Chuck tagged me a few days ago with the Eight Things meme; although I’m generally fairly anti-meme, I’ve been enjoying a bit of back and forth with Chuck in his blog and on del.icio.us, so figured I could add one more procrastination on a writing day.  Apparently, I have to start with rules … 

Rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged and that they should read your blog.

Eight Facts about Me:

1. When I was in Primary School I won a Lego building competition; this is, without a doubt, my fondest memory of the first 7 years of education.

2. Apart from The Goonies, the film that rattled around my brain the most when I was a kid was called Explorers.  I was fascinated how three boys could essentially make a spacecraft out of everyday junk (and a little piece of alien technology).  In retrospect, this example of making something amazing from the bits and pieces others leave lying around resonates with some of the way I view the internet and participatory culture (and until I looked it up on IMDb to link to for this post, I hadn’t realised River Phoenix was one of the kids).

3. When I was twelve years old I joined Perth’s Doctor Who fan club, The West Lodge, which was my first proper immersion into fandom; I attend the local science-fiction convention in the following year (Swancon 14) but found the whole thing rather intimidating and didn’t get back to Swancon until  seven years later when Neil Gaiman visited Perth as GoH in 1996.

4. I have re-read all six of Frank Herbert’s Dune books as a series at least twenty times since I was 14; I’ve been relatively unimpressed by the prequel novels in the past few years.

5. My sister and I both have PhDs and are the first members of our family to ever attend university at all.  My sister is eighteen months younger, started her thesis a year after I did, but we both were officially given our PhDs at the same graduation ceremony.

6. Emily and I currently live less than 14 metres from Subiaco Oval, which is where Australian Rules Football attracts 40-45,000 people most weekends.  Despite AFL being Australia’s national winter sport, I’ve never been to a Football game.

7. Until last Saturday I had never test-driven a car, having bought my only owned vehicle to date from my parents.  On Saturday I test-drove a Prius which Emily and I are seriously considering buying despite the fact it will take us several years to pay it off.

8. In the proposal for my PhD thesis in 2000, the final chapter was supposed to look at the use of computer-generated imagery and special effects in nature documentaries as a case study of artificial culture where natural and technological meaning merged together.  (It never got written because after that proposal both September 11 2001 and the Spider-Man films happened, and I used the latter to interrogate the cultural impact of the former.)

You’re It! I now tag the following people (hoping at least a few will play along): Jill Walker Rettberg (just getting used to writing that double barrel surname!), Christy Dena, David Silver, Nancy Baym (because fandom has a meme for a heart!), Mia Consalvo (who can sadly not follow the meme and call it ‘cheating‘), Jean Burgess, Kate Raynes-Goldie and Kevin Lim (who lives for these sort of connections!).