About

Over 20 years ago, armed with my smoking fast 200 MHz Pentium PC and 3dfx graphics card, I created my first web page “The Diary of An Adventurer” under the pen name of Ian Ash. I had a clunky midi embedded player installed with Enya’s “Lothlorien” .mid on short loop. The goal was to share my experience in the numerous online roleplaying games that were emerging at the time – ranging from the arcade-style multiplayer dynamics in “Diablo” on Battle-net to the endless roleplaying possibilities in the player-driven “Ultima Online” as originally conceived, and later EverQuest.

Fan fiction in the form of opinions, speculation, articles and artwork was very popular and powerful – close your eyes and remember the internet before either google or facebook – remember web rings? IRC? We were the online fan community before the “Like” button. The obnoxiously zealous top 1% of vocal fans that wanted to be more than just consumers of the next software release. We wanted to beta test it, break it, write about it, complain, love it, and eat it for breakfast the next morning.

I got the writing bug back just recently – at least six houses, three states and many virtual worlds later. Unlike the gaming-centric “Diary” (which never saw the dark side of a google index), this blog covers all of my interests – including my family, gaming, science, stargazing, movies, art, books and music.