What is your favorite place to go in your city?

I have a feeling that a lot of people, when presented with a question like this, are going to say places like the park or the museum, maybe even a restaurant/bar. Most likely, places where you can be around other people, because “people” are social by nature. That doesn’t mean EVERYONE is, because I’m definitely not that social and I know plenty of other people that are much the same.

So where IS my favorite place to go in my city? Home. I typically like to go home. Not to sound paranoid but home is controllable and safe. Like I mentioned in my answer to yesterday’s prompt, I don’t have to worry about making first impressions when I’m at home. I can also break from routine and just be a gremlin.

Primarily, though, home is where I can do the things that I want to do, like play video games, Magic: The Gathering with friends (see, there’s still part of me being social), or even experiment in the kitchen. Can’t exactly do those things elsewhere, at least not without some restrictions or requirements. I know there are places I can go to play Magic with other people, but I have to be honest…those places typically smell. I don’t like being judgmental, but if you’re in public and can be smelled from 40 feet away? No thanks.

So, home it is.

What’s the first impression you want to give people?

I have a love/hate relationship with attention. I don’t actively seek it out but I don’t try to hide either. It leaves me with mixed feelings about the first impression I want to regularly give off. It also affects your reputation, which can further compound on first impressions.

At work I like to just do my job, and do it well enough that people see me as competent, knowledgeable, and resourceful. Then I can build a reputation that people can trust me. This also conflicts with my earlier sentiment of not seeking out attention, because as much as I want to be helpful, I’m careful to not advertise my skills too much or else I’m liable to get too many requests for help with things that people are supposed to know how to do on their own (rather than taking the easy way out and just asking me.) It’s a challenge to balance.

Outside of work? I’m naturally reserved and keep to myself, which makes it easier to avoid attention. However, I still do have to interact with people at some point, so I do my best to be polite and offer a smile. This way I can hopefully give the first impression of being nice and courteous. Doing this has led me to believe a few different things. That I’m making a positive impact on them, or at the very least avoiding negative impact. They’re also more likely to return the courteousness, and people generally don’t look twice at you so you can just get on with your day without added attention. Unlike being negative, which seems to have a stronger impact/leaves a more memorable impression.

So, to summarize what the first impression I want to give people is that of a nice “background character” type, and not someone who constantly wants to be in the limelight.

What book are you reading right now?

I’m a fan of John Scalzi. I may not have read all of his books but I do own most of them (in digital and physical), and I also greatly enjoy and appreciate him as a person. Anyways, right now I’m reading his latest book “Starter Villain” and it is a lot of fun! I’ve enjoyed the subtle (and less subtle) jabs at the way the world economy works.

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

It seems like every couple of months I see a question like this crop up, usually as part of discussions with friends on Twitch or Discord. A couple of my close friends and I agree on a few things that would be ideal (for us) to want to live somewhere. The only problem is, does a place exist anywhere in this world that checks all the boxes?

Some of us want to live in a little witchy looking cabin in the forest. Some of us want to live near water. We all still want access to high speed Internet. Sometimes the discussion takes a slight turn as more friends join and agree that they like those ideas, so we turn from being hermits to a small group of homes. Make our own little village. We’ve also joked about one of us getting a massive house and doing “Streamer House” because several of us stream on Twitch, and we think it would be a fun idea.

Now, coming back around to what my ideal place would be? If there is somewhere in this world, possibly in North America so I don’t have to move TOO far, it would need the following.

• Forest, probably something like the Pacific Northwest
• Next to a large lake
• Probably on a small mountain, to have a slightly elevated view of the lake
• Close enough to civilization that it’s just a short drive into town
• And of course that high speed Internet connection

Well, based on my criteria, it turns out there are several potential candidates in the United States! But they’re nowhere near me. Being centrally located, I’m in the Great Plains. All the areas I’m looking at? The Rocky Mountains are probably the closest I’ll get. If I omit the mountain part (which cuts out one of the criteria) I could probably get away with Minnesota or the Great Lakes areas. Of course, if I REALLY wanted to do this, I would need money. Most likely a lot of it.

