Just to share info & photos about us so we get to know each other as people
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Hi, fellow cartographers profantastique!
This is a thread where we can share any personal info, including photos of our home, work, town etc, even pets, and horror... of ourselves.
BUT... NO religion, No politics, and No sex!
Humour is mandatory, niceness is compulsory, and friendship is contagious.
Social distancing is offered as a complementary supplement to all participants.
This is a thread where we can share any personal info, including photos of our home, work, town etc, even pets, and horror... of ourselves.
BUT... NO religion, No politics, and No sex!
Humour is mandatory, niceness is compulsory, and friendship is contagious.
Social distancing is offered as a complementary supplement to all participants.
Comments
I am a retired Associate Professor in Oncology, and live on Flinders Island, just NE of Tasmania in the Bass strait between Tasmania and mainland Australia.
I have a wonderful view from my computer, and naturally enough, I get distracted easily (this is my excuse for dawdling on various maps)
The pictures are of a map I did of the island in Jon Roberts Style, the view from my desk, my local beach 300 m from where I live, and 2 favourite spots on the island (65x30km). The island sits on the 40th parallel, (our house is just 100 m south of it), and we het wind from Patagonia uninterrupted till it reaches us.
I mainly love world, regional and building maps. I;m a little bit interested in cities too. Sarcasm is my forte - as it is for most Aussies.
Keep safe in these trying times.
My real name is Sue Daniel, and I was born into a family of scientists, doctors, mathematicians, coders and surgeons. I have Asperger's Syndrome, which is a type of autism, and probably accounts for why I am so very different to the rest of the family.
All my skills and abilities are related to art, though I've also been a company administrator, a quality manager, a mobile library driver, a shelf stacker (for 2 nights only), and many other things that a temporary worker gets to be. I have also just started a new contract working for Profantasy.
I don't currently have any pictures of where I live, since I have a photographic memory of it all and usually don't bother with actual photos. As for what I look like - I try not to catch sight of the mirror too often so you won't be seeing my face! LOL! I'm average everything and a bit overweight with long wavy red-brown hair that is rapidly going silver starting with two rather striking flashes at the temples (my most attractive feature) and to one side of centre in the top of my fringe (that would be my bangs, I think, for the Americans). I dream of going completely silver, since then I will look a lot like Einstein!
I will try to remember to take my camera with me next time I go for a walk
I have a number of hobbies. Amateur radio, loom beading, map making, building my own web sites, eating chocolate chip cookies, car camping but I hope to go hiking again eventually, I have only a few dice about 3,000 of them, I can sew my own shirt buttons on and make repairs to shirts if I need to.
I have read approximately 10,000 books. Thats not including any required for any class.
Thats all the personal info I care to share.
I am born in -76 which means that I am still a young un compared to many others here. I live in Bergen, Norway, where I work as an Assistant Professor, teaching computer science. The current world events have forced me to stream teaching from home instead of being in the actual classroom, which I have to admit is not my cup of tea, I like actually meeting the people I teach.
I am also a former navy officer, but the administrative kind mostly. Spent my years in service on a navy base administering networks, never serving on a ship or participating in any conflicts.
I am an avid gamer, enjoying many kind of games, such as pen & paper roleplaying with my friends, as well as board games. I also enjoy computer games of many genres, such as puzzles, adventures, strategy, simulation, RPG's, and a bit of driving. Never been the competitive one though, so I prefer single player games, or games where I can play together with friends rather than against people.
I came into Campaign Cartographer in the CC2 Pro era. Had a hard time getting started, mostly because I tried my standard approach of jumping into the program without looking at the documentation. Had a few false starts where I discarded it for other software, such as a much easier tile-based mapper. What really got me into it was when I acquired the Tome for the first time, and basically sat down and worked through the entire book from beginning to end. That was the days I really got what CC was all about. Fortunately, it is easier to get into these days. Tools are better, and it looks so much better too.
The view from my place doesn't look nearly as spectacular as Quenten's place. But I'm just happy I have a nice place to live, and that I am able to see the sea from my window, even though the view is partly obscured. I've attached a photo I took just now from my office window.
Started playing Tunnels and Trolls solo in 1979. We moved as neither I nor dad could find good paying jobs. My siblings found a game store, new concept to me, in January, 1980. It was Lou Zocchi's warehouse, he was working on a store in the building next door.
