State of the Becky

I need to remember this journal.

Things I learned today: I was unable to locate the allergy medicine at the supermarket, and unable to get a 9" fluorescent tube for my light box. Since I don't want to buy a new light box, I might just get one of those stick on lights and put it inside the box. I have to head abck to Target to get my allergy medicine, if I want to be functional before mid-afternoon. I have Benadryl on hand, but that's usually going to make me sleepy.

I did end up with manga and a book on painting by the guy who drew Dinotopia. (The book is called "Imaginative Realism", and is about how to paint things that you can't observe from life.) And a guidebook on New York City, mostly for restaurants and stuff. Between that and an Amazon order to get the print copy of 'The Language Construction Kit', I think I spent at least two weeks of grocery money on books this month. (Don't worry, I have disposable income... just noting that I spend more money on books than food.)

Work is going well. I have a very rough draft for my first paper, and my adviser wants me to spend the next three months getting my Hyperion stuff written up for a special journal devoted to the conference I presented it at. And we have the goals for the final piece of work I need for my dissertation.

I also want to blog on science, since cool stuff is happening. And not just my work.

Contemplation...

So, I once explained how I view characters when writing fanfiction -- that when I read a source, I'd create projections of the characters and setting in my brain as I read, and use copies of those to write fanfiction.

Now, here's my problem. I do this with my own characters as well. So I can have three or four versions all floating around -- same background, but different events. Or... let me use a character as an example.

I played Zack in a tabletop game (0). After that, I moved him to an online cross-over game with a couple of friends (1). Several years later, a friend from the tabletop game and I started playing one-on-one online, and we revived our tabletop characters from Zack's game (2). I also created another version of him in a different universe for another private game (3).

So that's three characters -- four if I split Zack-0 from either possible continuation of him. All have the same name and backstory, but have become different versions of the same person. It doesn't bother me -- I can keep them straight. What gets troublesome is when I do things like MAX, where I give people my character bios and ask them to draw things for me. Now, for a portrait or some things, the version doesn't matter. Others... like character interaction pieces, it does matter.

Worst case comes when the versions have differences in design.

So, a way to communicate this clearly to people. Besides the old fandom standby of X!(Name).

(This does remind me I promised our RP crowd over on the_nexus_rpg a wiki, just to keep track of the regular characters. The question would be to host it on my own site, or use a commercial wiki host.)