"We're not just Ubergeeks, we're the *Ubermenschen* of the New World Order. We eat new O'Reilly books for breakfast and that's not even the main course. We can quote entire Shakespearian tragedies from memory, we know how to perform quadruple bypass surgery and we can go from zero to sixty in one point two seconds. We are the KINGS, the BOSSES, we eat the world for breakfast and spew it back up because WE DON'T LIKE THE TASTE. We're hypersonic, wired, fired up, plugged in, chilled out, locked in and WE LIKE IT THAT WAY. Nobody messes with us because we have more guns than Elvis and more knives than a cutlery factory, and even if we didn't, we could whip Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and Jet Li with BOTH hands tied behind our backs. We're not scared of the world, because the WORLD IS SCARED OF US." --Fire

Liralen Li (Phyllis Rostykus)

I'm not sure where I first met Liralen, but it was probably through Carl Rigney, whose name you will see mentioned repeatedly in these pages. Even though she is married and lives a thousand kilometers away, I still think Liralen is the coolest person ever to exist, which is why she gets listed first here. I know that she codes, writes, spins, knits, plays soccer, repairs Land Rovers, and games; so far as I know, she can do anything.

Ayse, the Dark Goddess of Snide (Cera Kruger)

Behold the Ayse, the most marvelous Ayse to ever stalk the Internet. There have been other ayses, but none of them can match the rapier wit, the shining intellect, or the beautiful brownness of this, the One True Ayse. Fear the Ayse, praise the Ayse, worship the Ayse, ALL HAIL THE AYSE.

Kit (Murphy)

Kit is regrettably married (well, okay, she doesn't regret it), but I adore her excessively anyway. She must like me, because she wears all the descs that I write for her no matter how embarrassing they are.

Marith (Margaret X)

Marith is my very best sister, even if she didn't appreciate the glow-in-the-dark plastic cockroach I gave her. She dyes silk as well as herself, hugs me when I florn, and lets me tease her unmercifully, which is really all you can ask of a sister.

Gretchen, the Light Goddess of Snide (Shanrock-Solberg)

I did not actually go to school with Gretchen, unlike most of the other people here who are near my age. I have MUDded extensively with her, however, and competed viciously for connect time when her and Brad and Chrisber and I all lived together in Santa Cruz. Gretchen is rabid, and her hair is to be feared.

Garrett (Bryant Durrell)

Bryant is another person I didn't go to school with, since he went to some outdated university on That Other Coast. I knew him over the net for a quite a while before ending up crashing on his living room floor in Santa Cruz when we were both quasi-employed bums. Somehow we ended up with jobs at Netcom, and the rest is history. Or something like that.

Chrisber

When I was a frosh at Caltech, I fell in with bad company, who led me into spending all my time playing Champions and hanging out with upperclassmen. Chrisber was one of them. After I helped strand Chrisber in Santa Cruz without a car, a job, or a life, he still voted to let me into the house, which only goes to show something or other.

Rachel Gollub

Although I met Rachel at Tech, I can't say that I really knew her until we both had lives. Now I get invited to her birthday parties, and she doesn't seem to be embarrassed when I actually show up. It is at least half Rachel's fault that I started taking karate.

Teleute (Linnea Lortsher)

For a long time, I had to take it on faith that Linnea existed; after all, if she didn't, who brought all the Die Siedler expansions and chocolate from Germany? Then, in one of those coincidences that demonstrates the existance of the Illuminati, she got hired on at the company I was being rented to, so I could confirm she existed at that time, but she subsequently disappeared again and was again hypothetical until the fall of 2007, when I encountered her on the street. Those two data points obviously form a straight line of continual existence. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Angie (Clough)

Angie glitters. All the time. If you stand too close to her, you will glitter too. Or perhaps have anime posters taped to you.

Xandra (Chrysoula Tzavelas)

I'm still not sure how Xandra ended up here instead of trapped at school in Minnesota, but nevertheless she is here, and has an apartment and a job, and plenty of gaming and a career-like object.

Dave Flowers

Yet more bad company. Dave was the last of the people I hung out with extensively at Tech to move north, but finally the lack of gaming in LA dislodged him from his cushy university sysadmin job at Tech into a similar one at Stanford.

Christy Young

A good egg. Chrisber's good egg, in fact, and responsible for luring him away from Temple Square to a nest in the wilds of southern Mountain View.

Chris (Siebenmann)

Chris is also one of those university sysadmin types, but he lives in Toronto and I have only met him in person twice. He has a very fine home page, though, and doesn't make fun of my GMing, so he gets a place here.

Zonker (Regis Donovan)

The one time I met Regis in person, she took me to her dojo and had a bunch of women help her beat me up, which is certainly as much as I could ask of any friend.

Ambar

Ambar sometimes tries to make people think she isn't scary, but no one believes her.

Alexei (Bill Stivers)

I worked graveyard shift with Bill for several months at Netcom, which may explain some things. Still, there's nothing to cheer you up after a bad call at 04:00 like a rant in Bill's trademark colorful imagery.

