About me - the open book!

[kseenaa]

Can I just say HOLY FUCKING SHIT IN THE OCEAN?!?!?!?! o.O Now I've been part of friending memes before, many times. But I've never EVER been a part of one that has taken off like this. My flist is BURSTING! Geezes, fuck! o.O

Excuse the language, but yeah... o.O Circling the wagon -friending meme rocked my socks off!

Anyway, so part of the deal was to make a post about myself, so here goes... I'll excuse my wordiness right away.

I'm called KSena online which is a name I got when I was active in the student union club Sexmasters (NO! No, it has nothing to do with sex, to 'sexa' is an old swedish word meaning to party. Hence the name 'partymasters'.) I was very active in the student union while studying and got my significant other out of it, peting73.

I studied Library and Information Science and even managed to write a national masters thesis at the end of it all, together with chigrima / Chigrima. Despite butting heads and struggling with that thing for a year, we’re still friends to this day, even if we don’t see each other that much.

I’ve had many jobs as a librarian and library assistant, but only temporary work, when someone was sick or while they did reorganizations at the library. Not that strange, since this city is the only one where you can study all the classes needed to get a masters thesis in Library and Information science, it's hard to get a job. There's just so many librarians here. :-)

These days I have my first proper job, that I think I’ll get to keep.

I work at a school that is a bit troubled with a lot of refugee kids with a lot of troubled memories or parents with troubled memories. And then there’s a bunch of kids hanging out with the wrong crowd, kids I’m afraid it won’t end well for. So those troubled kids, those I call the hooligans. They love to run in and try to trash the library or the lunch cafeteria as well. (Not to long after I’d started, they sent off huge fireworks INSIDE the lunch cafeteria… Great idea.)

Now, I want to point that not all kids are like this. This second run at his school I’ve only worked here since December, and there’s some seriously awesome kids here as well from all over the world with various ethnicity and it’s just really cool to work here. I learn something everyday, even if I do have to work my ass off. :-) I like it though.

Family wise, well… I have a little brother that I adore who has two kids who lives with him every other week since he is divorced. Ugly story there… He is a great father and I love him and admire him greatly.

I live with peting73 since 2004. Not married, but engaged and I he really is the love of my life. We have a daughter together, Alexandra. She’s 3½ years now and has a really Really REALLY strong will! *lol* I suffer from Endometriosis, so having a kid was not that easy. Had to go through IVF three times before Alexandra decided to join us. :-) Third time the charm! I am so so so grateful to have her in my life, even though I complain and swear over the crazy she pulls sometimes… Motherhood? ;-)

My mother is crazy and blunt and very caring and really has no filter what so ever. And I love her dearly. If anyone wonder why I’m so insanely blunt and honest and without a filter, I point to her, because yeah. That’s the reason. X-D I love her to death and am so grateful for the tough love upbring I got from her and my father. :-)

My father died 2003 from probable heart failure or lung failure. He was only 47 years old when he died. And had just had surgery to fix up his hips that was all worn out and giving him pain 24/7. Packing up to go home, he fell down dead. It happened within seconds, and no one could do anything about it. I miss him dearly, of course. But it’s not that crazy grief anymore. Just a dull loss, you know? Death is a part of life to, as my grandfather put it when I was little. As an adult I definitely get that.

OK so now when we got through all that… Fandoms? Oh lord… I could make a list. X-D

When I was just 13-15 years old I discovered Robin of Sherwood together with my best friend, and man… WE WERE HOOKED! This was before fandoms and computers and internet, but still we wrote fanfic (MARY SUE!!!) and did fanart wearing out the VHS tapes we had the series on. These days we’ve gifted the series to each other on DVD. :-)

At about the same time we discovered Elfquest, and I am still hooked to that comic to this day. No words. I really have no words… :-) Even sporting two tattoos inspired from said comic. :-)

Then I spent a year in the USA working as an aupair in an awesome family, which I sadly lost contact with. And that family were all fans of the same tv-show… Xena: The WarriorPrincess. :-D To say it rubbed off was an understatement. And at this point the internet existed and I discovered the wonderful world of fandoms. And fanfic. And fanart. I didn’t read regular slash back then, but exclusively femme slash. :-) Xena/Gabrielle ALL THE WAY!!!

