Because I'm getting bored waiting for Disaster Services to call me back...

[camwyn]

"This is the problem with LJ, we all think we are so close, and we know nothing about each other. I'm going to fix it. I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you."

Comments

[kitanzi.livejournal.com]

Um, how about why are you waiting for Disaster Services to call you back? (I looked, thinking I must have missed something obvious, and I don't see you mentioning anything that would explain it.)

[camwyn]

Oh, I forgot to post about that. I work at a Red Cross chapter in northern New Jersey, about an hour and a half from Burlington, where we had twelve dams burst in a single day because of the, er, thirteen inches of rain that fell in the course of said day. Disaster Services is trying to decide if I have all the right paperwork to satisfy them and drive down there to do volunteer work- I'm happy to serve in either disaster computer operations, mass care, or damage assessment, since I have certifications in all of those and you'd be surprised how many geeks are needed to keep track of a disaster job's expenditures. And at how very, very few geeks there are in the Red Cross. We need more.

So now I'm waiting to see if they think I've given them all the forms from my doctor and from J. Random Nurse (since a doctor's signature alone isn't enough to clear me for duty in their eyes- god forbid a mere MD should ever issue a statement on someone's fitness for service!), or if I have to fax them more, or what.

yeesh. I love my organization and I love my work but the bureaucratic foo... my brain, the goggles, they do nothing...

[talmanes.livejournal.com]

Would you rather be loved or feared by the masses?

[camwyn]

Going to have to go with loved. While you can get a certain level of obedience out of fear, eventually it wears thin. Plus, you have to keep doing terrible things- more terrible each time- if you want to maintain it, and I just don't have it in me to be the ever-heavier boot on the necks of the human race, forever. I'd rather have the masses love me. It might be scary at times, but it's easier to deal with.

ClassicDrogn loves the chunes

[(Anonymous)]

What's your favorite sort of music?

Since I don't keep an LJ for you to return the favor, I'll note that mine is 70s-80s rock, in the metal and punk descended forms. Very little of what I listen to is newer than that, and most of what is, is keeping that sound alive in the new millenium. One noteable excepotion to thast is _Son of Rust_ who do balladic rock with electronica instrumentation, mainly about digital life, humans becoming machine, or machines becoming human. They have an album's worth of mp3s on their official website if anyone feels like checking them out.

- CD

Re: ClassicDrogn loves the chunes

[camwyn]

Oh, I'll listen to nearly anything. I have a preference for odd but still mainstreamish 80's pop and a small but respectable collection of world music- Mongolian mostly, some other stuff. Quite a lot of Sting, Billy Joel, Genesis, and Peter Gabriel in my MP3 collection, and the humour section is a bit larger than most, I think (thanks largely to my tendency to buy music that causes friends of mine to demand of the Universe, "Why did I quit drinking?").

I've got a recording of "Highway to Hell" being sung in Ukrainian and accompanied by accordions, another recording of a bunch of Finns singing "Sweet Home Alabama" in English with the Alexandrov Red Army Chorus backing them up, punk covers of "Mandy" and "One Tin Soldier", and another cover of a small band from Alberta singing "If I Were A Rich Man". I'm quite proud that I did not get these from anywhere like the When Pigs Fly cd, although I did fancy the Oak Ridge Boys' recording of "Carry On Wayward Son". Thought it was better than what Kansas did originally.

Re: ClassicDrogn loves the chunes

[kali921.livejournal.com]

Finns!

Do you like Apocalyptica?

Re: ClassicDrogn loves the chunes

[camwyn]

Haven't heard 'em, sadly. The Finns of whom I speak are the Leningrad Cowboys.

Re: ClassicDrogn loves the chunes

[traveller-blues.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* (checking his shelf at work)

Sting. Genesis. Babylon 5 soundtrack. Enya.

(checking shelf at home)
Peter Gabriel. Eurythmics. The Bobs.

And you need to hear P.M. Dawn covering 'Once In A Lifetime.' *nod*

-Traveller

Re: ClassicDrogn loves the chunes

[camwyn]

My copy of the B5 soundtrack is at work. For some reason it induces skipping fits in the CD player when it hits track 8. I've got the Tenchi Muyo soundtrack, which has the same composer- also decent stuff.

[genarti]

When and/or why did you first fall in love with Canada?

[camwyn]

"Alas, the first thing you ask me, I cannot tell you..."