We played d&d in several people's game worlds. My siblings, on the way home, told me they felt I could do a better job than those guys could. So our next trip over there I bought the players handbook, the dungeon master's guide, and the monster manual. A few dice, the starter module B1, and couple of things like Judges Guild village book and 5mm hexagon tablet of 50 pages.
At my 'height of play' I was DMing in 3 stores and at the house. A total of 5 games per week. I used lots of graph paper, and made my own floor tiles out of manila folders. some examples can be found on my Crestar site.
As time went by I bought more modules, mostly using them for ideas as several players would buy modules just to memorize them. I moved the secret doors and passageways so that action by them didn't help.
I started mapping Crestar. A decade or so later, I found CC2. I quite possibly drove people nuts with my questions on google groups. Then we moved over here.
Using CC2/CC2Pro I made around 3,000 maps. Crestar's southern hemisphere.
Not long after CC3 came out, I decided to redraw all of Crestar. The surface world maps had been 185 x 234 miles. So they were in the hundreds of maps. I did it as they were originally the 8.5 x 11 inch 5 mm hexagon pages.
Then I took FT3, and did a northern hemisphere map. Well, its an entire planet that I said was the northern hemisphere. I just imported it into a template that matched that hemisphere size.
Lots of islands in the southern hemisphere with one large continent, mostly continents with a few large islands in the northern one.
Started adding more sites for: Traveller Classic, Tunnels and Trolls, Men and Minotaurs, Space: 1889 !, GURPS Space, near future Mars and solar system ( no game that I know of ), The Fantasy Trip, Wizards Realm ( a game written by some folks in Mississippi, likely not well known. )
Sounds familar. My group also started with me as the DM because we felt I could do a much better job than the guy we played under. He didn't run D&D though, but rather Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but when we started out we did like you and got the core D&D books. Started a bit later than you, so it was AD&D 2nd edition at that time.
The "we" is myself, my wife Kim, and our two cats, Finn and Jake.
I've been a gamer since 1984 when my mom bought me the "Red Box" D&D Basic set. She bought it because she REALLY likes Indiana Jones, and the boxed set of The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game mentioned D&D on the box, so she thought they went together. I'm not even mad. It opened up worlds for me and I've never looked back. I was also the one in the group who took up the mantle of GM early, as no one else wanted to do it, although I've never managed the amount of simultaneous gaming that Jim has... Hat's off to you man!
In addition to D&D, I play Traveller, Shadowrun, Star Wars, Star Trek, and have flirted with Call of Cthulhu, GURPS, Middle Earth, Fate, Dungeon World, and 7th Sea. I'm probably forgetting a lot...
I'm a web developer by trade, having been into computers since I was 10, and have done a number of information technology jobs over the years. I can field strip a computer in 10 seconds! lol
No Navy for me though, I was a leatherneck (slang term for a US Marine), but I never managed to go anywhere interesting before getting out.
Nowadays I spend my time learning cartography and worldbuilding. You can find my current world at https://www.worldanvil.com/w/scalechanged-legacy-daisho. It's still heavily WIP. I promise I'll be bugging you all for help while I map it in the very near future!
Pictures will be forthcoming, but first I need to mow my face. My quarantine coat has come in thick this year. ;-)
Consequently, I never played it, and life was too busy as a younger adult. I became an instant stepmum of a 4 yr old boy with disabilities when I was 24, and most of the next 20 years was spent in a haze of exhaustion. So it was only 10 years ago that I was free to be myself - for myself.
I regret, now, that I don't have any memories of D&D to share, but I'm finding it fascinating reading all your stories
It was actually the computer game, Eye of the Beholder, that piqued my interest in RPG's, because the manual and hint book actually explained a whole lot of the underlying mechanics in AD&D, far more than you needed to know to play the video game. It was almost like a mini-player's handbook and Waterdeep campaign guide.
I'm a player more than a GM, except that I was the only one in the group ready to run games in systems other than D&D. So I ran a few games of Shadowrun, HERO, and a few other systems. And I was always the party mapper :).
I'm a husband of nearly 24 years now, and the father of a 16 year old and a 6 year old. I'm a mental health professional by trade, and manage an outpatient mental health clinic in an economically depressed, rural county here in Arkansas, USA.
A few years back I did a tee-shirt for our 10th year of gaming at the lake. I used an architectural render of the actual cabin where we gather, and did a little photoshopping...
