My username
editWhen I was in Junior High School (many, many, many years ago) I read LOTR for the first time, and was stunned. Deliriously happy while reading the saga, hopelessly depressed when I finished the final page. I had obviously found my calling in life: I was going to be an Important Epic Fantasy Writer. I started writing (mostly during American History class (Universal Truth: this class is a time sink for everyone on the planet except Jr. High School History teachers)), and got about halfway through Chapter 1 before realizing something fairly important: I couldn't write to save my life. It sucked. Hard. Even accounting for the fact that it was written by a Junior High School student. I gave up, crushed, and still have yet to fully recover. My life now is about 180° from what I assume the life of an Important Epic Fantasy Writer's life is like.
Anyway, Floquenbeam was the name of the lead character in my unfinished masterpiece, my pentology that was not to be. It was actually Fløqenbæm in the Olde Tongue, but people in the NearLands simplified it to Floquenbeam. He was a deposed King from Ashara Kor (or something very similar, I'm trying hard to remember the name of the Island Kingdom, but it's just not coming to me), posing as a roving minstrel while plotting with elves and assorted other races to regain his throne from the villain of the story, whose name I forget now but it wouldn't surprise me if it was similar to Saurogoth or Mordreth. Floquenbeam was modeled (very closely (no, let's be honest, he was a 100% carbon copy of)) Strider/Aragorn in LOTR. Perhaps you're beginning to get an inkling of just how bad this story was...
When the time came for me to choose a new username that I knew had no links with any name in real life, my old hero's name just popped into my head. I hadn't thought about that story in probably 25 years. It just felt right, and when I Googled it and found that there was zero use of this name anywhere on the interwebs (even today, every link on Google is either to here, or a mirror, or a content scraper) I knew I'd found my username.
Insider secret: If you ever see a new account User:Andolath, that's my sockpuppet (unless some jerk finds this page and steals the name, and if you do that you'll burn in Bhafarg Zha for sure). That was Floquenbeam's right hand man, I remember that name too. I really wonder why I remember some of this crap after 30+ years, but not all of it...
It's a good thing I lost that half a Chapter; I'm suddenly overcome with a nearly-overwhelming urge to try to write it again. --Floquenbeam (talk) 23:23, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
A Story of Academic Dishonesty. For User:Ponyo. Who I can't help but notice didn't actually ask for details about this, even when I subtly prompted her, but who I'm sure really wanted to know and just got distracted and forgot to ask
editOK, so I was very young. I can't recall the exact grade, but by remembering where we lived at the time, it was between 3rd and 5th grade. I think 3rd, if I'm picturing the correct teacher in my head. We were supposed to write a story about a mystery. Everyone else wrote a short 1-paragraph story that I assume was similar to this:
- One dai i wuz triing to find my shooz but culdent. i luked and luked. I cryed. my Mom told me too luk on the porch. They wur there the hole time!
I, however, didn't realize the assignment was so short. I thought I had to write a long story. The fact that I was in 3rd grade and this would have been an implausible assignment did not occur to me. But... Oh No! I had a severe case of writer's block! As I did every school day in the winter, I sat in front of the TV for hours and hours after school with my mound of snacks on a TV tray while I did my homework and watched Star Trek and Hogan's Heroes while getting more and more panicked as I continued to fail to think of something brilliant. Then a Scooby Doo episode came on. Now here was something I could use! I was saved! I summarized the plot of the episode as best I could [1], changing the names to Alice, Bob, Cathy, and Doug or something. I was probably smart enough to leave out Scooby; wouldn't want to be too obvious. A two page masterpiece of duplicity. It's not like my teacher watches Scooby Doo, I thought.
I turn it in, and the teacher is deeply impressed with the length and complexity. She asks me to read it to the class. (Now, you can probably already guess what is coming next, but I was completely blindsided. What a pathetic little idiot I was.) For some reason I think reading my story (ok, "my" story) to the class will make me popular. I'm very happy to agree. I read it out loud. Some little fucking asshole, whose name I can't recall but who I hate to this day with the heat of ten thousand suns, says "Hey, that was on Scooby Doo yesterday!" God I hate him so, so much. In less than 1.2 seconds I turn the darkest shade of beet red that you have ever seen, so the teacher knows it's true. I imagine my memory is slightly exaggerating this part, but as I recall the laughter lasted for about 20 minutes while I stood there, seeing if it was physically possible to turn an even darker red than the darkest red that there has ever been. The only zero I've ever received in my life. But it was the prolonged public laughter and inability to stop blushing that has scarred me. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:26, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
References
- ^ as I recall, the gang tries to figure out who is responsible for a string of crimes in various towns. For some reason they write a list of the towns the crimes occurred, and for some further reason are walking around carrying the list. They walk by a poster for the circus and someone, probably Velma, notices the circus has been in the same towns in the same order. It was the elephant trainer or head clown or bearded lady or something. And they would have got away with with it, too, if it wasn't for those rotten kids.
