Step Right Up, Step Right Up...

[Roaring Biscuit!]

On an entirely unrelated matter, you should check your PMs.

all of us?

Not you.

The rest of us.

[Cramulus]

This was an extremely surreal thread for me.

Now that it's a few years out, I feel like I can talk straight about it.


I had developed this Pterodactyl Handler character as a way to poke the "gaptoothed barefooted mud fondlers" at wicca.com. It started off as this, like, comedy routine. And over the course of several years, he grew more and more fleshed out & real to me. (maybe more 'real' isn't the right word -- more coherent) Eventually I could feel the Pterodactyl Handler in the back of my head, going BIKAAAW, impatiently scraping the earth with this claw-feet.

And there came a recognition that Cramulus was a similar construct - a certain mix of ideas and attitudes I'd been brewing here for a long time. And these two personalities, Cram and the Pterodactyl Handler, had developed in reaction to one another, had become polarized.

It's kind of like - there's a certain (I don't know how to put it) trance you go into when you're playing a character - in acting, RPGs, whatever. You can feel that person inside your head. And in my case, these two people were in conflict.  For me, the 'trance states' of PD and Wicca.com were anathema to one another.

And when I made this thread, it was because people from TCC were coming to PD.com. All of the sudden I was relating to them from the Cramulus headspace instead of the Pterodactyl Handler headspace. And it felt weird. Uncomfortable. It was the definition of cognitive dissonance.

And the third character, the OP, was kind of my attempt to step away from both of them. I guess I'm like half the people in this thread. Years later, this still sticks out to me as an extremely weird time.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This was an extremely surreal thread for me.

Now that it's a few years out, I feel like I can talk straight about it.


I had developed this Pterodactyl Handler character as a way to poke the "gaptoothed barefooted mud fondlers" at wicca.com. It started off as this, like, comedy routine. And over the course of several years, he grew more and more fleshed out & real to me. (maybe more 'real' isn't the right word -- more coherent) Eventually I could feel the Pterodactyl Handler in the back of my head, going BIKAAAW, impatiently scraping the earth with this claw-feet.

And there came a recognition that Cramulus was a similar construct - a certain mix of ideas and attitudes I'd been brewing here for a long time. And these two personalities, Cram and the Pterodactyl Handler, had developed in reaction to one another, had become polarized.

It's kind of like - there's a certain (I don't know how to put it) trance you go into when you're playing a character - in acting, RPGs, whatever. You can feel that person inside your head. And in my case, these two people were in conflict.  For me, the 'trance states' of PD and Wicca.com were anathema to one another.

And when I made this thread, it was because people from TCC were coming to PD.com. All of the sudden I was relating to them from the Cramulus headspace instead of the Pterodactyl Handler headspace. And it felt weird. Uncomfortable. It was the definition of cognitive dissonance.

And the third character, the OP, was kind of my attempt to step away from both of them. I guess I'm like half the people in this thread. Years later, this still sticks out to me as an extremely weird time.

I know just how that feels.  Dok Howl and TGRR were for a very long time different parts of my personality, so to speak.

But that faded through overuse. 

[The Wizard Joseph]

I have a distinct ability to "run" personas in my head that appear to react in all ways like an independent agent, until I don't want it to. I can also project them into my behavior and, among other things, used to ST for various LARPs as a way to practice rapidly switching personas. I got out of LARPing a couple years before I started posting here and have only done the occasional guest NPC since.

My reasons for doing so had nothing to do with the hobby per se, but I noticed that the practice was not dependent on my participation in the hobby. The hobby merely granted a safe playground for a primordial and dangerous human talent. I kinda think that the modern RPG is in a sense quite like shamanism. It's a means to explore and express the allegedly infinite unconscious, the soul. RPG games teach players how to "dress" it in their minds and engage in an amusing fantasy. LARPs go further and dress up the body to reinforce the illusion on the mind.

It all makes for some very good times, but the essential practice goes way back to our most ancient ancestors and the expression of perhaps our most powerful survival drive, community through shared stories. The RPG Storyteller and the Shaman are not at all the same thing, but I suspect that they are the product of the same elements of human nature.

Where it gets weird is when the dream you're producing "bleeds" into the so called normal world around you through your own deeds and shared perspective. RP games prevent this somewhat by setting up time and other reasonable limits "as a game", but we've all seen the gamer, in my experience LARPers especially, who apparently can't or won't walk away when it's over.

Not really sure where I'm going with this, but it seems relevant to the matter of your cognitive dissonance.

[minuspace]

In the theatre of my mind, it's different, the spectator's gaze is more forgiving.  Performing in front of others, perhaps not surprisingly, reminds me of taking a more combative stance.  It's somehow deeply embarrassing to me, to be fighting for a mask.  Because it's tragic when I take myself so seriously.  For example, right now, I'm stumbling over the inflated sense of my own importance even as I try to deny it, elevating me at best to a pantomime of myself.  I take it drama must be some kind imitative ritual to pass through and exorcise this limitation.  That by going through so many changes we wil, at the end, welcome that last encounter with a shy, innocent smile.