The Book of Daniel Vol. 2

1. What is your favorite vegetable?
Probably would have to be potatoes, based on both the vegetable in and of itself and the variety of proucts made from it that I enjoy.  Corn and eggplant would probably be close runners-up.

2. What is your least favorite (or most disliked) vegetable?
I don't know.  I could never get the taste for Brussels sprouts, I guess?

3. How many half cup (one deciliter) servings of vegetables do you eat on a typical day?
No idea.  Anywhere from one to eight, I guess.

4. What is your favorite fruit?
Granny Smith apples, raspberries, pineapples, strawberries... quite a few, I guess.  The wide variety of tomato-based products that I enjoy would probably actually put that in the lead, but I dislike raw tomatoes in and of themselves.

5. What is your least favorite (or most disliked) fruit?
Bananas.  Can't even smell them without getting nauseous.  And I'm pretty sure it's psychological, stemming from a specific event: when I was in fourth grade, my friend Shawn had a running gag where he'd sit on his lunch bag and then show everybody at the table the results inside it.  Usually it was a PB&J sandwich, and the punchline was, "peanut butter and SMELLY!"  Well, one day he had a banana in his lunch bag, and for whatever reason my immediate reaction to seeing that squashed banana was to projectile vomit across the lunch table.  I got to go home sick that day, but I haven't been able to be in the presence of unpeeled bananas since.

1. Books or movies?
I don't consider any specific art forms to be inherently superior to any others.  But I have fallen off of movies over the last couple of years (and hope to get back to them at some point), so I guess I have to default to books at the moment.

2. Indoors or outdoors?
While the outdoors are great, I've always been an indoor cat at heart.

3. Morning person or night owl?
Naturally a night owl, which isn't exactly ideal for somebody with a severe sleep disorder.

4. Online messaging or physical letters?
In today's world, online messaging (email, Messenger etc.) is just more convenient.  But physical letters can certainly still be nice.  The last I regularly exchanged them was with someone I knew on Livejournal years ago.

5. Dragons or unicorns?
Why not unicorn dragons?

1. Do you enjoy reading?
Yes.  Yes, I do.


2. What is the first book you remember reading?
I actually have an exact answer for this.  The first book I read on my own was Go, Dog. Go! by P.D. Eastman, and the first chapter book was The Trolley Car Family by Eleanor Clymer.


3. Who is your favourite author?
I don't have a singular answer, but Mark Twain, Raymond Carver and Bernard Cornwell all come immediately to mind.


4. What is your favourite book?
Again, no singular answer.  Recently, Goodreads posed a question on Facebook about "what book shaped your worldview," and I had two immediate answers for that: first, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin, which I read i college (actually for the class "Andy Warhol and the 1960s") and it helped me understand how media, news and pop culture are manipulated and how, in turn, we are manipulated by them. 

The other was the humor/picture book Motel of the Mysteries by David Macauley, which pokes fun at how the past can be completely misinterpreted and misunderstood by future historians, and how what we think is right may turn out not to be.  I first encountered it in elementary school, and back then it was just funny - like the page about how people in the future interpreted a current-day toilet as "the Sacred Urn," with the picture of the archaeologist demonstrating its potential use by wearing "the Sacred Collar" (the toilet seat) around his neck and yelling into the "urn" - but in adulthood, as someone who works in historical fields several times over, it helps keep me grounded and reminds me of how there's always more to learn.  As an art historian by training and, partly, trade, David Hockney's Secret Knowledge - which explores his theory that many of the Old Masters may have employed lenses, cameras obscura and other optical tools to assist in painting their masterpieces (which is almost certainly true in at least some cases, notably in the case of Vermeer, as also explored by Teller's documentary Tim's Vermeer) functions in a similar way.

More broadly, in recent years some of my favorite modern fiction are the works of Bernard Cornwell, especially the Warlord (Arthur) Trilogy and the Saxon Stories (Last Kingdom) series.

Given unlimted time, I'm sure I could keep coming up with other answers for this ad nauseum.


5. What is the last book you read and the first you'll read next?
The last few I've read include several nonfiction titles: All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley, Half Moon: Henry Hudson and the Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World by Douglas Hunter, Anne Bonny: The Infamous Female Pirate by Phillip Thomas Tucker and Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground by Michael Moynihan & Didrik Soderlind.

