Egad! I've been tagged by Tinoshke! So I'm supposed to rattle of 10 things people probably don't know about me. Here goes... 1) Mathurin47 - A name I've used for a long time, but the origins of it are not something I go into that often. My mother was a huge Louis L'Amour fan. He wrote almost exclusively Western novels, a genre I never got into, but he did write several books outside the Western genre. One of these was The Walking Drum. Set in 12th Europe, the lead character was named Mathurin Kerbouchard. The novel remains one of my favorite books. As for the 47, it is a joke I picked up from Star Trek. 2) It is no secret that I enjoy RPGs. But this was not always the case. Dragon Warrior, the first RPG I played, I absolutely hated. The idea of level grinding was foreign to my 10-year old mind and greatly conflicted with the need to press forward since this was a rented game and back then 3 days was all you got. Even to this day occasionally find myself wondering just how strong the monsters on the other side of a bridge are going to be. I avoided the RPG genre until Nintendo Power got me excited for Final Fantasy III on the SNES. After a brief rental, complete with an all-nighter (on a school-night no less), it was confirmed, the game was awesome, therefore RPGs are awesome. 3) Alluded to somewhat in a few of my monthly blogs (around September), a recent pastime of mine has been zoo-hopping. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, I've seen quite a few zoos over the last few years. A chance to practice photography and see animals that you wouldn't normally see. It's interesting how they show many of the same animals in completely different manners. Since 2007 I've seen zoos in Detroit, Toledo, Columbus, Cleveland, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, North Carolina, Columbia in South Carolina, and Toronto. Chicago has been mentioned as a possible destination for this spring. I do keep a gallery of pictures, though it is really horribly out of date... 4) At the age of 17 and 363/365 I decided to stop forcing myself to eat meat and became a vegetarian. Between several bad experiences growing up and not really caring for the taste of pretty much most meat I gave all of it up. In recent years, tired of being limited to salads at some restaurants I eventually ordered a fish and found it actually tasted pretty good. My parents never ate fish, so I'd never really tried it. I do cook fish on a fairly regular basis now, so I don't really consider myself a true vegetarian anymore, though fish is the only meat I'll eat. 5) My luck can be so noticeably bad at times my friends have dubbed it "Steve Luck". If there is anything that involves luck or randomness that I need or want to go through, you can almost bank on an absolute failure. The only exception that comes to mind is when I won my Xbox 360 in a Pepsi/Mountain Dew launch contest with a measly 22 bottlecaps. I probably burnt up 10 years of good luck with that one win... I think I may have pissed off the gods in a previous life or something... 6) Cats. I like cats. There has always been at least one around the house for as long as I can remember. From Max, who spent almost 20 years with us, to the current pair PJ and Sunny who I can't believe are already 14 and 10. For many years there was always 4 cats. Whenever we lost one, we'd always seem to end up with another. And sometimes it seemed old Max would outlive them all. 7) 4 July. A day like any other in the rest of the world. But here in America it is known as my birthday, though some refer to it as Independence Day. Supposedly there was an accident around the time I was born triggering all the fireworks at Fort Hood to go off simultaneously, though I have never found any proof of this. I think my mother may have been pulling my leg on that one... 8 ) In late June, early July (right around my birthday :( ), my allergies flare up, turning my perpetually clogged nose into a perpetually running nose for a month. While some OTC stuff usually keeps it manageable, a recent trend seems to have a nasty cough popping up every other year. The kind where you can't even lie down to sleep because you are going to start coughing. Last time it was diagnosed as bronchitis (if I was reading the doctor's scribble correctly) and it was pretty similar to the symptoms two years prior. Unfortunately for this year, there was no cough last year... 9) There is a game in my head I've been working on for over 10 years now. A follow-up to a couple of fairly simple RPGs I programmed for my graphing calculator back in high school. Perhaps I've been too ambitious, sometimes exceeding the capabilities of the platform/language and sometimes exceeding my own programming knowledge. However, that recent playthrough of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon has given a direction to take it that I hadn't considered before and perhaps simplify it enough that I can actually get decent code going. I still recall my one attempt at DOS-based graphics. All the movement code was identical, but whenever you would try to move left, the character would jump over one box and down one instead of performing the walking animation like the other 3 directions, eventually crashing the program. To this day it remains the only program that managed to blue-screen of death my friend's computer. 10) I refer to myself as being "happily single". While I haven't ruled out eventually dating again, it's been 7 years now and I've been in no hurry to change the status quo. Maybe I'll re-evaluate at 10. :P I suppose I should pull a few names out of my friend list, though quite a few of them have been hit recently, I dislike putting people on the spot, and I really need to go to bed (my shift starts in ~6 hours), so I'll do it this way. If you've yet to be tagged and you wish to put something up, consider yourself tagged by me :)