As many of you know, I am by profession an RN. Thankfully, for my health and sanity, I no longer work in the Emergency Room. The last 3 years i've been working on the administrative side of nursing working with autistic adults. Most recently, and ironically enough, I was supposed to start a new position with the New York State Dept. of Health in March. So, since the world's turned upside down, and most healthcare facilities had restricted visitors (I would have been going into facilities and doing investigations) I have been set up to work from home doing chart reviews. Just so, those of you that know i'm a nurse, know i am home safe. Although, i do feel a bit useless...I've been in touch with the state to do some volunteer time at the testing sites, as here on Long Island where I live things are pretty bad and i'll be testing next week.
Gaming...well, i played a few games after school when i was in middle school, about '83. I had a few guy friends who liked the stories i wrote for our creative writing module in English class. I'll never forget it....Scott and Gary walked up to me during lunch to tell me they liked my stories and that they were thinking about starting a new "club" (clubs were a big thing back then) and i should join them, before i got to my table full of girls chatting about lip gloss and how cute all the guys were from that new movie The Outsiders. I was always someone in school who lived in all the school social groups....i played sports, loved to be creative in art, tried my hand at an instrument for a few years, spent lunches in the library voraciously reading alone (this was where i eventually went on to discover the Dragonlance series), liked lip gloss and also thought the guys in the Outsiders were "so totally rad". So I went to their "club" and my entire world changed........all the reading i did from then on was primarily fantasy focused. It was an amazing experience back then discovering this wonderful new world - most especially the fact that i then got to ROLEPLAY in said worlds? What? I was home. HOWEVER, this was all short lived. Remember those Italian immigrant parents? You know how religious Italians can be? Especially those straight from the mother country? Well, enter the Satanic Panic of the United States. Thus, my days of tabletop rpg was over. Temporarily, at least. I never stopped reading, though. Never
Fast forward to the 90's....I've recently divorced and am rediscovering myself (this is when i decided to become nurse - until then I was an Executive Assistant, a la Melanie Griffith in Working Girl - minus the big hair - that was never my style). Anway.....i find myself with a new group of friends during this time. One night, I stop by unannounced and slightly tipsy to a friend's house to find him and a few other guys i knew to be pretty popular, certainly not your stereotypical nerdy type that played D&D in their mom's basements, playing D&D. I stopped dead in my tracks. I was home, again.
With the resurgence of D&D and the release of 5e i started playing more regularly which is what lead me to making maps. Locally we could find plenty of people who wanted to play, but not many who wanted to DM. Being the type A personality I am, i just decided to DM for myself and my close friends. Not being about to find the maps i wanted to play on brought me right to ProFantasy's doorstep and making my own maps. Y'all might have seen a few of those, lol.
Played a variety of D&D and Pathfinder games in a fantasy setting, but never really ventured outside them until recently with a new Starfinder game and Call of Cthulhu. I prefer playing on tabletop, face to face with my maps on the table, a variety of minis and terrain on them, and a handful of shiny clicking clacking dice (preferably a set i've made myself - i do that, too) to throw down. Although, i will say, that with the stay at home orders we've been playing online on Roll20 a lot, and i must say i enjoy using my maps with the Fog of War and Dynamic lighting!!
That's me - the abridged (believe it or not) version.
Hope everyone and their loved ones are being smart and safe during this time and staying healthy and sane!
Lorelei (aka Christina in real life)
Oh yeah, EotB is a fantastic game! I bought it on GOG recently, just waiting to finish the Pool or Radiance series before I crack into EotB again!
And yeah, I'd consider myself lucky. 3rd generation sci-fi/fantasy enthusiast, grew up with a den wall-to-wall with books. That, and my parents never fell prey to the Satanic Panic here in the 80's, so my D&D life was care-free, as long as I kept it out of sight of old folks.
Someone told me they tried to argue with her... they lost the discussion. I wasn't there but one of my siblings was, I was informed mom was in Great Form [TM} and the other people decided to not bother me.
I'd totally be down for some online play, if there's a spot open!
The D&D denouncement was a really classical example of parents condemning something they didn't know anything about and obviously didn't bother to find anything out about. I guess you where already well into adulthood at that time and didn't need her approval, but it is still great her taking an interest.