Mostly because I don't know. I know that I first got a sense of Canada being Fecking Impressive when I was in fifth grade, and we were asked to take a magic marker and outline the Mackenzie River and all its tributaries on a laminated map. My partner and I wound up tracing EVERY. SINGLE. RIVER. that fed into the Mackenzie anywhere; we took three times as long as anyone else and wound up with a map that looked more like a chart of the circulation in a human kidney. But that wasn't enough for falling in love. That was just a case of "whoa, dude" about the place.

I know that I had some interest in it when I heard my great-grandmother worked there a few years, then illegally immigrated into the States. But that wasn't it either. It may have had some roots in the time in high school when we were taught that the Ohio River valley was nearly given over to British Canada as part of the French and Indian (Seven Years') War settlement, but the various people involved opted against it. The idea of an alternate history that extreme intrigued me.

I got interested in the country seriously ... oh, I think in 1999... when I bought my Saturn and realised I could drive to an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT COUNTRY and back without much trouble. ID was gathered and an excuse found (a folklore festival I never did locate), and I drove to Toronto and met some of my online friends for the first time, including mountainspeak. It was a very peculiar feeling, being Foreign in a country so like my own. Come 2000, I visited Vancouver Island and was absolutely bowled over by the gorgeousness. By then I'd acquired more Canadian friends, and just to avoid sounding like a Dumbass American when I talked to them, I set myself to learning about the country properly. I mean, yeah, I was already ahead of the game because I could name all the provinces and territories and knew they didn't live in igloos or drive dogsleds all year, but still.

Somewhere in the process of learning, I got sucked in, and I haven't looked back since.

[thekit.livejournal.com]

Were you going to visit folklorama (http://www.folklorama.ca/)?

Sorry for not introducing myself earlier. I became a big fan of yours when you published your ENTIRE SILMARILLION OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN IN ONE THOUSAND WORDS. (http://www.livejournal.com/users/camwyn/328358.html)

[camwyn]

No, this was something happening the last few days of January or February. I remember that pretty clearly because it was my first visit to Canada ever and what little snow was on the ground was busily melting itself into oblivion apparently specially to spite me.

[traveller-blues.livejournal.com]

Odd question: What's your relationship status these days?

Single/Spoken for?
Looking/Not Looking?

-Traveller

[camwyn]

Spoken for, not looking.

[faeriethistle.livejournal.com]

your writing is superb. i look forward to your fic as much as my favorite authors. when did you become interested in writing and what/who has helped you along the way? any suggestions for wannabes?
and as long as we are at it, who are you favorite authors and what are your favorite books?

[camwyn]

Oh, gosh. I think I started to get the idea that writing might be interesting when I was in about ... oh, third grade, really. Maybe fourth. We had something very like a forensics competition in the local public schools- a storytelling contest- and we had to memorise the stories and deliver them rather than produce a new one. Still, the idea that I might get to make up the stories was there. When I got to seventh or eighth grade, I forget which, Stephen King came out with The Eyes Of The Dragon. Everyone in my class had been reading his horror books for some months- it was a big fad at my school- and at the time I was appalled that he'd turn away from writing horror. (I hadn't read The Eyes of the Dragon yet, so I didn't know it was so damn good.) I decided I'd try to make up for the loss.

We will now pause while the very Earth Herself quakes with laughter at the prospect.

Anyway, that didn't work out so well, esp. since I was in Catholic school and was easily overwhelmed with guilt at the prospect of writing a story whose entire point was 'everyone in the class dies horribly except for one or two kids who figure out what the Supernatural Menace is all about, namely, the teachers'. But I'd already been bitten by the writing bug and it was really just a matter of changing topics to something I could handle better- crap-tacular science fiction at first, and better SF and fantasy later on.

As for who/what, I've had good teachers. The ones in high school encouraged me heartily. I've had people who were willing to read my stuff, both when it was crap and when it got better. I've had inspirations- I remember very clearly watching Blazing Saddles for the first time and thinking, 'God, I'd love to be the person who wrote that!'. I wanted to be able to claim credit for a story that was just as much adventure and excitement as laugh-out-loud humour, and I think some of that's leaked through into the fanfic I write. If I'm very lucky it'll leak into the original stuff I do as well. What's really helped has been reading a lot a LOT of other people's books and learning from them what I like, and what makes my teeth set on edge. Knowing the kinds of stories you want to see more of is vital to writing them.

