Last edit
Summary: playing without a gamemaster
Changed:
< At some point I also posted to the German role-playing games newsgroup regarding, mostly regarding [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!activity/de.rec.spiele.rpg.misc/rKRc9NgzL_8J playing without a gamemaster].
to
> At some point in '''1999''' I also posted to the German role-playing games newsgroup regarding, mostly regarding [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!activity/de.rec.spiele.rpg.misc/rKRc9NgzL_8J playing without a gamemaster].
This is the Alex Schröder wiki. In German, there is a tradition of writing “ö” as “oe” if umlauts are not available. And when I started using the Internet while at university, umlauts were not available.
My very first USENET article was about roleplaying, or so Google says. I found an old article I posted 1994-04-19 on distributing experience points.
Soon after I started getting involved in play by email games (PBEM) and wrote GermanAtlantis. The first USENET article indicating that I had in fact working code is dated 1995-12-01.
This is how I got the idea of free software: The source code for Atlantis v1.0 by Russel Wallace was published 1993-09-13 and available for free on the Internet. The license was a very simple non-commercial license:
Looking at the Google archives, it seems that I posted an article 1996-03-11 regarding my text editors of choice: Qedit and Emacs. I was mostly editing C source code at home at the time. At some point I remember doing some work with Aurora, too.
I installed the DOS ports of the GNU tools at home for my German Atlantis coding. And I started using Emacs more often. Some months later I got tired of the DJGPP tools and decided to give Linux a try. According to the Google archives, I asked a question about installing Linux on 1997-10-08.
At some point in 1999 I also posted to the German role-playing games newsgroup regarding, mostly regarding playing without a gamemaster.
I started this site as a wiki in 2002-06-24. I had kept a wiki-like (ie. confusing) homepage on Geocities to “build trust” with my German Atlantis players. Later I became a MeatballWiki regular and kept an OnlineDiary on my Meatball page. At the time I disliked blogging. A year later I realized the error of my ways and started blogging here on 2003-06-03, or so it seems.
2006-11-09 I started writing about roleplaying games, and in 2007 I decided I no longer cared about political issues enough to blog about it. I turned into a HomoLudens, a gamer.
I have used the name Kensanata online a lot. That was the name of my party leader in German Atlantis. “Kensanata, Hohepriester und Oberster Theologe des Hekolat Tempels in Lochinver.” (Kensanata, high priest and supreme theologician of the Hekolat temple in Lochinver.) Hekolat was a mountain god, silent and stoic; Lochinver was a stony vale in the Blue Mountains leading to a huge lake in the east.
Kensanata was not supposed to mean anything in an existing language. It was meant to sound exotic, and it turned out to sound Japanese (to me, at least). Many years later Chris left a comment explaining that 検査 (kensa) stands for inquiry or inspection and that 鉈 (nata) stands for axe or hatchet. Make of this what you want. 
This is also the reason my nick on IRC, AIM, Yahoo!, Geocities, Blogger, LiveJournal, Gmail, Skype, etc. is “kensanata”. You can find me on the freenode network on #emacs, #wiki, and other channels.
I try to have a life and not be a total nerd. I hope my SweetHeart can confirm it. 
See my About page for more, and my Contact page for how to get in touch.
CurriculumVitae has some more milestones…