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metahacker
1. You and your husband have, shall we say, very different visibility online. How did this come about?
I think we have comparable visibility on mailing lists (of which there seem to be fewer and fewer each year as everybody moves to Facebook or something), but the rest is different. He had more visibility than I did on Usenet, I think (he hung out a lot in rec.arts.comics.* and rec.arts.sf.* in particular), but the spammers chased both of us away from Usenet years ago and now I'm more visible than he is largely because of LJ. (Also, a little, because I discovered the web in 1993 and was maintaining sites back when that was new and different.)
I didn't set out to create a journal or blog. I signed up with LJ because the GM of our D&D game thought it would be a good supplement to the game. (I had not previously heard of LJ.) Dani and I were both in the game; I created an account and he didn't. Once I had an account and a few friends it seemed silly not to do something with it. It was 2001 and this aspect of the web was new to me. (I also filled up the game journal with in-character writing. That was fun!)
The difference between Usenet (et al) and LJ (et al) is that the first is topic-oriented and the second is person-oriented. You go to rec.arts.comics to talk about comics, and were Usenet still viable I think Dani would still be doing that. (I would too, though not for comics.) I've never asked him about it, but I suspect Dani is uncomfortable writing about himself, while I am naturally introspective and I enjoy writing in general. I remember thinking, when starting to use LJ, that it was pretty unlikely that many people would be interested in subscribing to, essentially, alt.fan.cellio, but I was wrong. (And it goes in both directions, of course; there are people I enjoy following to whom I have no other connection, too.)
Looking back on my Usenet usage I now recognize the very early stages of "alt.fan.somebody"; I had implemented filtering that would kill some topics, always offer others... and, regardless of the former, always show me articles by certain people. Some of them now have blogs or journals that I can follow instead. :-)
2. What instrument have you always wanted to try? What one would you love to be awesome at?
I have long wanted to learn bowed strings -- viola da gamba, cello, etc. I love the rich tones and the emotion a good player can convey. (I find myself more attracted to lower-pitched instruments than, say, violin or fiddle.) The only bowed instrument I've ever played is the bowed psaltery, which is, um, not in the same class.
The instrument I would like to be awesome at is guitar, because skill in guitar opens many doors -- filk/bardic circles, folk song sessions, random jamming, etc. It's a very practical instrument and I absolutely do not have the right kind of brain to learn it conventionally. So if somebody's waving magic wands, I'd take guitar.
3. The obligatory house question: what led you to bring one to Pennsic?
I fell in love with Baroness Megan's little house, and I thought it would be Very Cool, and I really hate camping. Ok, not that what most of us do at Pennsic is really camping, but... So when I found out that the Coopers would let anybody build and store houses, not just merchants as I had thought, the gears started turning.
It's actually harder to maintain and set up than I had thought it would be -- yes, it's a house, after all, but I still thought it would be easier -- but our camp gets a lot of benefit from its presence and camp-mates with the right skills and muscles are willing to help, so it's worked out.
4. Which sequel-less book do you wish there was a sequel to? What would happen in it?
And now we come to the question that stumped me and led to these questions sitting around gathering dust for so long. :-)
I can't think of one. I can think of lots of books where I wanted sequels and the authors provided them, and I can think of lots of books that were satisfyingly complete in one volume so I don't crave sequels, and of course I can think of many series where the authors should have stopped writing sequels long before they did (if they did). But I can't come up with a single book that fits the criteria of this question. I even browsed our SF library looking for inspiration and came up empty. So sorry.
What's odd is that I can think of several TV shows where I wanted another season (after one or less than one), and I think of TV seasons as being kind of analogous to books. I don't know why there's that difference.
5. The workers have just finished installing the new MonoPortal in the basement, but you still haven't figured out where to select for its permanent destination. Where would you like to be able to teleport to on a daily basis?
(Psst. If it's bidirectional, as I assume it must be if I'm to get home, then it's not in the basement. In the detatched garage would be fine. Hey, I've read Larry Niven's teleportation stories. :-) )
Boston. Or maybe I mean Newton Center or perhaps Brookline; I'm not sure. To more precisely place it I'd need to do some local research.
In the nearer term, if I could commute that easily then I could attend classes at Hebrew College, which could be enough to kick-start me into acquiring the prerequisites. (As a practical matter, I might try to delay MonoPortal configuration until I knew whether I would be accepted as a student...) But more broadly, and longer-term too, I have a lot of friends in and around Boston who I almost never get to see because it's too far away to be practical, so assuming I could locate the MonoPortal for reasonable transportation access, this would be a great way to solve that problem. (I don't know whether "reasonable transportation access" means conquering my fear of driving in Boston or getting used to longer trips (via T) than I am used to from driving in Pittsburgh.)
no subject
*nod* And then LJ has communities, which bring us back to the topic-oriented again, although they are not exactly the same as the old Usenet days.
Man, if you could telecommute to Boston that would be SO AWESOME. I squeaked with joy on reading that!