So, this all seems pretty awesome.

Hello, everybody! I have a name, but that's sort of a legal detail; who I am is Kistaro Windrider, one of those folk with sincerely-held species identity issues. Pleased to meet y'all!

I'm a computer scientist currently getting underpaid working for a non-profit in Seattle, currently on cancer research projects. (The fact that I found a job that actually uses the skills I thought were pretty awesome during college and then does something I care about with it is why I'm not really complaining about the pay too much.) Unsurprisingly, I'm an avid fan of video games- but almost always handhelds (or iOS devices), since there's quite a lot of contention for the TV (I'm splitting an insanely large apartment four ways- but we only have one epic television) and I spend a good portion of each day on a bus anyway. (If you ride Bus 545 from Redmond to Seattle to work, or the other way at the end of the day, then if your 3DS was on and ready for StreetPass, perhaps we've already "met"!) It also matters that it's what I was raised with, to a degree- my parents strictly forbade me from video game consoles until I turned 18 (my first was my GameCube in college), but because of long car rides (to school, mostly) I was allowed to buy a Game Boy in 4th grade, which I played enthusiastically and have had chronic wrist problems ever since. (That thing was a brick, seriously.)

I moved out to Washington state when Microsoft gave me a job out of college, but three years of software testing there is soul-destroying. I am much, much happier with what I do now, actually using my skills. Microsoft paid off my student loans, in the end, and that's all I really wanted from them anyway.

So, I said something about species identity issues. I'm one of those Otherkin people. To make an extraordinarily long and elaborate story short, I believe I've had past lives as a few dragons (hey, multiple incarnations as one dragon would be weird, why do people usually phrase that in the singular?), and identify with that more than I do as a human. But, well, a body is just a detail; the soul is the thing. Spiritually, I'm kind of a really incompetent Buddhist.

I play my PSP and 3DS about equally, although my 3DS is mostly playing my excess catalog of DS games. My iOS devices are mostly for turn-based games played over lunch, although I'm just about as likely to read. (Amazon and the Kindle service have lots of what used to be my money.) We have most of the recent and several not-so-recent consoles around here, though- I haven't played most of the library available to me, since libraries merge as people move in with each other.

Edited to add- I should probably explain the thread description. Well, it's pretty simple- I haven't seen a highly-active, classic-style, varied-topic forum thriving like this for a very long time. I like the aesthetic- it's the boards I remember from when the Internet was awesome. Call me a young curmudgeon, but I sincerely don't like the centralized corporatized social networks- and how they've eaten most of the other forums I've seen, as people drift away to use them instead. This place is, simply, refreshing.

But, enough yammering from me. Hello!

Hello Kistaro, nice to meet you and welcome to Vizzed Board.

This place is not an illusion, neither the Matrix... it's the reality, the dream which came true ^^

Well, if you have any questions, feel free to ask

Wow, you sure have a lot to share. I would certainly like to see you join us on the Vizzed Board of a discussion or two... or three, or more. Very few people here, if any, claim to be Buddhist, so you would definitely bring a different point of view here --Vizzed has already attracted a wide variety of people to begin with. If you have any questions about the Vizzed Board, or just want to chat, feel free to send me a private message.

It's rare to get a member as well spoken as one self, so welcome

I'm not really into the whole tech thing, so you'll excuse me if I try to direct my attention from it lol

I see you talk about PSP, and that's something we sort of share in common. We both own Sony products!

I prefer the PS3, but that's me.

I got an XBOX 360 back when I worked for Microsoft and could pick one up at an employee discount (it's a fairly modest discount, for XBOX stuff; PC software's marked down much further); I then never got around to buying a PS3 because there isn't that much divergence in the game libraries. There are a handful of things I'd like that the PS3 has and the 360 doesn't, but not enough to justify the price of an entire console system, y'know?

That may be the really clever thing Nintendo's doing. The Wii and Wii U are a fascinating mix of good and bad (and very bad) ideas, but at least none of the other consoles are likely to substitute for them, most of the time- so they're competing against Nothing, rather than against another console. Whether I buy an XBOX affects whether I buy a PlayStation, but much less so for whether I buy a Wii...

Of course, my favorite Wii games have all been ones that could be implemented without any of the features of the Wii, with the exception of Wii Fit, which is watching me lose about a pound a week. (More related to Dance Dance Revolution and calorie counting, though.)

Kistaro : Some dreams become reality. I learned that too the first time I came to this website. I mainly like the N64, Gamecube, and Wii (whatever has the Zelda series). I don't have a PS3 or Xbox360 but I kinda of what them in the future when I have enough money to afford them. Anyway, have a good time on the site.

(THE EPIC TURTLE GUY) title given by {Hnnn}.

Yeah, I don't like social networks in general either. I have to admit that this place can get a little spammy sometimes, but there are some really good topics that sprout up.

I prefer forums to social networks because there's an actual order to everything. Rather than just being able to put random topics and comments everywhere, people actually have to make threads and behave themselves around others.

Oh, and I see that you enjoy technology, just like myself. I'm pretty sure that my future will involve computers in one way or another, and right now I'm investing my time into server management and networks, and I'm dabbling into web design along the way.

the_casualty : I think the biggest problems I have with social-networking style communications is that it's person-centric. If you reply to a post, i9t's about the person, rather than the conversation topic, sort of inherently. All the venues of conversation in a social network belong to someone. Of course, this forum belongs to its owner, but the threads are simply things-of-themselves; they have an initiator, but that's nowhere near the kind of claim a social network account is for territory.

Forums are subject-centric. The subject of the post and the conversation is the most salient priority, rather than the person whose domain it's in. It makes a pretty important difference, and tends to allow for much more conversation-centric discourse.

Forums re-bump posts when someone replies; social networks just let conversations fall off the page. For the most part; G+ took the kick-to-top approach under specific circumstances (specifically, when G+ thinks you're interested in a thread), which helps, but it's still too person-centric.