Blaugust Day 7 — TGTCML: Best Friends, Roleplay and Webcomics
This is part of the Blaugust series!
In the previous post, I talked about how I posted my FFIV fan fiction online back in 1998, and created a small web community through forums and play by email. The interesting thing is that I’m still in touch with some of the people who wrote and RPed with us from that old community, even if the base of the community has long went its own way. In fact, it was through the email list that I met my long-time best friend, Syntyche.
She was first to email me – but that’s not unusual seeing she’s an extrovert with the ability to much more easily make friends. We discovered we both had a long-time love of the SNES version FFII/FFIV, and we both actually wrote our own versions of fanfiction for the game in the past. We started to RP together on the email list, having our characters meet, and eventually becoming friends through the game.
Then we started IMing outside of the email list and forums. Then IMing turned to creative idea sharing. Then it turned to full-out RP sessions.
Syn is a darn good world builder and DM. She knows how to set the stage and how to juggle not just many interesting characters, but also many NPCs that have the potential for growth. She also writes bad guys, which is something I can’t do well. We started RPing about 14-15 years ago. We still RP in the same world with many of the same characters (when she doesn’t kill them off) even today.
She’s also probably going to complain that I blogged this about her. >:)
Of course, me being a creative type, I used to joke that our RPs would make a good webcomic, since they were already in a script format. Then jokes became an actual webcomic with a domain name and everything: Wayrift. I also began working on several other creative web projects, such as Dreigiau (NaNoWriMo) and Shimmer (currently discontinued). In order to keep all these organized, I picked up the domain Sygnus.org and it acted as a hub site to all my projects.
During this time, blogs were just starting to appear – I remember my first one being a LiveJournal. I didn’t blog a whole lot because I didn’t really feel I had a lot to share. But when WordPress started popping up, I was curious and dabbled in that a bit, too. This, of course, led to other things.
To Be Continued…