So, I come to map making from wargaming, which I started in 1966 with Avalon HIlls U-Boat and never stopped. We moved all over the place and eventually ended up on Merritt Island, next to the Kennedy Space Center where you got to watch men leave for the Moon. Wargames led me to a military career and so I was in the Civil Air Patrol, High School ROTC, won an Army ROTC Scholarship and went to University of Florida, intending to be an Engineer, but I decided with all the understandable Greek symbols, I may as well switch to History and learn Ancient Greek (which I never did). Maps of course are central to military operations, wargaming, and the study of history. After graduating I went to Armor and my specialty was Armor/Cavalry. After my class, you specialized into Armor or Cavalry, but in practice they never did that. I was fortunate enough to get into the 11th ACR in Fulda where I served as a Tank Platoon Leader, Cavalry Platoon Leader, and Troop Executive Officer as we patrolled the Inner German Border to watch for the Soviet Hordes to come across. Fortunately, they never did, although we did lots of wargames about it, both with live maneuver and map exercises. After that I was assigned to the 1st Infantry Division (The Big Red One) and I was first assigned to the 1-34 Armor as the Battalion Maintenance Officer, The the S-4 Supply Officer, then a Company Commander. After that I went to the Division Staff where I was the Armor Training Officer and the night operations officer in the Division Tactical Command Post. Then it was down to 4-37 Armor where I was the Assistant S-3 and then a Company Commander. Back to Germany to the 1st Infantry Division (Forward) (really the 3rd Brigade) where I was again a company commander and the assistant operations officer. Then all the way to the left coast (California) and I taught ROTC for three years. Then, luckily enough, back to the 1st Infantry Division where I was a Division Assistant Operations Officer (always a bridesmaid, never a bride) for Desert Storm. After Desert Storm I was the S-4 Supply Officer for the 2nd Brigade. (So I was fortunate enough to command in all three brigades and serve on the division staff twice. If you are going to be one, be a Big Red One.
After the Army, I worked in the defense simulation industry in various simulation centers as the database manager and site manager. At the same time, I consulted for computer games and wrote a monthly column for Computer Games Strategy Plus, as well as reviews and articles for other magazines. I then switched to working on simulations instead of using them (a maker of tools instead of just a user of tools) and did that from 1998 - 2019 working on a variety of tactical, logistical, operational, and non-kinetic simulations for the US Army and the Joint Staff. After a small windfall, I decided to form my own little wargame company which led me to CC3 in order to make the maps. Since I like to model the real world, the issue is to use real maps to model the terrain and simplify them enough for gamers. My game playing went down while doing all that simulation work, but now that I retired, I play about 3 days and 12 - 16 hours a week.
I like to visit battlefields, and the next big trip is the Little Bighorn next year (it was supposed to be next month. (Sigh). That will be followed in 2022 with a trip to take my wife back to Norway.
I also build models of spacecraft and boosters, naval ships, science fiction stuff, armor, and aircraft. I have perhaps 300 unbuilt kits and over 300 games, with about 250 built kits about. My library is about 3500=4000 books, none of which are large in comparison to some of my fellow modelers, gamers, or bibliophiles.
I'm in awe of many of the maps you guys do, especially since all I do is trace features, and everytime I try to make up a map, it doesn't look right to me, but maybe I will get there one day. I am also a big fan of Brute Force and Ignorance when it comes to some tasks, but little by little I am learning some of the more subtle tricks of the trade in working with CC3.
Also, thanks for posting a pic of one of my favorite places. Was born just a few days before the Moon Landing and actually decided to go to NASA instead of Disney the one day I had to spend in the area (although in all fairness, i would have gone to Hogwarts at Universal if it existed then), lol.
Lorelei, I would guess, given that you are lounging on the fence outside the VAB, that it was the 80's when you went. In the 70's, on Sunday you could drive all over the space center and go inside the VAB. I really deplore that absurdly high levels of security we have placed on our public places. Of course, the reason you couldn't go in the VAB during the shuttle era was the solid boosters and fueling of hypergolics _inside_. After shuttle ended, you could go back in until they started stacking Orion stuff in it.
27 May 2020 at 1632 Eastern, hopefully the US will resume launching its own astronauts into orbit.
How do you upload multiple images in one post?
I am the woman who demolished every single last tree on the slope in the first ever skiing video game she played! Oddly, I did manage to survive
This is me on my New Zealand trip a few years ago, still some of my favorite memories to go back to.