I'm currently reading The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media by Bryan Alexander, and am rereading (via audiobook) The Empty Throne, the eighth book in Bernard Cornwell's aforementioned Saxon Stories series.  I also have Irene Hunt's Across Five Aprils on deck; I recently found the copy I got as a kid and I'm pretty sure I never actually read it, so it's past time to knock that one out.

1. What do you consider your current main fandom? (This can include hobbies and collecting. Anything you feel fannish about!)
For specific recent ones... I guess Expedition 33 (recently played/still working on post-game content), the Sabotage Studios game universe (currently including Sea of Stars and The Messenger), and Life is Strange (played and  completed the whole series since January) would, almost by default, be the most notable recent additions.


2. What was your first fandom?
TMNT was probably the first really huge one for me.


3. Do you have any favorite headcanons or fan theories?
I really dig the idea of the "Tommy Westphall Universe" - the theory that through various crossover episode connections between shows, the ending of St. Elsewhere - which revealed that entire series took place inside an autistic boy's mind as he looked into a snow globe - set off a chain reaction that led to probably at least half of every TV show ever, various movie franchises, and - arguably - real life itself also all take place in the boy's mind.

For personal headcanon stuff, one big one I have is simply booting the Burial at Sea DLCs out of my BioShock headcanon.


4. Have you ever created fanworks?
Nothing too serious, unless some super-crappy Final Fantasy fanart drawings I did as a teenager count.


5. Are you still active in any old fandoms?
Oh, totally.  I'm a lifelong Three Stooges fan; TMNT is still cool; I've still never bothered to outgrow wrestling since starting watching as a kid in the late '80s... for general categories, stil a game junkie; have fallen off of movies the last couple of years but need to get back to them.  Currently "rereading" Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories/Last Kingdom series, which I've been a big fan of for the last decade or so (I've already listened to the audio versions of the Warlord/Arthur trilogy, which is probably my very favorite Cornwell.

1. What was the reason you began a Dreamwidth or LiveJournal account (or both)?
I signed up for Dreamwidth because I genuinely miss Livejournal's glory days, and this is the closest I've found to it in modern times (even more than the shambling corpse of LJ itself), although I haven't yet found as strong a community on it as I had on LJ in the early-mid 2000s.

2. How many DW or LJ communities do you subscribe to?
So far, Friday Five is the only one, other than the DW news feeds.  There were a number of good ones on LJ back in the day, like "Dead Men Talking," where users played the roles of historical figures, but they're all long dead now.

3. Do you have a favorite community or one you check out often to see what's new?
As mentioned above, so far this is pretty much it.

4. How did you pick your user name?
It's an oblique reference to and continuation/resurrection of my old LJ (which is still there, but has been unused for years).  My LJ username was just my real name (probably not my best idea, in restrospect), but I used the phrase "The Book of Daniel" as the header.  

5. If you could change your user name, would you?
Nah, s'alright.

1. What did you want to be when you were a kid?
It changed a number of times.  My best answer was in 1st grade, when I said that I wanted to be either a teacher or a Ninja Turtle; one of those technically came true (guess which!).  At various other points I wanted to be a doctor, cartoonist and pilot (primarily due to Disney's TaleSpin), and there were probably others.

2. What is your proudest accomplishment so far?
I was at the orpahnage until I was 18, then I got my job at the souvenir stand.  Oh, and once I saw a blimp.
More seriously, I don't know.  Teaching my first college level class was a big one.  The most recent is that I found out that I'm in the acknowledgements of the upcoming biography of the man whose house is now the museum I've worked in for 24 years, so after so long it's nice to have that strange connection I have to a person that died 83 years before I was born immortalized.

3. What is your dream job?
Hermit sage.  I could do pretty much whatever I want, and occasionally a traveler comes to partake in my wisdom.

4. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
I don't really even want to think about it, but hopefully still teaching in some capacity.

5. What does it take to make you happy?
A good night's sleep, a pizza, a glass of port, cat or two, and something good to pass the time, not necessarily in that order.

1. If you could change one life-changing event in the life of someone important to you, would you?
On the surface, this seems like an easy "yes." But still having Life is Strange fresh in mind, which has an entire sequence that shows that doing just such a thing could lead to unintended, and potentially severe, results, it'd acutally be much more of a situational answer.