Response
edit- "For User:Ponyo. Who I can't help but notice didn't actually ask for details about this, even when I subtly prompted her, but who I'm sure really wanted to know and just got distracted and forgot to ask." But you said "preferably when there's alcohol nearby" and I still have 2 hours to go! There is a nice bottle of Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc chilling in the fridge for just such an occasion, please be patient!-- Jezebel's Ponyobons mots 21:48, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
- But I needed to procrastinate NOW. --Floquenbeam (talk) 21:49, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
- Comment One Two stories for the price of one! Now I know how Charlie felt when he found the golden ticket!. (Digression: When my husband finished his PhD he applied for a completely (or so we thought) unattainable position in a little island paradise. They called him away for an interview and my daughter, who was Pre-K at the time, and had not read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (or any novel for that matter, she's, like 4), asked me where her dad was. I told her that he was trying to win us a Golden Ticket so we could move to a land of ocean and flowers and seals. My husband returned from the trip, and announced that they had offered him the position. My daughter ran up to him squealing "Papa won the Golden Ticket!" It wasn't until Grade 3 or so that she read the book and made the connection.)
- Comment Two I also fancied myself a writer in my formative years and looked to Fantasy/SciFi for inspiration. Unlike your highbrow LOTR knock-off, I became fascinated by the movie Mazes and Monsters starring a fledgling nobody named Tom Hanks and based my Magnum Opus on this tale of role-playing gone wrong. I scribbled out 14 pages of text about a group of college students who forego their Spring Break to play their favourite Dungeons & Dragons-type game in the caves near the campus. They divide into groups and start their adventure only to realize that their fictional powers had become real and one of them was going Ten Little Indians on the group. Time moved on and there were a few more attempts at creating the Great Canadian Novel whilst toiling away in Jr. High. Then came my high school inspiration: Heathers. Everything I wrote after that included some variation on the "nice girl who can't escape her nasty clique" theme. Except now I gleefully produced my works on a green-screen computer with a flashing cursor prompt and used a dot matrix printer instead of writing it all out by hand. And then one day I just stopped and never wrote another lick of fiction (except maybe the letter I wrote to get out of jury duty). I have no idea whatever happened to any of my works of art.
- Comment Three I spelled Scooby Doo wrong on my talk page. This will haunt me to the end of days.-- Jezebel's Ponyobons mots 22:37, 3 May 2019 (UTC)
RFA debrief
editThis seems like an interesting exercise. I thought about my own RFAs for the first time in a while when I saw Sdkb's debrief. I do think there's at least one important point to try to make. One caveat, however: because they aren't recent, I suppose it's possible I'm filtering my memory thru rose-colored glasses.
My two RFAs were relatively stress-free. I went in knowing there was a decent possibility they both might fail (the first because of an unidentified previous account, which wasn't the albatross I thought it might be; the second because of you-know-what). So I just went thru both with the sole goal (generally but not 100% achieved) of handling them honestly and honorably, and que sera sera. I highly recommend this approach. If you look at them as crap shoots, then your goal doesn't become passing; it becomes handling the things that are in your control the most honorably you can, and having the peace of mind to accept what wasn't in your control. It frees you from the confines of worrying about "how should I answer this question to maximize my chances of passing?" to just worrying about "what is the honest answer to this question?". I very much enjoyed the opportunity in my first RFA to refuse to answer the question - asked at pretty much every single RFA in those days - "what is the difference between a block and a ban". I wonder if that refusal killed the question, you never see it any more. I would love it if that were true.
Almost all the opposes were either silly (so I could laugh them off to myself) or perfectly reasonable.
I certainly didn't view either one as a referendum on my character. I certainly didn't feel I "deserved" adminship. I think if I'd gone into either one thinking I really should pass, or thinking that if only I just handled it exactly right I'd pass, I'd have been far more miserable, and far more likely to quit if they failed.
If I had only one piece of advice to give an RFA candidate, it would be: only run if you don't really care if it passes or not. If you care too much what happens, you don't yet have the right mindset (how Zen of me!). I wish it were possible to make the whole process itself less all-or-nothing for so many people, a process that somehow led people naturally to this point of view. I have zero idea how to actually achieve that. But the only stress I really felt was when the second one drrrraaaggggged on with a crat chat. I was really ready for it to be over.
Wait, that's not true! I did also get annoyed - insulted, even - by a few people in my second RFA who assumed I was being flip or dishonest or smug in my second RFA. That stung more than I would have thought. It meant a lot to me that a couple of people who otherwise didn't know me still recognized that I was being trying to be self-effacingly honest. Those people meant a lot to me. I'd forgotten until now how much I wanted to tell the people who just casually assumed I was being imperious or something to fuck off. That would probably not have been effective or honorable. --Floquenbeam (talk) 17:18, 7 June 2024 (UTC)