Dracos and Otter
Playground

What's going on here?
Who's Responsible for this travesty?
What in the world is this stuff?

Who?

That would be me, Liana M. Winsauer. If you want to contact me, try e-mailing the username otter42, and put an gmail.com after the “at” sign. And make sure you use a subject line that makes some sense, or the garbage filters are likely to catch and dispose of it. That e-mail address already gets enough spam, etc., that I suppose it doesn't do much to try to obfuscate my address, but I can try.

Why?

Why not? I was messing around trying to learn html for some other reasons, and I had some random silly bits. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

What is this stuff???

Like I said, silly bits. If I write anything well, it would be humor. That, of course, then being the cue for me to write something terribly non-fictional to put out (the Opinionated Seamstress). But still mostly silly bits!

Yes, the language in some of the things can be pretty dense. Although I incline to run-on sentences, any Lovecraftian and/or Victorianesque language, archaic and British spellings, and miscellaneous tortured constructions are intentional. Misspellings and other typographic errors are not.

The original (dead tree) expeditionary records were written as if published in the “National Geographic” magazine, but I didn't want to find out how much of a sense of humor the NGS lawyers have. So, I changed the National Geographic references to “The Journal of Geek Studies”, and then ran with the journal idea when putting together the rest of the pages.

The original expeditionary records were done at about the time the pictures were taken with my Minolta Weathermatic-A 110 camera. That should date it far enough back in history for anybody besides the people that can make an accurate temporal placement, thankyouverymuch. Spatially, the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan, a mine tailing pile about 400 ft tall near Portage, Wadsworth Hall at MTU, and Hungarian Falls.

I think the only pieces that really require any explanation are the "Palladium Era " history pieces.

Once upon a time my husband was going to run a Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game (like D&D, but better), and I rolled up a wolfen (9 foot tall humanoid canine race) pirate as a character. My husband asked for a little character background. He expected a short paragraph, maybe two. I've never been a get-a-life gamer with long, detailed, fussy character histories . . .

Apparently I was bored the day I sat down to write it up. Not only did Dallas take on a life of her own; a historian, Hrrul, emerged. I ended up having to create Hrrul as a playable character, too. There is/was a third piece, where I discussed how hard it was to do research into the “Palladium Era”, but I realized it was just bad. AFAIK it went to the bit-bucket and is no more.

Y'know, we never did play that game.

I think the Techi-Nerdus piece is probably the best writing I've ever done. It was such fun skewering all the different geeky types. I can't remember what the genesis for it was, but once I got on a roll it pretty much wrote itself.

And before anyone gets in a snit, I'm a geek too. Lurker with the occasional Core Dump.

No, I don't have a Blog, LiveJournal, or any other narcissistic billboard claptrap. Oops, I guess I do. Two of them, actually. Those would be my personal blog, and Otter Necessities' blog. But I'm still not a Twit or on Facebook.


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