User:Aldyron/Charles Stross

Charles Stross
Charles David George Stross is a British sci-fi writer, a geek, a creator of monsters, and more. You can read plenty about him in the Wikipedia article. By the way, I somewhat helped translate his book Accelerando into Italian, and I kind of fell in love with Manfred Macx's glasses.

Wonderfully creative and crazy people like him contribute to make an enjoyable playing experience for us. How so?

The Slaadi
So more than 1.1 billion seconds ago (to paraphrase Accelerando) Charles Stross came up with the Slaadi. The Wikipedia article contains lots of information about them, including an amusing quote about the process leading to their creation.

Pen-and-paper D&D featured the Slaadi, then DDO featured the Slaadi, so we can now enjoy fighting the Slaadi.

Deepcon
Now... about six hundred million seconds ago, a few friends and I founded science fiction club Deep Space One. Among other things, every year we organize a convention named Deepcon, that I have mentioned here in the DDO wiki a few times.

Charles Stross was our guest during.

What this page is about
While life, the Universe and everything often keep me from playing and editing, I keep you all in mind... game, devs, players, editors and all. So I took advantage of Deepcon 19. I printed a few Slaad-related pictures on photographic paper and brought them to the convention's signing sessions. I explained to Mister Stross what they were about, talked about DDO, its developers, its players and DDO wiki.

So now, as a homage and acknowledgement to you all and to Charles Stross, I have a Christmas gift, albeit a late one in some time zones (it's been a surprisingly busy Christmas). I offer you three autographed pictures:
 * one for this page and me personally
 * one for the Slaad race page (which I guess I'll be writing soon)
 * one to replace Gur'noras the Slaad's

I'll link them in the gallery below, too.

Also, there's one for DDO's forums (that I'll upload after I've found the time to read the several minutes of updated policies...).

N.B.: I cheated. I wasn't satisfied with the quality of the scans. In order to keep picture quality as high as possible, I decided to graphically pick up the autographs from the scanned prints and graft them in the same positions onto the original digital pictures. That skips a printing pass, a scanning pass, the inevitably lower crispness, biased colors, and all the dust and scratches.