Getting back ot Sweden, unemployment and then university… I re-discovered Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who I’d seen before but not paid much attention to. As a bored university student, I did. And discovered the HUGE fandom online (and LJ!). I was hooked. :-D Spike in any constellation is my yam in this fandom, preferably in a darkfic. ;-)

At the point where the third movie ended up on the big screen, I ended up in another fandom… Pirates of the Caribbean. It had such a vibrant lovely fandom with so many skilled cosplayers, I can’t even being… It’s still active although not so much on LJ anymore, sadly. I LOVE the three first movies still, hate the fourth, and is carefully optemistic about the fifth. My OT3 in this fandom is Will/Elisabeth/Jack, obviously. How can it not? ;-)

Then, by chance in a RL friends LJ, I stumbled upon an a picture of a young, very young, guitarist. Asking who it was I found out it was the guitarist of the band Tokio Hotel. No idea who this band was, I started to dig around online about them. And I was doomed. Now, I’d never been involved in any fandom that involved real people slash, but well… I am now. This is my main fandom right now, the one I am mostly active in. Reading fanfic, looking at fanart, discussing the band, listening to music... I run three communities for the fandom currently (check the links), but who knows it that will be more? Since those Tokio Hotel fans who leaves LJ seems to dump communities on me… I don’t mind, I just find it a bit funny. :-) Favorite members of the band is Gustav Schäfer, the drummer and Georg Listing, the bassist.

Lastly I was a little bit involved in the Sons of Anarchy fandom, but not that hugely. I do so very much love reading a well written fanfic in the fandom though, since they all tend to the darker side, not so surprising. Can you write a slash fic about a criminal biker-gang? Why, yes… Yes you can. :-) My favorite characters are Chibs and Juice. :-)

So when not hanging out with my family I am involved in a long running vampire LARP here in the city and has been since 2001. That LARP is older than that though. I’m also going to a postapocalyptic Fallout LARP every summer. I love doing roleplaying as well, with pen-paper-dice and online. LARP and roleplaying games are really my main hobbies. Keeps me young to since mostly my LARP-friends are way younger than me. :-)

Just don’t come talking sparkling vampires with me. I hate Hate HATE Twilight and it’s fanfic 50 Shades of Grey with a BURNING PASSION!!!! So if you enjoy the same, please don’t talk about them with me… I even tell kids I work with not to read them. I hate them that much...

And I… think that’s it. Props to you if you got through all that. Told you I was wordy! X-D

If you got any questions, I’ll be happy to answer. :-) I really am an open book.

This entry is crossposted between LJ and DW. Comment where you are comfortable.

Comments

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

Me and hubby used to do A LOT tabletop role playing games before we ended up parents. :-P Now we just don't have time, unfortunately. Hubby knows the rules to Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 by heart, and is a great GM. So we did a lot of that. We alos tried Vampire the Masquerade Dark Ages and the Deadlands role playing game. (I LOVED DEADLANDS!!!)

I hope we'll still have friends to play with when kiddo ends up older and we can easier hand her over to a babysitter. :-)

LARPing I've mostly just played Vampire The Masquerade Minds Eye Theater. The LARP I'm a member of has been going on since... 1997, 1998 or 1999. Quite a few of those who started it up then are still active players. :-) One of them a brilliant BRILLIANT GM, one of two. :-D Once we used to be 30-40 players, active once, but now we're down to 15-20. All ages though, which I think is awesome. Hubby is 43 and is the oldest one, and I'm 39. The youngest we have is 16 and we got all the ages in between basically. :-) A great LARP and I adore being a part of it.

Some friends from said LARP also started a yearly weekend-LARP based on the Fallout games. And man... That is FUN!!! I've been part of nearly all of them, except the summer I was HEAVILY pregnant and then gave birth. X-D Hard to be LARPing then. :-) Been a part of it since to. :-)

LARPing and role playing are such nerdy hobbies, but I've learned that in my line of work it's appreciated by both kids, teachers and rest of the staff to be a bit of a nerd with odd hobbies. :-D So I've only gotten positive responses, especially at the school I am at now. :-D

[the_rck]

I tried Vampire: the Dark Ages at a convention once and didn't really get into it. I think the nail in the coffin for my interaction with it was one of the writers boasting that they didn't do historical research (which I very much doubt). If I recall correctly, he said that he had once passed a history test entirely by reading the Ars Magica sourcebook and that that made him lose respect for the game. (Which is logic I really and truly do not follow.)

I played in a Mind's Eye Theater based LARP at one point that was a weekend long thing. Unfortunately, the folks who put it together didn't balance it very well (it was all pre-generated characters) or make sure that everyone had something to do.

What's needed for a one shot or weekend long LARP is very different from what's needed for an on-going campaign. For a one shot, giving each player the feeling that they're playing a central character is really key. In a campaign, people get the chance to build up connections and influence in a way that doesn't work in a short game.

I played in a single session of a Vampire LARP at one point, as a guest of one of the GMs but without a defined role. A couple of players were disappointed that I wasn't sticking around because I had ideas for ways for them to move their particular agendas forward. I wanted to get a feel for what a LARP campaign felt like because we were dealing with someone who really, really wanted to figure out how to make an In Nomine LARP (we tried but it's a poor fit for a LARP because it generally needs human characters as plot tokens without including anything that would make playing one at all fun).