As for my favourite authors, Terry Pratchett's very high on the list. So's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Arthur C. Clarke has generally had the power to make me happy, especially with his short stories, though I wouldn't touch the Rama sequels with a ten-meter cattle prod. And, well, Tolkien. But then, I'm the kind of person who willingly slogged through all six or seven volumes of the Histories of Middle-earth that had been published whenI was in high school. I LIKE the boring bits of the Silmarillion. Mercedes Lackey, too, though I've never read any of the Valdemar books- I liked her Elemental Masters series and her Diana Tregarde books. I happily absorbed a lot of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover novels and The Mists of Avalon, but eventually a number of the themes wore very thin indeed- still they were great for a first or second go. And, naturally, these days there's JK Rowling, but I think you knew that.

I'm really exceedingly fond, however, of Barry Hughart's Master Li and Number Ten Ox novels, and I was exceedingly happy to get my hands on good translations of Outlaws of the Marsh and Journey to the West. Those two are classics of Chinese literature. I don't advise reading Outlaws of the Marsh and then watching any Westerns- my grandmother was watching Bonanza when I read it, and I remember thinking that the people in Bonanza just couldn't measure up to the Chinese outlaw heroes. Oh, well, too bad for them.

jumping in late on this one

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

The dreaded religion question - how were you raised, and what do you believe in now?

Re: jumping in late on this one

[camwyn]

Born, baptized, and raised Roman Catholic, and confirmed, too- my Confirmation name is 'Romero', after the archbishop of El Salvador. I believe that there is a God who created the Universe ab nihilo, and that this God loves us and is fascinated by the world this God has made; I believe that details about this God's gender, nature, etc. are really rather moot, since the whole point of being God is that you're beyond the limitations of little things like physical form and human language. I believe the Universe was created and allowed to unfold along comprehensible lines and laws that might someday be understood by organisms dwelling with in it, should they put forth enough effort over enough lifetimes to gather all they needed to know and comprehend it all. I believe that all human beings have souls, and that all human beings are fallible, and that Original Sin is not a sin at all but instead the only comprehensible face the early Church could put on the natural tendency of all matter and energy to succumb to entropy. I believe that when God acts in the physical world it is in ways that interfere with free will as little as possible- that God did in fact direct the development of the unfolding Universe with the intent of one day bringing ensouled, sentient, intelligent beings into existence, but that this was done over billions of years through the deliberate observation and alteration of staggeringly tiny things like the paths of subatomic particles. I believe that pain is a part of physical existence, a sign that something is not right, and that it is allowed to happen because otherwise nothing we or other sentient beings do has any meaning. I also believe that this sucks, but that if I really understood why suffering existed I would also understand how to fix it, and that as a participant in a world filled with suffering it would be my responsibility to fix it whereever I could.

I do not believe in the Devil. Evil is what happens when intelligence is applied to the task of undoing; bad things are perfectly capable of happening without the interference of a supernatural intelligence attempting to bring about the heat-death of the Universe, and evil things are perfectly capable of happening with nothing more than human minds to make them be.

I believe that the teachings of Yeshua bin Miryam as relayed in the four canonical Gospels - or at least in the three Synoptic Gospels, since John makes my teeth ache - are sound and wholesome, and are the words of someone speaking for God as he knew God to be. They are also the words of someone who was living in Roman-occupied Palestine and was influenced by his environment. They are also the words of the copyists, scribes, and followers who came in the years after the original speaker, and while they were inspired by a God who wants sentient beings to be free and happy and love one another, they were of necessity subject to the failings of human beings, and thus can never be completely accurate. Human language puts limitations on concepts by its very nature- to communicate in an unlimited way requires mind-to-mind telepathy at the very least.

I believe that there are other paths and other ways to understanding and truth, and that it would be wrong to force someone to say they believed mine- or any other particular path. I believe that some ways and rules are better than others, both for the believer and for the world around them, and believe that it is good to share these ways with others. HOWEVER, I believe that the best way to do so is through one's deeds and actions. Words mean very little in the end. It is more important to love other people and act on that love, and to love the world around me and act on that love, than it is to say that I love or to say why it is that I love.

And I believe that it's really smegging stupid to put restrictions on someone's ability to serve the people of the Church based on whether they've got dangly bits or not.