Fire (Chris Page)

Fire is taller and thinner than me, and gets paid more and has better hair and a fast sports car and a gorgeous girlfriend, but who else would I go shooting with at 22:00 on a Tuesday night?

hegemony (Tara Lynch)

hegemony Frog-Bringer, Mistress of Flannel, owner of the other half of Ayse and Marith's brain. Her totem animal is the hedgehog.

R Sean Borgstrom

Sean is by far the best writer and the strangest and most interesting person I know. She is the world-reknowned author of Nobilis, which is the strangest and best-written RPG ever.

Maya (Genevieve Cogman)

I don't actually know Maya all that well, but she likes Hong Kong movies, and put me on her pages, which is good enough for me.

Merlin (Earl Miles)

Merlin would like everyone to know that he tastes good in fondue and barbecues well. (We think there may be a bug in the alien-to-Silicon Valley translator.)

Harold Zatz

Harold is another Techer, who, among other accomplishments like animating things no one ever notices in movies, managed to get a job developing cool software AND get his company to pay for a network connection so that he could live nextdoor to his friends in Palo Alto and work in LA, which was a pretty good scam, but he has finally escaped the Southern Wastes and now works somewhere doing something with code.

Al Petterson

Very bad company indeed. Al has never spared any effort to be a bad example to the frosh, even going so far as to get a job, graduate, marry someone both gorgeous and keen, buy a house, and start raising a family. But he still games, so it's okay. Al is equivalent to Liralen, which apparently comes as no surprise to his wife.

Cyrano (Chuck)

Cyrano appears to be some other kind of geek entirely, but he turned me on to Hellboy, which is way cool.

Adam Janin

After a traumatic foray into the depths of industry, Adam has returned to California and become a grad student of indeterminate duration at Berkeley, working on those computer things that are all the fad nowadays.

Eldrik (Bruce Lysik)

Bruce begged me to link to him so his page will show up higher on search engines. Since he gave me rides to work every day for like a year, it seemed fair.

Aberdeen (Emily Poole)

Emily has more patience than any eleventeen other people. You can tell, because she works for a school district, with emotionally disturbed 7th-graders, and hasn't gone insane yet. (Unless you count moving to Alaska as an insane act, but she hasn't done it yet!)

Dr Earl Hubbell

When I was younger, I wanted to grow up to be just like Earl, but now I just want his brain. Although technically he falls into the category of Bad Company I Fell Into In My Youth, he let me crash on his floor for half a year when I had no job, which was pretty swell of him. Until recently he was imprisoned in the bowels of LA, but eventually he managed to bludgeon the guards senseless with his thesis and make his daring escape, love interest in tow! Or something like that.

Carl Rigney

If you ever have the chance to game with Carl, do it. He is a GM of surpassing skill, who can make even Shadowrun fun. And he has good music.

Doctor Jeremy Gollub

"There's only so many times you can get kicked in the head and still call yourself a biophysicist."

Genista (Susannah Gort)

Geni is the Cutest Hedgehog Ever, but now sadly she has moved to the Netherlands, only four hundred seventy-eight steps ahead of the INS.

Brad Shanrock-Solberg

Brad has tamed the fearsome Gretchenhair, by being too sensible and practical for it to devour. He is also the Pre-eminent Guru of the ECNG.

Sherilyn Petterson

Remember what I said about who Al married? This is her.

Jim Murdoch

Jim is laid-back, and has cats. Sometimes, he cosplays as a Space Pimp.

Lynx (Conrad Wong)

I knew Lynx long long ago, when MUDs were young. Then I didn't know him for a long time. Now I know him again.

Ken Shields

Ken is a new acquaintance, but since he is now ENGAGED to Ayse, I guess he'll be sticking around to game with us.

Ray Wood

There's certainly something to be said for anyone who runs a game about 8th grader werewolves using Torg rules.

Squire (Bernie Hsiung)

Now that Earl has moved to LA to be a grad slave, Bernie is the person deemed most likely to be controlling the population of Temple Square with evil mind powers. He keeps people's brains in jars in his basement, which is quite a trick in an apartment in California.

Kael Loftus

Kael has been working at Netcom for five or thirty or ten thousand years, and is not dead, institutionalized, or imprisoned, which speaks highly of his strength of character, if not his good sense.

JHart (John Hart)

Every time JHart uses his superpowers to avoid certain death, he grows about a centimeter. He handles money only as a bow to absolute necessity, and is a tactical, strategic, and logistical genius. He oscillates between Arizona and the Bay Area, with a non-negligible probability density in other places containing eligible women. So far, none of them have agreed to spawn with him. The human race may yet survive.

CZR (William Cesarotti)

CZR may be a degenerate, but he's our degenerate.

Bruce (Woodcock)

I don't know that I'm all that fond of Bruce; he can be pretty damn annoying at frequent intervals. But he is amazingly snide, and he did get me a job when I really really needed one, which was awfully nice of him.

This file was last modified at 1216 on 09Sep07 by trip@idiom.com.