All About Richard!!!!
View photos of me cavorting outside my native habitat...
Here is my biographic info, I am including this because I am vain and am sure that everyone is intensely interested in everything pertaining to me.
I am a native Californian, born in Anaheim on Valentines Day 1963, and raised in Fullerton. My existence has been fairly normal, I attended Raymond Elementary School, Wilshire Jr High & Fullerton Union High School. It was at FUHS that I discovered role playing games and got hooked on them. My first "RPG" was The Fantasy Trip, my friend Vivman and I would take turns running the other through Death Test and Death Test II. Then we got into Runequest (set in Glorantha), which was my staple RPG until GURPS came out. I recently converted to a crunchy form of Fudge. And since then moved on to Tri-Stat dX, though I am eyeing GURPS up again <sigh> [Edit: I have since done back to being infatuated with d20]. I have also been playing wargames since my dad gave me a copy of D-Day, after which I bought Panzerblitz, Third Reich and the original Squad Leader. I have since focused mainly on Advanced Squad Leader & Der Weltkrieg series which eat up most of my wargaming time these days.
2003 UPDATE!!! I am the co-owner of a small role-playing game publishing company called Domibia Games. My friend Tyma and I have many exciting projects planned for Domibia Games, hopefully some of them will come to fruition.
2005 Update!!!!! As I should have known, nothing serious has come to fruition at this time <sigh>.
2006 Update!!!! Twenty-ought-five blew for me, so I am no closer to any of my earlier goals than I was last year...
2007 Update!!!!! See previous years... I do have my own dinky publishing company though. Cavalcade of Whimsy is now me! I'll use it to publish my wee game related stuff that I write (ha ha).
2008 Update!!!!! As far as I am concerned '08 made out with a hobo's ass. Early in the year I had some trouble with the mortgage payments and am still dealing with that a bit (I am not in danger of losing the house, just need to make more money). My mom died on September 30th, four days before her 86th birthday. My mom raised me almost entirely by herself (my dad bailed when I was seven), and we were pretty close (she lived next door for my entire adult life), so her death hit me really hard. My dad (who roomed with me) came down with congestive heart failure and has had his right leg amputated and is now living in a convalescent home. So the year ended with me losing all my support system. So hopefully I can turn over a new leaf for '09 and start living the life I want to live.
Other Crap!
I live in a little bachelor style house in the rear of a two-home property that I
own and rent the front house to my friends Tony & Lisa.
One thing I've always wanted to do is to travel. My explorations "abroad" have so far been limited to a 2-week cross-country
road trip (with my friend Janice) several years ago which took me through most of the western states and up into Canada and over to the Great Lakes. I enjoy long
road trips but I also want to visit some foreign countries (yes, I know Canada is a foreign country, but barely...). So my dream trip would be several months in Europe visiting all the historic sites that I've read about (donations
gladly accepted...).
I do other things besides play games. I am currently
(and endlessly) working
towards my Associates in history at Fullerton College,
supposedly so I can teach. I also have given some thought to using my voice on the
radio, since everyone tells me how good I would be at it. I occasionally write
poetry and take photographs. I am also interested in military history,
linguistics, astronomy, art (Bruegel's
a fave), computers, religious study (I'm an ordained minister and a self-described
moral-agnostic), mythology, zoology, music (mainly death,
doom and grind, but I also love a lot of classical music (Haydn, Bach, Rossini and
Beethoven getting the most airtime) and bagpipe music {I have 600+ vinyl records
gathering dust while I try to rebuild my collection in CD format <sigh>}), geography, anthropology,
paleontology, archaeology, lots of reading (fiction favorites are King, Clancy, HP Lovecraft,
Robert E Howard, CS
Lewis (I love the Narnia Chronicles),
Patricia Cornwell, Ayn Rand (I am
not a follower of her entire philosophy, so don't jump on me if you are an
anti-Objectivist), Orson Scott Card and Bill Watterson's
Calvin & Hobbes; nonfiction that I like includes
Camille Paglia (what has become of her?), Thucydides,
Charles Fort and Thomas Jentz), and movies,
not any TV really, except for Lost, which I am addicted to.
Kitties!!!!!!
I have 2 plump and lazy cats (the middle one, Margaret, is
deceased), none of them were named by me, so I take no blame. Aisling is
pronounced "ash-leen" which I'm told is Gaelic, her nickname is
"Fat-Ash". Wallis is named after the Duchess of Windsor back in
the 1930's...yeah, Wallis is a girl...her nickname is "Fatty-pants".
I now have a 3rd cat named Gray, who doesn't have a photo yet, but he looks
somewhat like
Margaret, so I think I'll save some cash and just change the name on the
photo...
I'm very sad to say that Wallis "Fatty-Pants" died in mid-April 2003. She was my favorite kitty and I will miss her greatly.
As of December 2007 Gray has moved out and I see his useless form on occasion in the neighborhood and Aisling is missing and presumed dead. She was getting very old and feeble, but not enough to have her put to sleep, and one day she just stopped being around. We looked all around the property and asked neighbors but nobody has seen any sign of her. Very strange...
So, no cats any more.
Ancient Photo!!!!!!
Here is a picture of me taken in 1967 when I was a wee grub, I have no idea what the item in
my left hand is and it has been bugging me for years now. The person in the
background is Dana Barlow, at least that was her name back then, assuming that that
is actually her (her brother Mike has since confirmed this). Hey, Dana, if you're ever reading this, let me know what the hell I
am carrying in my left hand...
Go back to something interesting... .
My own definition of Moral Agnosticism is the belief that moral and ethical codes have value outside of the tenets of organized religion. Human cultures and communities require a basic framework within which all members should agree to behave. Therefore people should be inclined towards kindness out of a desire to improve the community within which they exist. Not out of fear of postmortem punishment, but rather with the intellectual understanding that a safe and well functioning community benefits everyone who wishes to be a part of that community.