eddyfate

My Work Desktop Apparently right now it's the thing to do to post a screenshot of your desktop. Here's the current desktop I have at work (they rotate about once an hour).

I've been tagged by Sam Chupp to do this, posting sixteen random things about myself. Normally I don't blindly respond to these, but I have done 100 random things about me before, and I haven't updated it in a while. So, I decided to use the opportunity to pare it down and offer a new version of it.

1. My name is Eddy, not Eddie. I started spelling it that way because I hated the “ie” part back in early grade school, and my mom spelled it that way once, so I kept it. I’ve since found out that it’s not an uncommon spelling, but people still get it wrong.

2. I once was offered an opportunity to run guns. I turned it down.

3. I lived effectively destitute for three months in Akron, Ohio in the summer of 1994. I was on academic probation with the University of Akron, and lived in a house with five other people. I had to walk 45 minutes to work and back (McDonald’s), and mine was one of only two incomes in the house. When I found out that our rent money was going to drugs, I went back home. Since then, the University of Akron hunted me down for a loan that I never knew existed, so apparently my money is destined to be sucked into Akron.

4. I have a temper. A bad one. Once I threw a cell phone down a long hallway and shattered a mirror with quarter-inch glass by accident. The cell phone was fine, oddly enough.

5. I have a cleft tongue. When I was born, my tongue was fused to the bottom of my mouth, so the doctor cut it away, leaving a small cut right at the tip of it. I’m told certain people quite like it.

6. I have a scar under my left eye, from when my dog (named Bacardi by my alcoholic step-father) accidentally clipped my face with her razor-sharp claws. I used to get self-conscious about it, but now I sometimes forget its there.

6a. I have a scar in the dent of my upper lip, from when I was hit in the face with a plastic bowling pin. I think I was 11 or 12, but I don’t recall exactly.

6b. I have a scar behind my right ear from my mastoidectomy. The doctor’s found what they thought was cancerous tissue in my mastoid (bone behind your ear), and they had to cut into it with a small rotary saw and scoop it out. The doctor thought it would be funny to show me the saw before the anesthetic kicked in. I believe I vomited into the anesthesia tube. Since then, a recent similar operation has caused the scar to become larger, and also my right ear sticks out a bit. Luckily, I have long hair.

7. For my birthday in 1987, my mother’s parents (the Sweeney grandparents) got me a leather-bound copy of The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. This actually explains me far more than most people realize.

8. Technically speaking, I’ve been disowned. When I told the truth to my aunt when my cousin ran away, I was told that Grandma Webb had disowned me. In a bitter irony, that same cousin turned out to be a petty criminal last I heard.

9. Although my mother is American, she was born and raised in England, while Grandpa Sweeney was stationed at a US Air Force base. She was there most of her high school life, and has (or had - we're not sure) a dual citizenship.

10. The day we got married was the final riot in Cincinnati in 2001. Said riots were near the church we rented, so once we heard about it, we moved the reception to our house. That party is still our personal “best party”, and it was totally unplanned.

11. I have a nervous habit of picking at the skin around my thumbnails.

12. I lost my virginity to a woman I met over IRC. I got on a bus, traveled to Michigan, and had sex with her for a week straight before I went home and promptly lost track of her. In retrospect, I was damned, damned lucky I didn’t get killed or abducted, but that was back in the days when mainly college students used IRC.

13. When I was a teenager, I had a rare disorder called “adolescent epilepsy”. The way I understand it, the two halves of my brain didn’t grow at the same speed, so I would have petite mal seizures where I would just blank out and not be able to control my muscles or understand anything for 30 minutes at a time. It was frightening, and I’m glad I outgrew it. However, as a side effect, I do occasionally get hard shivers that I think might be the result of minor nerve damage.

14. I was a radio DJ for about six months, working for my community college’s tiny radio station. I went on the air as BaD aCiD, which is a good indication of how much I sucked at it.

15. My grandfather spent a number of years working for the infamous “Hanger 18” at Wright-Patterson Air Force base. When he died, I inherited two journals full of newspaper clippings from the 50s and 60s from American and British newspapers about various UFO sightings. They are some of my prized possessions.

16. I have only been arrested once. A friend of mine (the same one who later offered me a chance to run guns) said that he got his mom’s permission to borrow the car, and that he had a license. When the cops pulled us over at midnight after the car was reported stolen, I found out that neither of these things were true. Thankfully, the detective on duty realized that I was just an “unwilling accomplice”, so Grand Theft Auto was never put on my criminal record. However, that is part of the reason why I have a strange affinity to the video game Grand Theft Auto, and why I wrote a card game about car theft.

