Immortal Dreamer's Web Page
Born August 10th, 1972 in the lovely scenic post-apocalyptic neighborhood of South Detroit, I'm a Leo, according to the classic Zodiac. According to the standard interpretations, that means that I'm "King of the Beasts"...and I certainly have the control fixation to prove that much. As my friends and many co-workers over the years have learned, that means that I can be rather hard to get along with, as I have a psychological need to be in charge of a given situation. By the Chinese Zodiac, 1972 is the Year of the Rat, which means that the person is loyal, honest, and dependable...I like to think I'm all of these, although I'm enough of a paranoid that I give out very little personal information to be honest about.
In any case, I grew up under very unpleasant circumstances, which I won't go into in too much depth here. Suffice it to say that South Detroit is a very dangerous place to grow up, especially when you're the only white family in your neighborhood (no, I'm not a racist, but I've grown up all around them, and learned the reality of such things). One either learns how to fight, and gets very good at it, or one gets beaten up and ends up dead. I chose the former path. I'm a rather accomplished street fighter (no, not the video game, but the dirty fighting that keeps you alive), and when I was a young teenager, I started on the Asian paths, and I hold a Black Belt in Tang Soo Do (although I haven't actively trained or competed in many years, for various reasons).
I was educated through a variety of Catholic Schools (oh, wonder), from Kindergarten all the way up to my Senior year of high school. At that point, it was off to the University of Michigan for premedical/psych classes. Or at least, that was the plan...you see, after getting there, and getting out from my parents rather oppressive thumb, I went kind of nuts. Staying out till all hours, spending money like a drunken sailor, and my grade point plummeted like neutronium in jello. That led to leaving college, and starting down the path to obscurity...
That is, until I met my wonderful, dazzling, incredible SO, whom I met
online back in 1992. That's led to moving and living all over the
country...a stint in North Carolina, which was responsible for me
ending up as an honest to goodness Wiccan priest-type. A longer stint in
Hawai`i, which led to all SORTS of things, and has been one of the most
fascinating times of my life. I'm currently back living in Michigan
(although thank goodness, not in Detroit), getting my life on a
steady and stable path for the first time in a very long time.
Well, I have lots of interests...it's just that most of them end up being soundly within "geekdom". I'm not a very athletic person, and most of my activities tend to either be solitary, or indoors, often dealing in some fashion with books or computers. That being said, most of my interest tends to be dumpable into one of five real categories:
Gaming is without a doubt, the first and foremost of my hobbies. I've been at it ever since I was eight years old, when a favorite uncle thought that it would be fun to get me a set of the Dungeons and Dragons base rules, and it's been a long love affair ever since. I have well more than $25,000 invested in gaming materials of all sorts over the last 16 years, and it's still my favorite thing to do to spend my free time.
MU*s are a newer addiction, something I got into in college...just imagine it...gaming, online, with LOTS of people. Any hour of the day or night! Yeah, this was a MAJOR addiction for me all through college, and largely responsible for my plummeting GPA all through college. After all, who wants to go drag themselves off to a boring class when they can stay on-line and net all day?? While I'm no longer quite as bad as I was, I'm still relatively involved in things, and now I even run them on my own.
Movies have been a long-time love...I am a wandering database of movie quotes, and it can drive people nuts sometimes, especially when I get together with some of my friends, and every other sentence is a movie quote of one form or another. We often have little impromptu contests, where they'll throw out some random movie quote and challenge me to come up with where it's from...more often than not, I win. :)
Anime is a somewhat more recent love. I got introduced to it in college, and picked up a little appreciation for it there, but by and large, I didn't REALLY get into Anime until I met my SO, and we started getting into some of the long-running and better done anime series. But it's some very well-done, well-thought work, and certainly not just "kiddie cartoons", as the unenlightened tend to think.
Music is a relatively small passion with me...I certainly don't follow it with the kind of fanatical devotism that some people do. But there are musical groups, and certain music that I like, and so I thought I should list some of it here at least. Although I'll be the first to be a stodgy old stick-in-the-mud and say that current music sucks. But I think every generation has said that about the current teenage generation's music, whenever that might be.
There are more specific links scattered all through these pages to people, places, and things that I found interesting for some reason, though most of them are on pages more dedicated to that sort of thing (the anime links are on the anime page, and so on). This section is more for links to people's pages, people that mean something to me for one reason or another. Though some of them may not know it, they've all made a difference in my life. So here's a little list, along with links to pages for those who have them:
Brian Jackson