All of this chaos makes perfect sense · 11:21am Nov 5th, 2014
When I was young, I moved to Eugene, Oregon. I was always a smart kid, and I already knew how to read and write (and had for possibly several years even at that point). Now, Eugene is kind of an odd town, and it had some charter schools there, namely language immersion schools - schools where you spend half the day speaking (and learning) a second language. At the time, they had a Japanese, a Spanish, and a French immersion school. I was somewhat torn between the Japanese and French schools, but I believe I chose the French school because it was likely to be less disciplinarian and because some of my ancestors were French (as I have later learned, my ancestors were, in fact, amongst the very first settlers in New France).
Now, as you might imagine, going to a French Immersion Elementary School is incredibly nerdy, so the school was full of smart kids. I never had any conception that being smart was in any way bad, and of course we played all manner of nerdy games. The older brother of someone I knew played D&D after school, and I joined him a couple of times, which immediately hooked me. I had always enjoyed making up stories in my head, and playing made up stories was just too fun an idea.
I got the boxed set, then a 2nd edition Monster Manual, and, reading through it, noticed that there were lots of types of dragon - but no titanium dragon. This was wrong - titanium is the most awesome metal there is! I even know that as a little kid. So, naturally, I photocopied the blank monster manual page and made up a titanium dragon. I don't remember the details (other than that it was the best metallic dragon ever), but the name, for some reason, stuck with me - I had always enjoyed the symbology of dragons, and a titanium dragon was clearly the best kind of dragon, so I became the titanium dragon in my head, as a title of sorts - and later on, as an internet handle.
Many years later, circa early 2002, I created a free webpage on DigitalRice, back when having a free webpage was a thing. I suppose it still is, to some extent, but modern internet functionality has kind of supersceded such; I may someday soon have a webpage again, but it won't be free, and it won't much resemble what I had back then.
The webpage was called "The Titanium Dragon's Lair". For you see, even then, all that time ago, I was the Titanium Dragon. So, doing a vanity Google search on the first of May, 2002, I ended up finding Dracana's Lair, a website about being otherkin - that is to say, the belief that you were something other than human in some sense. In her case, a dragon. "That's fascinating," my 17-year-old self thought, "someone who believes themselves to be a dragon must be interesting." And so I looked at her website, and found out about otherkin, and the Gryphon's Guild, and the people who believed themselves to be nonhuman. I hung out with these people for many years, though I have not spoken with most of them in many years at this point.
In that time, I learned about furries and the furry fandom. I didn't know much about them at first - indeed, at first I confused furries and otherkin, a mistake my present self finds amusing to this day - but I ended up browsing through various things, looking at art, and especially coming across various webcomics. I had always been a furry without realizing it, and thus having access to massive amounts of art and other interesting stuff was cool.
Over many years, I followed many webcomics. One webcomic leads to another, via ads on Project Wonderful, and on May 1st, 2010, I clicked on an ad featuring a cute cat and found a webcomic called Bittersweet Candy Bowl which featured anthropomorphic cats. I met some interesting folks there, and started hanging out with not only the creator of the comic but a number of other folks on IRC, Skype, and on their forums at the time. My many years of being a huge fan of roleplaying games ended up leading me to join into a game on their forum - a game called the Adventure Roleplaying Game, or ARG (very original title, to be sure). Everyone played a character in it who was based on a character from the comic, transposed into a fantasy setting, and the idea was that people would slowly die off at random over the course of the story - something which rather got derailed when too many roleplayers actually started roleplaying to a really ridiculous extent. People got invested, we ended up playing through the game, some folks did, in fact die, and we overcame the challenge... and had so much fun that we actually did it again, running another game with the same characters, set a year after the first game, on an entirely different continent. The original person running the game ended up having to drop out much of the way through, resulting in Bribri taking over said game and finishing it.
Who is Bribri? Well, I didn't know him very well at the time, but he ended up started a community roleplaying game group set some twenty years after the original ARG. The idea behind the game was that everyone there worked for an adventurer's guild, and we would randomly get jobs and group up as a random group of characters to do quests, and the rest of the time sat around roleplaying. It was a great deal of fun, and I made many friends, but I particularly ended up bonding with Bribri and sort of becoming the second in command there. Bribri became my best friend, and we ended up participating in other roleplaying game activities together, and just generally hanging out, watching television shows and movies together, and generally having a grand old time.
Bribri, like anyone who read a cute comic about cats, enjoyed cute things, and when a show called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic started to take off, he sent me (and some other folks) a whole folder full of pony reaction images, showing just how cute they were. I ended up starting to watch the show, and made it about ten episodes in before I gave up and turned away from it for a long time. This might have been the end of the story, save that a couple of years later, as season 3 of the show was wrapping up, Bribri started streaming the episodes again, in order… and I watched along with him, and ended up hooked, watching the whole series and then joining the fandom, primarily posting on the Ponychan imageboard. I visited TV Tropes as well, and from there, ended up coming across a few random pony fanfiction stories on FIMFiction.net, but was not really hooked until I read a trollfic there. Or, more specifically, a comment on the trollfic. The story wasn’t important; what was important was that the trolling comment indicated that the reader was not trolled enough by the story.
I realized, at that point, that I was home. Any site which housed anyone who was that much of a troll was clearly a great place to be.
And so I started hanging out on FIMFiction, creating an account there and reading stories I was curious about. I poked my nose into many disparate types of stories, and eventually fell to the dark side of fandom, reading one too many shipfics and deciding that I had to become involved in such. For those of you who don’t know, shipfics are stories about characters from the show being put in a relationship together in a work of fanfiction. I found out about a group called Intelligent Shipping Discussion, which existed because the ordinary Shipping forum was full of people making mindless comments and some of the more sophisticated writers wanted a place to talk which was more moderated for “intelligent” discussion about shipping. As you might guess from the statue icon and the renaissance painting used as a banner for the group, the group’s sophistication was somewhat kidding on the square – it was pretentious as heck, and everyone knew it, but it also really did exist for the purposes you would think such a group would exist for. And many good writers really did hang out there, and gave feedback on other people’s stories.
