By Dragonel
Rant rant rant... What is a rant, anyways? I’ve been thinking about it a lot since Prax asked me to do this. You see, it seems like everyone has a rant, and they always have. By everyone I don’t mean all the internet comic artists. I don’t mean people online, and I don’t mean people who have a soapbox. The rant was around long before Dennis Miller started seeing how many times he could say f*ck in a late-night premium cable show (can I say f*ck here?). Go to a library and check out the classics. You know how the ancient Greeks taught? With dialogues. A dialogue is, more or less, a rant, sometimes with more than one person involved.
So it’s not as if I don’t have a tremendous body of work to draw from when I’m defining the concept of the rant. Essentially, from what I can figure, a rant, quite simply, is when someone takes advantage of any opportunity, be it access to a microphone, an open ear, a blank sheet of paper, or in my case an open Word Perfect (TM) window, to share their biased views, skewed perspective, and self-righteous opinions.
By way of introduction, I’m Dragonel, and I’m horribly, horribly biased. Horribly. Really. But that shouldn’t be an issue, because right now this is my Rant, and when it’s my Rant, I’m right. Period. End of story. I can use whatever metaphors or ill-fitting logic to prove that the world according to Dragonel is the correct one, and the world you live in makes the war-torn Balkans look like a Utopia.
Point in case: Prax’s exact words for what these Rants should be he said: “Anything, just try and make it somehow related to RPGs.” Well, that’s as close as I’m going to get to relating to RPGs. Why? Say it now:
“It’s Drag’s Rant, and Drag is always right in her Rant.”
That’s why, if you hadn’t guessed it, this first Rant is about Rants. Hmm... Problem though, I’m out of stuff to say about Rants. Once you realize that you’re always right it can be tough to manage enough energy to keep going. I guess it comes from that old habit of saying “The GM is God!” But now I’m back on RPGs, and we can’t have me ranting on relevant subject matter now, can we? ;-)
So, maybe this is filler, maybe this is the true subject of the Rant, preceded by an unusually long introduction (you be the judge), but I’m going to give you a little bit of info on my biases :-)
My real name is Susan Walker. If you’ve seen that above one or two of the comics (which you won’t have unless you’re reading this in the archives) it’s because I occasionally contribute to the Sisyphusian Prax puts forth in writing VRPG. Aside from that I’m also Senior Editor. That means I edit all the Rants for this site (or at least that’s the plan so far). That’s more or less the extent of what I do here.
Outside of this world (there’s an outside? *gasp*) I’m twenty (well, twenty at the end of April), I’m a clerk at a used book store, I’m currently “between high school and college” (I *will* go back to college though.) I’m an avid role-player (I have well over 6 feet of source books within an arms reach of me at this very moment... Probably another 3 or 4 feet if I bothered to unpack the boxes of them), and I’m proud to say that I’ve been online since I was 13 and haven’t had much of a social life since then. Okay, let’s be real, I didn’t have much of one before then.
I used to think of myself as a democrat, a liberal democrat no less, until I decided I was an anarcho-socialist. Nowadays though, I realize the older I get the more disdain I have for the extreme left in addition to the extreme right.
If you’ve labeled me slacker based on what I’ve said, then shame on you for labeling me. I am a slacker, but labels don’t do anyone any good. The fact is it’s what I am. I live with my mom though I’m talking with a friend at work about moving out and getting a place of my own. The fact that he sometimes bugs the crap out of me is only a slight hindrance.
For those of you who don’t usually read Rants but have for some reason stuck through this so far, don’t worry, you can expect my future Rants to read more like Bridget Jones’ Diary than Scott Kurtz’s pedagogue like Rants. I’m barely past those awkward teenage years, so if you don’t want to come for the righteous fury, come for the teen angst.
Oh yeah, did I mention I’m an internet comic junkie? Right now I have thirty-five comics bookmarked that I check daily, and I’m constantly adding to the list. It sounds sick, I know, but I’m obsessed. I look to people like Pete Abrahms, Scott Kurtz, Poe, Eight, Tatsuya Ishida, Piro and Largo, Gabe and Tycho. These are my celebrities. I realize they probably DON’T get greeted on the street, but these are people just like me, people with computers and too much free time, and they have their own T-Shirts! Yeah, yeah, stupid and sappy, but if there’s one thing I like about America it’s that anyone can hit it big, even if they haven’t really hit it big.
That’s about it about me. I’m not saying that I’ve concisely defined myself, but I think you know what you need to know. Besides, if these Rants turn out to be as melodramatic as I expect then I’d hate to spoil the surprise ;-D
Ciao!
--Dragonel