Oh well. I can dream.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)?

I can’t say that I recall randomly finding something cool (on the ground or otherwise) and then deciding to keep it. If I did, it was probably a tiny trinket of some kind that I eventually stowed away or lost.

That being said, “cool” is subjective. Some of you are probably going to read this next part and just nod your heads, others might find it more relatable and entertaining.

A long time ago, when my biological mom was still alive, my family would occasionally head to northern Washington and visit my mom’s side of the extended family. Some of my aunts and uncles liked to look for agates on hikes. I had only gone on these hikes a couple of times (probably because my aunt didn’t want to haul me around and babysit a seven or eight year old) but there was one time that I found an agate I thought was really cool. It wasn’t quite an inch long by half an inch wide. It was a deep purple color, with a touch of reddish purple on a small rounded point, and a thin vein of something in it. I fell in love with it immediately. My first agate! I was so excited I had finally found one, and I showed my aunt. She was happy for me, at the time, but I think she might have been a little jealous because I don’t recall if she had any luck finding anything that day.

A while later, I forget how long after I found it, but I was playing with that agate and admiring it when I showed it to another family member. They tried to convince me that the little vein in the rock was toxic and that for my own safety I shouldn’t have it. I didn’t believe them, of course, and being a kid I didn’t care either way. They never got their hands on it.

I had that rock with me for a long time. I even remember having it with me when my family moved to South Dakota, so I probably had it for close to 20 years. I lost it during one of my moves after college, and I still think about it from time to time. I never got it polished, keeping its exterior rough and unrefined, but I wish I hadn’t lost it. For all I know it’s still in my old bedroom back home. Maybe I should go root around in there next time I visit my dad. If I ever find it again I’ll share pictures.

What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?

I’m sure for a lot of people there are things we could agree on that skipping it doesn’t hurt, and vice versa. Medications, for example, you don’t skip. Unless you forget. Like I did this morning with my intranasal spray. Oops!

Then there’s things I skip on purpose. Weekend rolls around, and I know I’m not leaving the house or need to be presentable? Shaving, and occasionally showering. Don’t get me wrong, skipping a shower can be gross. However, I have a strong sense of smell, so if I can smell myself? Right into the shower. My roommates might not notice, but I will. Shaving, though? Yea if I can skip shaving I will. Every so often I might consider letting the beard grow out, but I usually am okay skipping on my days off, especially if there are three more in a row. Just like next week with American Thanksgiving. If I look okay enough on Wednesday, I’ll consider skipping shaving before work and just look a smidge more rugged, because then I can skip shaving for five days!

I’m sure many people can relate to that, right?

What is good about having a pet?

I really don’t know where to start with this one. I’ve grown up with a variety of different kinds of pets, and each one has had their own challenges.

In my mind, looking at what is good about having a pet means considering your relation to said pet. Are you a child in the household with the pet? Are you an adult?

For children, some pets can be a friend they play with, or something like a sibling. Sometimes the pet is a gift from a parent, with the intent that the child learns to be responsible for taking care of it (but let’s be honest, more often than not the parent still takes care of it a lot.)

For adults, some pets are companions. They help with loneliness, maybe not perfectly, but there’s something special about coming home and being greeted by a dog wagging its tail or a cat purring and rubbing against your leg. Additionally they give adults something to care about outside of themselves which can help keep them going when they’re down and times feel tough.

Maybe I’m just talking out of my ass a bit here because I’m not educated in the psychology of pets, but that’s how I look at it.

Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).

There are two ways I’m looking at this prompt that I’m going to try and explain for you all. The first will be more literal, following what I’m going to call the “standard response”, and the second will be focused on an “end result”.