2. Which do you think is easier to do, being friends for many years, or being life partners for many years?
Well, some of my friends have been friends for over 30 years, and I still haven't quite gotten the "life partners" part to work (came close, but not quite), I guess the former.

3. Have you ever walked away from someone you considered a friend?
Relationships, yes, but I dont think I have specificially with friends, although of course there have been some that have grown apart or lost touch, and childhood friends that moved away in the pre-internet days, never to be heard from again.

4. If you had to choose between telling the truth and hurting a friend or lying and making them happy, which would you choose?
This one might also be a bit situational, but generally speaking truth is probably best.

5. Which would you rather hear--the truth which will hurt, or the comforting lie?
Same.  Truth may suck, but in the grand scheme it's generally for the best.

1. What were some of the smells and tastes of your childhood?
That certain smell of the elementary school cafeteria is the one that's struck me lately, because the cafeteria kitchen at the college I'm teaching at  has had the same smell (as I remember it) every time I've walked past it this semester.  I was actually going to write a post about that here and hadn't gotten aroudn to it yet.  I guess the same cafeteria pizza would be a top pick for the taste side as well.

2. What did you have as a child that you do not think children today have?
Well, an analog childhood, for one.  Not counting game consoles, I didn't have a home computer until I was in 7th grade, a Windows 3.11 rig from a computer show, and home/consumer internet was still in its infancy - AOL 1.5 was, I think, my first firsthand taste of internet.  If we're talking specific toys - pipe-smoking Mr. Potatohead comes to mind.

3. What elementary grade was your favorite?
For fun, probably 5th - that was a year that I had good friends in class, some fun and memorable activities and no major issues.  For teacher quality, 6th - my teacher that year was very influential on me and, I believe, a direct reason for me studying and teaching history today.

4. What summer do you remember the best as a child?
To be honest, they mostly kind of blend together - I don't know how many memories I could actually assign to any specific summer break during those childhood years.  Endless summer, eh?

5. What one piece of advice would you give to your younger self, and at what age?
I don't know.  Maybe make a little more effort toward academic programs in high school, like joining the National Honor Society (which I was qualified for, but didn't feel like writing an essay at the time)?  But, it's never affected anything in adulthood or the real world.  Be more outgoing?  But, I'm naturally a textbook introvert, and I don't think I could've changed that.  I guess the main thing would just be a general "stop procrastinating."

1. What is your favourite food?
Pizza.

2. What is your favourite food preparation method?
Cooking, by default, since i haven't gotten too much into baking yet (I'm still pretty much a novice at all of it).  I'm probably best at seasoning.

3. What is your favourite cuisine or style of cooking?
To eat, Italian, Mexican, Indian, general American mutt...  for cooking, many of my best work so far have been pizzas and soups.

4. Do you have any dietary restrictions and if so what are they?
No meat.

5. If you could introduce the whole world to one ingredient to improve their culinary experience, what would that be and why?
Dill is great for more than just pickles.  I use it on home fries to add some extra savory depth.

1. What is the oldest object you own?
Not counting, like, rocks or something, I have both volumes of the book Adventures of Roderick Random published in the 1790s, so that'd probably take it.  For *my* oldest possession...  Oldest in at least semi-regular use... the main keychain that my Kramer-esque set of keys is built on is supposedly made from a WWII (presumably surplus) gunstrap, and I have a stereoscope viewer from the turn of the 20th century.  But I have other passive objects older than that too - some 19th-century books, an 1860s "Boss Tweed" bank, etc.

2. What object have you owned the longest?
 If it counts as an object, I have a philodendron plant that's as old as I am.  I'm sure there are still some early-childhood toys lurking around somewhere too.  My oldest in at least semi-regular use... maybe my Blues Traveler shirt that I've had since 1994?

3. What is the newest object you own?
I got a Kung Fu Tea Princess Peach collectible can and cup that I'd ordered from eBay today, both of which will end up in my game room (after the tea is drank), so I guess that's it by default.

4. Who is your oldest living relative?
Not actually sure.  There's very few of us left, so on both sides of the family it may just be my mom's generation.

5. Who is your youngest living relative?
Also not sure.  I know I have some cousins that have kids but I don't know exact ages.