As I have mentioned elsewhere, I was a major presence online in the Usenet gaming communities rec.games.frp.* for many years (going back to the late 1980s). One day, in 1991, I was contacted by a person going by the name of Mavra, whose real name I later learned was Peter Adkison. He said he was part of a new RPG company and was looking for people to take a look at an early draft of their first planned product, and I was the sort of gamer he was looking for. Little did I realize how important a first contact I had just made. I of course [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: Usenet
March 20, 2015 By 2 Comments
I have previously discussed, in more broad terms, my entry into and participation in the world of online communication, starting when I was only 14, discovering the existence of email and bulletin boards through the local high-school computer network. There were, and are, many different ways of participating in social interaction online – email in its many guises, bulletin boards, IRC, LiveJournal, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook – but the one that has been the longest-enduring for me, and certainly the most influential on me over the [ Continue reading... ]
STORY: To Duel the Gorgon
March 22, 2013 By 11 Comments
This is a very short story (about 2400 words, or roughly the length of one of my average chapters in a book) which was originally written just as a spinoff of a Usenet discussion. The context was that we were trying to decide if there were any magical effects which could not be duplicated by technology -- i.e., whose presence immediately signaled we were dealing with magic, not science (even Sufficiently Advanced Science). One of the participants put forward the Gorgon/Basilisk/Medusa effect of "turn to stone when you look at [ Continue reading... ]
Under the Influence: The Dawn of the Network Age
October 17, 2012 By 7 Comments
I grew up as part of the last generation that can remember computers being something that only Scientists and Universities and Governments had – arcane hunks of metal with das blinkenlights and whirr-whirr-whirr tape drives and big, washing-machine sized magnetic disk drives (which held orders of magnitude less than your USB thumb drive does today). So while ARPANet/the Internet was born when I was considerably younger, I was part of the first generation who had the opportunity to see and operate a computer when we [ Continue reading... ]
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