My name is Bronwyn Boltwood, and I live in Chinatown in Ottawa, Canada. I share my apartment with a much-loved and ever-increasing quantity of books. I’m always running out of shelf space and have to pile them on shelf edges and floors, because there are so many good books in the world, and I can only own a tiny fraction of them. There are some spider plants and an aloe that keep reproducing on me too. The plants are no trouble. The dirty dishes and laundry, on the other hand, are. I wish they would stop multiplying when I’m not looking.
All my favourite interests — and quite possibly all my interests, period — involve stories or design in some way:
- anime and manga
- architecture
- art
- blogs
- environmentally friendly technology
- fantasy
- history
- interaction design
- music
- mythology
- role playing games
- romance novels (only the good ones, mind you)
- science fiction
- usability
- wikis
- writing
Play
Some of the authors that I love most are Robert A. Heinlein, Barry Hughart, Spider Robinson, Robin McKinley, Isaac Asimov, Melissa Scott, Neil Gaiman, and Garth Nix. I’ve read many more — I go through hundreds of books a year — but it takes a certain quantity and concentration of awesomeness for names to stick. Otherwise it’s a case of recognizing when I see it, or thinking “I read something good about _______…but what was it and who wrote it?” Maybe if I start using Library Thing I can beat that problem.
I also like games of various kinds. My favourite video game is Katamari Damacy. I have a 717.09m Moon, and one day I’ll get eternal mode #3. I also enjoy Beyond Good and Evil, Mark of Kri, and Nethack. My favourite roleplaying setting is White Wolf’s Exalted, though I think the system has its flaws. Since my boyfriend is an avid gamer, we discuss settings and story and mechanics quite a lot (he’s got a much better head for mechanics than I do), and we have some cool ideas for multiplayer video games. There is a dearth of co-operative multiplayer games deep enough to engage us, that are in a genre that both of us would enjoy, since I don’t like shooters. Most of what exists is some variation on the “kill monsters, get loot, level up” treadmill, and we’ve done that enough to get bored of it very quickly.
I also spend a lot of my free time wandering about the web or the library learning things. Even when I read fiction I learn things. Yes, that includes romance novels. Have you ever noticed how much the social expectations about love and sex are propped up by romance novels? They’re normative stories. Anyway, the point was that no matter what I’m doing, I’ll usually learn something new whether I tried to or not.
Work
When asked what I want to do with my life, I answer “Make things work better”, which is specific and vague enough at the same time to throw big fat monkeywrenches into my attempts to find out what job title I should be aiming for. Most of the stuff in my portfolio is about making things work better in one way or another. (Much of the rest is writing.) A broken system — especially one where the users are forced to work around its inadequacies instead of fixing them — is a guaranteed way to drive me up the wall.
My natural state is to be constructively and creatively lazy,1 but hand me an interesting enough problem, and I’ll be working like a demon on it until it’s done, even if the project is a little beyond my capabilities. Sometimes, if I needed to learn something sufficiently cool, I consider that a project feature instead of a bug. For example, I ended up learning way more PHP than I actually intended to when writing the Lens skin.2 Lens also taught me that if you want to learn something, find a real live problem to solve that requires the desired knowledge. It gives you direction, and tells you what to learn first, and what to leave for next time.
Treats
I like making sweet things, like
- chocolate chip cookies
- gingerbread
- cinnamon buns
- waffles
- caramel cereal bars
- fudge
- toffee
I am reliably informed that they are all addictive. I also like to experiment with the recipes, giving rise to items like gingerbread with chopped dried apricots and sugar on top, or chocolate-mint-caramel cereal bars. If you ask nicely, I might bring some to the office party. :)
1 Translation: finding better ways to do things so that I’ll have more free time. (↑)
2 I don’t yet know enough PHP to feel comfortable putting it on my résumé, but sometime I’ll probably learn more. Ruby is another programming language that I might learn, too. (↑)