let me tell you about my character...

Here is a D&D story for schneefink, who was wishing for some.

I learned about D&D from the acknowledgments to a Katherine Kerr novel when I was in fourth grade, but I didn't find people willing to play RPGs with me until high school. We mostly played White Wolf, since that was then the fashion; in particular, I GMed a lot of Mage.

My first serious D&D campaign was in college. Third edition was new and shiny! My character was named Angharad. She began the campaign as a very naive Lawful Good rogue; I reasoned that she came from a Thieves' Guild family, and had conformed to the expectation that she'd join the family business. She was moderately smart at the start of the campaign (INT 13 or 14, maybe), and we all started at seventh level. We encountered a strange temple that "balanced" our stats, though, so her intelligence went down and another stat went up, and because Angharad was exceedingly Lawful Good, I picked up a level in paladin. Then, through some rather awful failures in coordination, the entire party was killed by a mindflayer; upon resurrection, Angharad found herself with even less intelligence and missing one of those levels of rogue.

Finally, after maybe a semester of play (we spent a lot of time talking to people, and not very much killing monsters), Angharad earned a second paladin level, and became able to sense evil... at which point she learned that sildra's eponymous character had been lawful evil the entire time. "Sildra! You're evil?" is one of my favorite moments in excessive commitment to lawful goodness.

Smiting evil with a holy sword while simultaneously doing sneak-attack damage due to flanking is also pretty great, though.

three long-standing interests

Interests meme from bluebaron. Comment if you'd like me to choose interests for you to write about?

calabi-yau manifolds

These are the thing I research! They're particular higher-dimensional spaces that are flat in the sense that if you were inside one you would experience no gravitational force, but are curled in on themselves in complicated ways. Here's the picture everyone uses, and here's a slice I generated using a different equation. Calabi is the Italian mathematician who conjectured that these spaces should exist. Yau (my mathematical grandfather) proved they actually do.

medieval knitting

I've done a lot of knitting based on medieval objects (or seventeenth-century patterns), over the years. It's usually in the round, and finer than a lot of modern work. Here's my current project:



Those are size 1 needles (that my friend vandyhall made out of brass rod), so it's fairly small knitting, though not nearly as tiny as the original, which is a silk relic pouch preserved in a church in Switzerland.

onomastics

This is the fancy way of saying "the study of names". What interests me about studying names is less the individual names, and more the fact that thinking about names in different times and places provides an excuse to learn about languages, culture, and the way they interact. I'm particularly nerdy about classical Greek and Roman and medieval Turkic/Turkish and Mongolian names, though I've picked up all sorts of things, over the years.