This eventually resulted in me writing fanfiction – first shipfics, then regular old fanfics of every genre, leading to a massive and rapid improvement in my ability to write prose. Eventually I started hanging out with a lot of other good writers on the website, shipfic writers or no, and participated in random write-off competitions with them, wherein we wrote stories with only a very small window of time in which to write them. These stories were often less than perfectly polished, and after the competitions we would all work on polishing them, often with one another's assistance.
All of this lead to tonight, when someone who offered to help edit my story turned out to be someone who not only knew Dracana, but who had written a website about dragon otherkin which very likely encouraged Dracana to profess their draconicity openly on the internet. Something they did in 1999 resulted in them editing a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction about Celestia raising the Sun 15 years later.
Most of the time, we don’t really see the strings that control the system, but sometimes, if you pull long enough, and have a good enough memory, you can find that it leads back to someone you meet many years later. And it is funny how a few little events can result in you spending large amounts of time doing something you never would have expected you would spend time doing.
Every day, we influence people in ways, sometimes small ones, and sometimes profoundly. Sometimes, the little things we do can change the course of our lives, and we may not even be aware of all the ripples we have set off.
That was a fun read. The only thing I must disagree with is the part about titanium dragons being the coolest. Potassium dragons are Obviously Cooler, because they explode.
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Sodium dragons would too. Don't whip out the spray bottle if you aren't ready for a bang!
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All I can picture now is a water dragon and a potassium Dragon trying to have sex, and subsequently exploding.
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2575561
I beat all of you with the CesiumDragon having sex with the DiHydrogenMonoxideDragon.
¿Do you know what beats all of the above
The CesiumHydrideDragon having sex with the DiOxygenDiFluorideDragon:
¡Boom!
Before the three of us derail this blog any further, I'd like to say that it really is interesting how the world interconnects in the most unexpected ways. Coincidences are the most uncanny things, and you never know where you'll find them, but they really are everywhere.
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A lot of people don't realize this, but titanium itself is also actually pretty explosive under the right conditions. Or, more accurately I suppose, can create pretty good explosions.
You see, titanium rapidly oxidizes in air, forming titanium oxide. Unlike iron oxide, however, titanium oxide remains on the surface of the metal in an unbroken layer which protects the titanium from further reacting with the environment... at least, under ordinary circumstances.
When you're dealing with molten titanium, however, this doesn't happen. To prevent oxidation from occurring, molten titanium is kept under inert gas. However, to prevent the vessel used to contain the stuff from itself melting, water is used inside the vessel walls to keep it cool.
All is well and good as long as the vessel remains intact, but if there is a breach, there is a popping sound as the water starts to contact the molten titanium. This is your cue to start running.
Now, water reacts with the molten titanium to form titanium oxide and hydrogen gas (H2), and the extreme heat will also produce steam. The hydrogen gas and water vapor will begin to rapidly accumulate in the space above the titanium, which will, eventually, create a steam explosion as the pressure increases.
Once the steam explosion happens, it is bad news, because this will cause the inert gas, water vapor, and most importantly, the hydrogen gas to be disbursed into the atmosphere. And for those of you familiar with your chemistry, hot hydrogen gas plus oxygen equals even more heat plus water vapor and a rather nice explosion capable of hurling a rather large piece of metal hundreds of feet through the air and blowing the roof off of the titanium foundry. The rather loud bang can be heard for up to 20 miles.
My mother used to work at Oremet, which occasionally had this problem. After the first several times they blew the roof off the building, they put gigantic hinges on the roof so that the next time it happened, it would blow open the hinges rather than leaving a hole in the roof, and they could just go back up and close it up.
Needless to say, the fire department was not impressed when they saw this. Ironically, after the first time the hinged roof was blown open, they stopped having problems, and haven't had any more such issues to this day.
Titanium itself, in powdered form, is used in fireworks to create white sparks.
2575676 that's... Rather interesting and terrifying.
Thank you for sharing!
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And this is why, boys and girls, molten metal is dangerous!
Well, aside from the more obvious reasons.
I appreciate your circumspection, but if you were avoiding a name-drop for my sake, feel free to ID me. It's nothing I haven't already linked on my user page.
I'm dealing with things in tiny snatches of minutes today but I'll try to add a more coherent response later.
I won't reveal who I was but I used to be a member of the BCB Krew
It's nice to see you here. The BCB forums were a great place, until it dissipated and eventually closed down. 
That place was fun to hang out, and then there was BCBcon, which I couldn't go. 
Shame there hasn't been another BCBcon in a while.
It also seems that you were fated to meet your friend again. I believe in a lot of supernatural things, like fate. Has something ever happened to you that would be hard for you to write off as a coincidence?
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I suppose I shouldn't be terribly surprised to run into a BCBer here; it isn't much of a jump from cute cats to cute ponies.
Alas, it is true that the BCB community has kind of disintegrated; I still keep in contact with a few folks (Bribri (who is also a big pony fan), Ucro, Ace, Rukral, Pan to a lesser extent, and occasionally I poke Taeshi or Suitcase) but yeah, it has kind of drifted apart. Ah, well, such is the way of things I suppose. Still kind of sucks.
As for fate, no, I don't believe in it in real life. I do enjoy playing with the idea in stories, though; my latest story, Dawn, plays around with the idea of fate a bit. Celestia dismisses the idea of fate, but there's an underlying current of irony if you go looking.