident -- because the trampoline fell on me.

Probably the least traumatic terrible accident ever. Once we reopened the trampoline and determined that, despite the fact that I couldn't feel it any more, my forearm had not, in fact, fallen entirely off, the whole thing was oddly fun. I still remember the novocaine syringe as being 18" long and 3" thick, but aside from that nothing in the process particularly hurt. The fiberglass cast was an excuse to avoid any tasks I didn't want to do, while allowing me anything I did. Overall, a fine way to spend a summer at age 11ish.

It is curious to realize that both times that I have suffered serious injury, it's been within seconds of me asking "what?" instead of paying attention. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

(And it is sobering to realize that, if the same thing happened today, it would probably result in investigation, recrimination and misery. At the time, everyone shrugged, said, "eh -- it's camp", and didn't worry about it much, which strikes me as quite the healthier attitude...)