What do you do besides role-playing?

[Luke]

i could tell you about my job, but it's boring and technical. It makes me money and keeps my desktop publishing skills sharp.

but hobbies and passions... jeebus. it's all in that fucking game i wrote. all of it. I feel like Mia Farrow looking into the crib after having giving birth... it's my everything, it's a monster; i love it.

I guess I'm kind of a filmie, too. To flex my feeble film muscle... I've had my eye on Burt Lancaster since I saw Sweet Smell of Success. Had him pegged as a big dumb leading man. So untrue.

Dro and I saw him in this '64 Frankenheimer pic called The Train. He plays a French railway engineer during WW2. It's all shot in Paris, but he doesn't even try to affect an accent. Awesome. That's star power. Great old school action movie. The kind where you win with brains and guts rather than bullets and explosions. Such resignation in those shoulders!

Then I recently saw him in Visconti's The Leopard. Such a strange movie. I felt like I didn't get it, but I also couldn't help but like it. And Lancaster speaks Italian for that one!

-L

[Trevis Martin]

I go between my job as a cartographer and a part time gig teaching art classes at a local community college.  

I make art that few except me love, read all the time, watch movies when I can, write some games here and there when I can get over feeling humbled at the feet of the mighty designers who I find myself in the company of.  I do woodworking when I get the chance (and the money, hardwood ain't cheap.)   I'm working on learning php to augment my web design skills.  I maintain the GCP wiki and roleplaying lab which I'm hoping to host more people and games on.

My wife is threatening me with children, which will cut down on a great deal of the above.

Trevis.

[Frank T]

I'm a soon-to-be lawyer over here in Germany. Actually, my final examination is this friday, so what the fuck am I doing sneaking around this forum instead of preparing?! ;-)

I used to do some fiction writing, but that has diminished in the last few years. For sports, I do some running and volleyball, but not at a very high level. And I like travelling. I have a wonderful trip to China booked for the end of the month, and I'm almost more excited about that than about my exams and finding a job.

[Bankuei]

I'm finishing up studies in acupressure so I can open my own practice.

Hobbies:

Read- a book a week, sometimes quicker.  Mostly cultural/religious
Food- love good food, learning to cook new stuff every month
Anime- Getting back into it.  I like robots & ninjas.  I will never grow up.
Hiphop- Sort of a love/hate affair.
Martial Arts- kicking my ass back into getting more serious about it.

Chris

[Tobias]

Like almost all of you - I work. Got my own business which nicely ignores large parts of my chemical engineering education and allows me to surf the web whenever I like, when I'm not supposed to be working on sustainable development and software design.

Occasionally, I crank out a kick-ass piece of software.

My hobbies seem to be consumed by the latest hobby in my life - my lovely girlfriend, we're moving into a new house and you know that whole drill.

When they're not consumed, it's generally due to ninjutsu twice a week (so much depth), rock-climbing (she does that as well - so I got back into it), and cross-the-board gaming - boardgames, cardgames, RPGs. I like to develop the first 2 to the point where I can win competitions and get into european championships, and by that time my interest's usually moved on.

I'm looking forward to getting a motorcycle this year as well, dust off my skills, go touring. The Netherlands have had about 1-2 weeks of fine weather, now.

People prefer my cooking to going out to a (quick) restaurant. I enjoy trying to please and surprise them. Do you know that thing where you let others just bring a pile of ingredients, and you've got to make something? I love that.

[Jack Aidley]

I work as a computer programmer for these people.

Otherwise: I climb (indoor's mostly) - I'm almost good at it. I read quite a lot of non-fiction, but not like I used to. I make homebrew.

[James Holloway]

Let's see. In my honest-to-gosh daily life, I'm an archaeology grad student. I have a website: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~jeh30. I'm a great big history nerd as well -- I'm really a historian who happens to work with a lot of archaeological evidence rather than a proper archaeologist. I used to have a little zine (well, the first issue was actually huge, not little) in which I attempted to write history in the same way Hunter S. Thompson wrote journalism.

In my other time, I spend a lot of time reading. A lot. I'm also starting to turn my hand to writing. I'm currently working on writing the first piece of fiction I've written since high school, and it's a lot of fun, though heaven knows if I'll ever finish it. [/url]

[J. Tuomas Harviainen]

Most of my time is consumed by work, as the academic library which I'm in charge of doesn't run by itself. The rest of the day is shared between doing things with my family and either writing larps, reading (mostly academic stuff; I've grown jaded with fiction over the decade I worked at a public library), or doing reviews on experimental music. I usually manage to combine the last two, which in turns leaves me enough time for regular gaming. I'm extremely glad that I'm both a very fast reader and a person who doesn't require much sleep.

[sirogit]

Write short stories, write poems, draw comics, write scripts, draw, photgraphy, photoshop, film, program, piano, stand-up... all at a very amatuer level of course. Short stories are probably what I'm best at, I do some very expierimental horror stuff that I'm quite proud of.

Go to college. Get freaked out by my ex-girlfriend. Get freaked out by this one girl so she can model me for her "Freaked out people" collection.

Video games, both playing and collecting. I'm pretty big into the emulation scene as its a nice way to not have to deal with the clutter of physical stuff, but I've got a pretty impressive physical collection as well.