[01] Do you have the guts to answer these questions and re-post as The Controversial Survey?

Absolutely. Luckily, my self-worth doesn't require me to prove my "guts" to an anonymous meme writer who thinks they're edgy by coming up with yet another survey of inane crap that I've already answered a thousand times already. C- for effort.

If you read this, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me.

(Back to work, and writing, and maybe sleep.)

Meme Rules: Post a comment, and ask for "top five" or "top ten." I then provide a topic, which you answer in your blog/LiveJournal, along with these rules. This topic was given to me by banzaigrrl.

Top Five Victorian Practices That Should Be Resurrected

* Manners. It's something that's quite dead these days. (Edit: To clarify, I'm not referring to etiquette, which has strange and sometimes arbitrary rules associated with it, but more basic manners of politeness and civility.)

* Dressing Appropriately. While I admit that I'm not the best at it myself, there is something to be said for a sense of dressing for the occasion. There's a psychological change when someone dresses in a suit instead of a shirt and jeans.

* Letter Writing. With the creation of instant communication, communication itself has become diluted. When communication with distant friends was done almost entirely by letters, it forced people to think about their own lives and how it came across in print.

* Personal Honor. The idea that personal honor not only means something to oneself, but to others as well. Acts such as keeping your word and acting like a gentleman aren't just vague abstracts that are discarded when inconvenient, but social mores carefully observed.

* Confidence in Humanity. The Victorians generally believed that the human mind and spirit could overcome any obstacle. It's not blind optimism, but a faith that people can be more than they are.

I did this a while ago. Seems I've fallen in the rankings since then:

COMBAT CARDS 2.1

watch eddyfate fight

CREATE YOUR CARD

(And yes, I do call carbonated beverages "pop," thankyouverymuch.)

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Post a comment something you have heard about me. I will respond with Truth or Rumor.

Here are the rules:
Once you've been tagged, you have to write a blog with three random facts about yourself and three complete lies.
In the end you need to choose six people to be tagged and list their names. (I don't tag people in memes.)

1) I was nominated for an award that went to the TV show "Angel" instead.
2) I write science-fiction novels under the pen-name "John Weber."
3) I am a beer snob with a preference for British Ale.
4) I own every single toy sold under the name "Optimus Prime" (or, in Japan, "Convoy") ever released.
5) For the past few weeks the only thing I've eaten for lunch was beef jerky.
6) I can bench-press 100 pounds.

What was I doing five years ago? What else? Dealing with drama.

Worked out again last night, this time working arms (biceps and triceps). My arms felt like rubber after, and are very sore today. They're not so sore that I can't function, but I can feel it every time I lift my arm. Ow.

Things are a bit slow at work, so I've been catching up on my work "to do" list. I've also been tweaking my LJ a bit, and realized that I started a section on my bio page that I never actually did anything with. So, I'll finish that up:

Describe me in one sentence to someone who has never met me.

The most accurate, entertaining, and amusing answers will be put (with credit) on my bio page.

I found this on one of my writing sites, and thought I would turn it into a meme:

What is the best science fiction book you have ever read?

Personally, I'm torn, but will have to choose Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with Dune and Neuromancer running very close behind.

This is a fun one.

Reply to this entry, and hit Ctrl-V (or other equivalent) to paste the last thing you copied to your clipboard into the comment.

Tagged by sassette726, because I can't read. ( Read more... )

Amusingly, my wife now posts more often than I do. Teh awesome.

I've been busy, but I have no plans to stop writing in my LJ. However, I'm interested in finding out who still reads, because I like to tailor my content to my audience to a degree. I don't have the ability to put up a poll anymore, as I don't have the cash to renew just now, so please leave a quick comment letting me know if you still keep up actively with my LJ (instead of just scrolling past it on your friends list).

This is kind of interesting. If you know me at all, please describe me on this website in six words. It's an analysis tool that allows me to measure self-perceptions against outside perceptions.

I got to thinking about this old meme (100 Things About You). This is a revised list. Revised ones are marked in italics, and new ones are marked in bold. ( Long list. )

Grabbed from gmskarka.

If I had a writing shrine in my office, what attributes would it have?

My writing shrine promotes: The ability to juggle multiple projects while allowing me to direct my muse into the project at hand.

My writing shrine guards against: The Demon of Distraction and the Devourer of Free Time.

My writing shrine's paternal saint is: Vladimir Nabokov, patron saint of descriptive language.

My writing shrine's maternal saint is: Bronte, patron saint of characterization.

My writing shrine's three relics are: The Research Library of Umberto Eco, Steve Long's Computer of Productivity, and the Everlasting Stack of Reading Material.

My writing shrine demands a daily sacrifice of: Petting.