I ran a single session LARP several times that adapted Vampire stuff to our home rules system. It worked, but I'm not sure it would work for a campaign at all, not without altering our base rules heavily (for the campaign aspect rather than for the Vampire aspect). I'm pretty sure that I wrote and put that game together simply to prove to myself that I could do it. The players all seemed to have fun, so I count it a success. I wouldn't want to do it again, though, because it's a lot easier to manage a game, both in preparation and running, when none of the characters have more than a handful of special abilities.

I'm always interested in trying different LARPS. I've played some very good ones and some real stinkers. There was one where one character's entire plot was that he had a headache and was pissed off about it. Which I take as an indication that the folks writing the game put in way more characters than they should have.

Some of our friends wrote a LARP as a wedding present for us. They ran it the day after our wedding (we didn't go on a honeymoon because we couldn't afford it). I thought that was the sweetest gift. They even specifically wrote me a character who couldn't die because, at that point, every LARP character I'd ever played had died before the end of the game. (That's in large part because I'm not that great as a player. I'm okay, but I'm not spectacular. When I started playing, I'd already written and run four games, so people assumed that I must know what I was doing when I played. It's a whole different skills set, and people kept giving me difficult characters.)

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

I wish I could keep up with your lovely worded long comments, I really do. And I feel horrible for writing you short answers.

Getting a costume made LARP as a wedding gift is REALLY cool! :-D Consideirng how many hours a GM always put down on a game (most often at least).

There's always good and bad LARP's out there. Such is life. I've tried bad ones to. And come to the conclusion that fantasy-LARP just isn't for me. :-)

[the_rck]

I babble sometimes. I also touch type at about 65 wpm. That makes going on and on a heck of a lot easier. When I'm commenting from my cell phone, I'm a lot terser.

I don't mind short answers. I worry sometimes, though, that I'm imposing by saying too much, so there is that.

My husband and I met at a LARP I had written and was running. We went to different universities in the same state. I had invited two friends of a friend from his school to the game, and they called the day before to ask if they could bring a friend. I'd had a player drop out just a day or three before, so I was very pleased to have an additional player.

People tried to set us up around that time, but neither of us were interested. We came together a couple of years later, independently. The friends who'd originally tried to set us up kind of freaked out at that point. ::laughs::

In terms of one shot LARPs, I've seen games go badly in two different ways. One is with broken game mechanics, and one is with poor writing/plotting. Broken game mechanics are easier to overcome, IMO.

When you say 'fantasy-LARP,' do you mean the kind of game with boffers or other simulated combat? Or something else?

Also, have you watched the webseries called LARPs? I'm pretty sure it's by Geek & Sundry. Scott showed it to me a month or two ago, and we had a lot of fun with it. The story, both the campaign story and the out of character story, is enjoyable.

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

You type at 65wpm?!??! Wow... I willa dmit I feel horrible for typing shorter answers than the once I receive. :-P I'm silly that way, I suppose. :-)

LARP is far more a social hobby than a lot of people give it credit for. :-) Sure, we're nerds, but we're not the weirdos people not in the hobby thinks. Kinda romantic how you meet through LARP like that. I have a lot of friends that have done the same. When we were younger, there were a lot of drama with couples and changing boyfriends left and right and does not being faithful and... and... The list got on. But we've grown older and wiser now, I guess. :-)

I agree. Broken game mechanics are always always easier to overcome. Broken story and broken plot, that's nearly impossible to overcome, according to me.

No, not boffer and such. Never much into that, even though some sort of fake-fighting always give some spicing to a LARP. I meant LARP that is set in a fantasy-setting. Like Lord of the rings or something close to it. I've done vampire LARP for years and that's in a modern setting. And I've gone to a post apocalyptic LARP every year for six yers. :-)

I'll make sure to check out the LARPs webseries. :-D Looks like it could be fun!

[the_rck]

When I was in high school in the early 1980s, a semester of typing was a pre-requisite for taking computer programming, so a lot of kids took typing who wouldn't have otherwise. At that point, every single typo required the use of an eraser, so making mistakes really cut down one's speed, and uncorrected typos were subtracted from one's speed score anyway. Typing that way, I don't think I ever got past 35 wpm, but using a computer is different because of the ease of correction.

My daughter's elementary school tries, in a half-hearted way, to teach the kids how to touch type, but they get maybe ten minutes a week of that and not necessarily every week. It's taught as part of their weekly library time, but so is the use of an assortment of computer programs and resources. The skill is more useful now than it was when I was her age, but it's harder to find it taught.

[kseenaa.livejournal.com]

Same thing mid 1990's. But it was something we could pick and learn if we wanted to. I hope I get the chance to learn my kid when that day comes. :-P

It seems like it's a skill not many care about these days. A shame really.