I pick fights with cars a lot. I decided that if a car comes by me that makes a painfully loud engine boom, I bend over and say "GOOD EVENING MADAM" to express the fact that their attempt to prove their masclunity failed and I actually thought they were a lady. My friends aren't sure if this makes me cool or just a jerk, but I think I'm saving the environment.

[Rich Forest]

I used to have many, many answers to this question. These days I mostly do just a couple things, a lot.

I sit in coffee shops for hours and hours and hours, working on my thesis directly or indirectly (i.e. analyzing texts, reading articles and books, writing copious notes, and plugging along at actually writing sections of my thesis).

I obsess over almost anything that is in any way connected to Street Fighter and continue to fairly regularly play Street Fighter III: Third Strike on my good ol' dependable Dreamcast.

I travel when I can afford to. I take many pictures of travels or just around Hong Kong, and sometimes I post them on my livejournal, which I try to update regularly. I spend time surfing the web.

That's about it at the moment, but it fills my days very comfortably.

Rich

[pete_darby]

work: Ick, computer security

home: Home ed for my kids, less computer games than I should given how many I own and how few I finished, them crazy DVD box sets...

Oh yeah, acting. Since last year, about half my year i'm involved in a production.

Writing: first drafts of novel & kids story done, awaiting re-write.

Geetar playin', and you know, stuff.

[Doug Ruff]

By day, I'm a junior civil servant in a large government department (which, if said government gets its way, will soon be a small government department.) It pays the mortgage.

By night, I fight crime! Well, actually I'm a bit of a homebody - I'm studying with the Open University (working towards a degree in computer science) and I spend the rest of my time with my girlfriend, my other close friends and spend way too much time on the Internet. I also read a heck of a lot. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I'm trying to be an indie games designer.

I very occasionally do some acting - this used to be a regular amateur hobby, but it started to get a bit of a chore, because the local group kept expecting me to do 3 or 4 plays a year and that's a lot of rehearsal time. I still take on the occasional short project, but only if I think it's going to be fun. In fact, I've just spent a surprisingly enjoyable evening playing the part of a demented masochistic monk for someone's degree film project.

[Clinton R. Nixon]

I can't believe I have to moderate a Birthday Topic.

Original question was "What are your hobbies and passions?" Unless you love your work, don't bring it up. I hate my job, too, and yours bores me. Anyway want to make a new topic about hating ours jobs, feel free. I'll post, I promise.

[Eero Tuovinen]

To my bourgeoisie relatives, civil servants and such I introduce myself as a student. Helsinki University, majoring in mathemathics. The cover's getting a little thin, though, as I study less and less, and more and more of my studies center on folkloristics, philosophy and ancient languages. Not to mention that I'm currently doing my fourth or fifth year (I forget which).

To most of my associates I reveal my real passion, which is art and culture. I want to be a writer, game designer, poet, whatever will make me free. Freedom to communicate with my fellow man and figure out some fundamentals about this life of ours, instead of getting paid for stuff I don't care about. Just last Christmas I perhaps found some convinction on this: I won't ever be a very good mathematician, but I perhaps could become a writer of some note.

Concretely, since last Christmas I've lived up north in my little home town, spending my time in cultural pursuits ranging from writing to web coding to reading and stuff. The work schedule is still forming, but I'm pretty satisfied with my progress here. I could totally imagine living a major phase in this way, writing and studying stuff in a small town.

It's been years and years since I last considered "hobbies", really. There's just projects with more or less immediate cultural meaning. Lately I've taken up running for exercise, having practiced Krav Maga (one of those martial arts) before, when living in Helsinki. Similarly I've been spending a great deal of time watching anime, but I don't feel that it's a hobby - it's more about familiarizing myself with the genre and major works, to reap the benefits one gains from the arts. Really (although it's fun, too).

Then there's reading, movies, comics, music, all kinds of gaming and such... they're all a part of the cultural web I'm interested in, so there' really not that much difference. At some point I'm consuming a given art, then I'm suddenly fiddling with producing something similar of my own. Most such stuff never gets published, but some do.

Concretely, what I've done this spring exactly: writing rpgs, writing grant applications, running, leading the Finnish Boardgame Society, web coding for fun and profit, watching humongous amounts of anime (I'm talking 200+ hours of various series) and of course roleplaying... that's it, pretty much. Hopefully the various projects start carrying fruit this summer.

Reading these descriptions, some people clearly have a more clear idea about where their life's heading than others. Part of growing up, I guess.

[beingfrank]

Hobbies  Reading.  Much reading.  Science fiction, fantasy, crime, and history non-fiction.  I'm also a brownie guide leader for a group of 14 6-10 year old girls.  Most of my friends refer to them as my 'minions' and accuse me of corrupting the young and planning to take over the world with them.  I make no denials.  Family history research, as a present for my dad who wants it recorded, and my uncle who wants to see what can be discovered.

Passions  Words.  Beautiful words and putting them together in interesting ways.  Not seriously, but just for fun.  Travel.  Strange places and cool history.  I live in a very young country in terms of recorded history, so I like going to places that look old on a human time scale rather than the geological.  People.  The way they work and all our everyday madness.  Statistics and research design.  I love the elegance of it all.  And I'm lucky enough that it's just become my job (I mention it as a passion that's coincidentally my job, rather than the reverse).