DEDICATED GEEK MASTERS

One of my Facebook friends, a sound rational mature individual, whose ideas are very largely in the correct territory, revealed himself as a tortured soul in his youth. Someone with a rich inner life, and, at that time, unwashed friends.

Cite:
"The ongoing study cleanout just unearthed something else long forgotten - the 8000 year history timeline I wrote out for my D&D campaign that I ran when I was 16. Holy carp.
The penciled lettering on this is about 2mm high in places."
End cite.

I myself have never engaged in Dungeons and Dragons. That was entirely the realm of out-of-shape programmers and engineers in the lab. For the most acne-tortured soul among them, it was his sole raison d'etre in life.

He continued:
"My stack of notebooks and hand-written history, country profiles, deities, magic, lore, etc... fills a box the size of a footstool, top to bottom."
End cite.

The subcultural community responded. Here are comments, with the names of the obsessive weirdos changed for safety.

Fledermaus: "I never took notes. It's gone. All gone."

Certifiable female of the species: "My husband [-] was the same way. He took extensive notes, made elaborate maps, created entire worldscapes. It was as much fun to him as the actual game, maybe more so."

First person: "Yeah, I loved writing all the lore and the stories. The problem was that you had to have players and they ruined everything."

Another female of the species: "That was just what I was sitting here thinking. He'd have some well thought out campaign and we'd trash it like the stone age barbarians we were. :D "

Someone else: "Gleefully. My out of my mad brain via my ass prevented such a thing."


Somewhere among his friends are Gandalf and a bunch of trekkies, I bet.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I myself read tonnes of Fantasy and Science Fiction as a teenager -- my mother was a published author in those genres -- and in my adolescence I drew up plans for a rational world-government; a three inch thick tome. All of the edits, annotations, codicils, and inserts, made it more than unreadable within a few months. It was, not surprisingly, filled with paragraphs in formal Dutch, English, and really bad Anglo-saxon. As well as Indonesian, Tamarao, and bits and pieces of fractured Atjenese and Javan. Some of it was in cyphers of my own devising, some of it in code.

No, I did not have a troubled childhood. I had discovered coffee.
Plus, a few years later, pipe tobacco.

Caffeine, nicotine, and highly refined sugar.

It wasn't an obsession, it's just that if everyday you add two or three pages, before you know it, the damned thing has grown to over a thousand sheets.
I should mention that at the time I had three distinct forms of handwriting, and was already using excessively neat, print-like, blocklettering.
Plus editorial marks.

Trashed the whole thing when I was fifteen.
I had grown up by then.

My rear-pocket notebooks, of which there were dozens when I returned to the United States, were dumped in the garbage years ago.
Darn good thing, too.

In the present age, there are over twenty large wide-ruled notebooks in my living quarters with notes, stories, and dictionary entries for several Malayo-Polynesian cultures and languages. As well as Indian and Indonesian food and recipes. Plus a similar number of small breast pocket notebooks filled with micrographic lettering.

Oh and Seal Script (篆書) as well as Stone Drum script and similar archaic writing. Practice sheets, notes. Designs for carved seals.

Somewhere along the line I went from potential universal teen dictator to amateurish linguist, philologist, and social anthropologist.
It's many years later, and I can free-text narrate parts of the Mahabharata as I know it, plus tales of ghosts and pontianaks in the Malay archipelago. As well as some Chinese verse, plus further Asian stuff.

So I can indeed respect ex-Dungeons and Dragons geeks. The brain is a tool, as well as a caged monkey. It must be fed, and it must fling poo.
Like parrots and cats, it develops neuroses if left unattended.

To quote Dr. Frankenstein: "It's alive, alive!"


Some people fill their spare time with fantasy baseball.
It takes up many hours after midnight.
Okay then .....




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