All about YOU

[birdsofshore]

I love talking with you all here each week / day / hour / insert own level of addiction, but I often think I don't even know basic stuff about your LJ , like what your username means, what your icons are, etc etc. Come and tell me everything.

Why did you pick your username, and what does it mean? What's your default icon, and does it have any significance? If it's a famous person, please don't assume I will know who it is - I never know who anyone is unless I have the hots for them. What about those other things we can personalise on LJ - the quotes or messages at the top of your journal, and that odd little thing I've never worked out how to change, for instance who_la_hoop's says "I can see your house from here", which always makes me laugh. Do you have special art or graphics on your header? What are they all about?

I will start you off. My username is from a poster that I have in my living room, which says "Birds of shore & sea", with, er, drawings of different birds. Of shore, and, indeed, of sea. "Birdsofshoreandsea" is more characters than LJ allows, and besides, the shorebirds are the ones I like the best.

My picture is probably self-evident, but it's a curlew, which is my absolute favourite bird. I live quite near to plenty of these glorious creatures and they make me very thrilled and happy whenever I see one. They're just so ludicrous and beaky. They look like they shouldn't exist, and they seem to have really fabulous personalities. I can watch them for hours, just mooching about and digging for worms. They also have subtly beautiful plumage and the most wonderful song. I'm not actually OBSESSED with birds in real life, but I can verge on HIGHLY ENTHUSIASTIC about birds on any given occasion, so apologies if you just glazed over there.

The quotes on my journal are from one of my favourite books, The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving. "You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed" and "Keep passing the open windows" are pieces of advice from the book on how to survive whatever life throws at you. If you haven't read it, it's a big, insane, sexy, sweet, funny, tragic romp of a book and please don't tell me if you don't like it, because I have adored it since I was about 15 and bought it to impress a boy I fancied who worked in a bookshop (my rec for Frequent Patronage will be along any day now, by the way). Fandom is definitely part of my plan to remain sane and to 'keep passing the open windows' (in other words, to avoid falling into depression and self-harm), so both quotes seemed apt when I was picking my layout.

I have only got a standard LJ header thing - it was the one that seemed least offensive when I looked through. I'd love fancy graphics or some beautiful art up there, but OMG, how hard to choose, plus, if I'm being honest, I don't have a clue how to do such things DD:

Please come and do all the sharing. I really, really want to know.

p.s. A very big thank you to whoever nominated me at HPfanficpoll thingy, if you are on my flist. I was very flattered indeed that you liked my fics, and touched that you took the time ♥

Comments

[tryslora]

Sure, I'll bite... not that mine is very interesting. :)

The default icon is me. One day after getting my hair highlighted I was trying to take a picture of how damn brassy it was that time, and I just... liked how it came out. It's a picture of me that doesn't show my face and doesn't make me feel fat. *wry smile* Or old, for that matter.

The name... er... don't laugh. I made it up for a D&D character, ages ago. I created the character in my junior year of college (we're talking in the 80s) and I played her for two years, and when I was online for a group talking about gaming, I used that as my handle. My normal handle for a very long time was "d-singer" and folks called me "D." which was handy since it mimicked parts of my name. But as folks went online, people who were actually named "D. Singer" started to use that as a username, so I switched to tryslora full time. The best part about it is I know that if I see it anywhere, it's me!!

My "name" used to be "ALL WORDS ARE AWESOME WORDS!!!" because I kept shouting that at people during word wars. :) So I guess it's sort of my catch phrase, and it's been borrowed by others at hdw which makes me really happy, because all words ARE awesome words. I decided that I was tired of the capslock and exclamation points, though, and changed it to "call me trys" a while back.

My titles are sort of an ancient in-joke, I guess. I used to be a part of a community which did this kind of RPF roleplaying. It was a strange cross between characters and real, and I ended up naming my brain. Yes, because I was "me" but fictional, I decided that it was all happening inside my head, where all the characters/voices in my head were reflections of me, thus, it was the Hall of Mirrors. It stuck, and I refuse to get rid of it. :) My actual domain is hall-of-mirrors.com but it's sort of non-existent and I need to fix that someday and move it to a new hosting service. My best friend at the time had the um... crap, I can't remember what hers was called, but the space between them (since we shared a brain) was call The Corridor and there were spaces for all our friends along it. Thus my friends page is the Corridor.

See, it makes a weird sort of sense, even if it all makes me sound a bit insane, I'm sure. And it isn't at all exciting.

[birdsofshore]

LOL, it is very interesting and EXACTLY what I hoped everyone would come and tell me! I guessed your userpic was you, but then, I think EVERYONE'S userpic is them. There are a lot of gorgeous people out there, aren't there? ;-)

I like your Hall of Mirrors line. I never wondered what it meant exactly, it's just evocative and intriguing.

[tryslora]

I end up associating everyone's userpic with them, and if I meet them in RL I get super confused sometimes. :) I don't look anything like my userpic, which is probably why I use it. I think even the shade of red and the way my bangs/fringe are cut is different now.

I love the idea of the Hall of Mirrors. I love the idea that there are all these reflections inside the mind, some slightly different, and some very different, and that they are all THERE and we can sort of navel gaze into them. Or sometimes just switch mirrors and let another one out. Er. We won't talk about how I deal with issues by picking random personalities to do it for me. *innocence* It's a really apt way of looking at my mind, and thus, my world, which my journal reflects, yeah?

[birdsofshore]

Are you aware of the concept of plurality? A flister posted about it recently and it was so, so interesting. I still don't fully understand, but the idea fascinates me. Some of what you say seems to echo or point to that.

[tryslora]

I am aware of plurality and multiplicity. In another identity online, I became fairly involved in some discussions about it with friends who are and I'm not sure I am... but I suspect that I have the kind of psychology that's ripe for it and if my life had been traumatic, I'd have been there. I'm in a weird place in between. I have the folks in my head, and they talk, and they come out in RP and fic and help with other things. I can't imagine a life without living with things going on inside my head. It sounds kind of dull and lonely. Plus, it helps me a ton with writing, because I have an excellent skill at looking at the world through other people's eyes. :)

I'm not sure if anything I say actually makes sense when I start talking about it. I have a tendency to stay quiet because I figured out a long time ago that I neither sound normal, nor plural, and both folks tend to think I don't quite match. And I don't want to offend anyone.

[birdsofshore]

Ah, that's interesting. It made sense to me. I am still learning all about it, so any experiences or such are intriguing to me.

Sometimes when I am writing in first person, I feel like the character (well, OK, it's always Draco) is speaking through me. It's not me actually writing it, I'm just a conduit. That sounds pretentious. Ha, that IS pretentious! But it's a very enjoyable feeling, and it leads (IMO) to some of my better attempts at fic.

[tryslora]

It's not pretentious at all; it's a great way to write character-oriented fic, or characters that leap off the page as being alive. Keep up that technique; it's an excellent one!