Starting with that standard response logic, I’m taking the prompt to mean the purchased item is a whole and complete object at time of purchase. In this case I figured that my most expensive purchase was my current laptop. I had inherited a laptop a couple years ago, and wasn’t planning to game on it. I had planned to use it for personal work, document processing and writing. That’s all I needed it for. Unfortunately, it was already 5 or 6 generations behind on hardware, and it wasn’t properly connecting to networks. It got to be too much of a hassle, so earlier this year I shopped around for a new one. I went into that process with the mindset of just making it the replacement to meet my original needs and nothing more. It didn’t need anything fancy, and I wanted to avoid spending a lot of money on what would amount to a modern day typewriter for my writing needs. That idea went out the window really quickly. Budget laptops were exceedingly lackluster, and by that I mean they were basically all Chromebooks. For the record, I owned a Chromebook several years ago, and the inherited laptop was what replaced it because Google in their infinite greed and wisdom decided to stop letting Microsoft put their Office apps on ChromeOS (or so I recall, it very well could have been a Microsoft decision.) Either way, I didn’t hate Chromebooks, but they had ceased to meet my needs. Bye-bye budget options. After that, the next step up were laptops that were too small, but if I wanted anything larger than a 14in screen the prices seemed to jump quite a bit because of the higher end components that were packed into them. I eventually lucked out and found a low- to mid-level gaming laptop on sale. So far, best $1,100 I’ve spent on an individual item.

That last bit got away from me for such a simple question, so I’ll keep this part shorter.

The second way I was looking at this question was to consider the purchasing aspect as it would relate to parts of a whole, because my gaming computer (not the laptop I mentioned before) would technically be the most expensive personal item. The current rig I’m running is easily twice as expensive as the laptop, if not a little more. When COVID-19 practically shut down large swathes of the global economy, and everyone in the tech sector went to the Work From Home style of living, they all needed computers. So demand for parts went through the roof while supplies plummeted from low production capacity in the face of pandemic restrictions. When I overhauled my gaming PC we were a year and a half or so through the pandemic and restrictions were lifting. I caught some sales, and AMD was putting out a new line of GPU’s so I switched from Intel and Nvidia. If I had stuck with them my rig would probably have cost me four or five times as much as that laptop…

Gaming as a hobby can be damn expensive, but I love it anyway.

What podcasts are you listening to?

I don’t listen to many podcasts, but the couple I do involve Brandon Sanderson.

I’ve listened (and relistened) to hours upon hours of “Writing Excuses” to help me learn more about the many facets of writing fantasy and fiction. Where I started listening in Season 10 it’s mostly hosted by the same four people (Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler, and Mary Robinette Kowal) but they also have guests from time to time. I love the way that its tagline refers to their original intent of keeping it short, and they do! Episodes are typically much shorter than other podcasts, ranging from the referenced “15 minutes long” up to maybe 30 minutes when they really get into a topic. I am very much behind in keeping up with this podcast, because I was going back and relistening to specific episodes several times so I could make sure I caught everything I wanted to pick up, but also partly because I would listen while falling asleep and wouldn’t remember.

I also enjoy listening to “Intentionally Blank” hosted by Brandon and Dan. Less educationally focused than their Writing Excuses days, but still fun and fascinating. They like to provide their opinions on how they did or didn’t enjoy something from pop culture, for example the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They don’t always agree on things, and they completely understand that listeners are going to like things they don’t so they never go on tangents bashing something, but they do provide their own analysis of why they enjoyed something.

Aside from those two, I don’t listen to many others. The next one I occasionally listen to (when I remember or see something that reminds me) is “A Hotdog is a Sandwich” hosted by Josh and Nicole from the Mythical Kitchen YouTube channel. That can be a fun listen if food is your thing because they occasionally like to analyze the background and history of food in culture while sharing their controversial opinions about food and flavors.

Any other podcasts I listened to until now have been little onesie-twosie bursts to check them out or because they had a specific guest. On “Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People” he had the chance to talk with Kelly Gibson who was one of my high school teachers from when my family lived in Colorado. (Wonderful episode, you should all go listen to it!)

Outside of that, I prefer to just listen to music.