My turn, I guess.
I'm... a few years older than Taru. I live in Silicon Valley, where I work (or more precisely, am looking for work) in marketing communications. I've been a writer, word person, and fount of useless knowledge as long as I can remember. I worked as a journalist, researcher, and copy editor before going into marketing, so maybe it was inevitable that I'd be drawn to the role of skald and archivist here.
I have kind of a split personality -- on one hand, I'm a sedate, respectable voter and taxpayer who's fond of cute little cardigans, pearl earrings, and "Mad Men"; on the other, I have a substantial geek side. For example, when handed a super-powerful Dyson vacuum at a church clean-up day, I couldn't help but brandish it and proclaim, "BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL!" before settling down to vacuum pet hair and glitter off the pew cushions.
I'm a late-breaking convert to comics, or rather "sequential art" (as the awesome Scott McCloud terms this art form in
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art).
I follow a fair number of Web comics, and came to SSSS via ads on the Girl Genius site. This is the first fandom I've joined -- or Web community of any kind, really. (I'm really put off by the nastiness that breeds in some online communities/comment threads. And I'm afraid I used to look down on fandoms as showing unseemly enthusiasm for "trivial" things.... until I found myself neck-deep in one.)
I got into SSSS in late June, when the plot began speeding up. I had glanced at the Prologue, but it wasn't grabbing me. So I only made perfunctory checks every few weeks.
Then suddenly in Chapter 2, something clicked. Character interaction! Humor! Pathos! Backstory! Emil's suitcase full of explosives! Adorable horsies! Lalli being spooked by the moving sidewalk! At that point I was hooked, and went back to reread it all from the start (as well as aRTD, which I had drifted away from somewhere in Chapter 4.).
THEN I discovered the Disqus comments under each page, and my fate was sealed. As others here have said, SSSS attracts a remarkable community. When Eich set up this forum, I promptly joined -- and have been posting so much that I sometimes think I should just shush and give everyone else a chance to talk.
I like cooking, opera and ballet, salsa dancing, fonts, and wandering around outside. I am fussy about spelling and grammar, probably because I majored in Latin in college. My favorite writers include Jane Austen, Ursula K. LeGuin, Bill Bryson, and Robertson Davies.
I got my forum name from a photo of some flowers I'd grown -- the first thing to catch my eye when I was looking for a suitable icon.
