Other interests and hobbies
Do you play guitar, or do some other type of hobby in order to get inspiration for your writing?
– Jesse Leal
I don’t play guitar, though I’ve always wanted to learn. I tried to teach myself on my father’s guitar, but never even mastered tuning it, which made the rest of the process painful to the ears.
I can read music, and play piano and clarinet on a grade-school level. But I wouldn’t say either of them inspire my writing. So, for the truly curious, here’s a quick run-down of John’s Other Interests:
- Gadgets Treo 650? Check. TiVo? Check. (Early Adopter points: I got my first digital video recorder in 1998.) Toyota Prius? Check. (We have two in the family.) Wireless Weather Forecaster? Check.
- Languages I like to travel, but my interest in languages is borderline obsessive; I spent six weeks learning Japanese in preparation for a 72-hour visit to Tokyo. I’ve spoken Spanish since grade school, and French since high school. I’m fascinated by the evolution of languages, particularly how English lost its Germanic declensions and re-imported so much of its vocabulary from French (which resulted in having both ‘regal’ and ‘royal’).
- Warcraft My name is John, and I have Warcraft problem. Kudos to the good folks at Blizzard for their digital crack.
- Reality Television If I only watched The Amazing Race, no one would question my taste. But my TiVo also holds Big Brother, The Real World, and The Real World/Road Rules Challenge.
- Home improvement I’ve renovated two houses in four years, by which I mean telling a contractor what I wanted and blissfully ignoring the actual labor involved.
- Information architecture Beyond the work I do designing and running this website, I also love to keep up on XML, RSS and other emerging standards.
- D.C. heroes I know there’s a lot of love out there for the Marvel pantheon, but I’ve always been a D.C. guy. Ever since I watched Superfriends as a kid, Superman and his brethren were my gods on Mount Olympus. I was never much of a comics reader, but somehow I learned all of the heroes’ mythology.
January 12th, 2005 at 5:08 am
LOL @ John August being addicted to World of Warcraft: Bye-bye screenwriting career. Tim will be disappointed…then probably get really obsessed with WoW and ruin his directing career too. So he know’s who to thank.
Just don’t let Johnny play it John, you’ll have thousand’s of his fan’s knocking your door down when he give’s up on acting to pursue a career as a Dwarf Hunter (er that’s Johnny Depp by the way.)
Ok I’ll stop now (I should be ashamed.)
(p.s. Can’t wait to see your new film (Charlie)!)
(p.p.s Ok going back to world of warcraft now.)
(p.p.p.s. damn it died!!!; my first first time.)
/Very ashamed (yes, partly because of my terrible writing abilities/skill’s/talent, whatever you call it.)
Excellent site btw; helpful and informative. Thank’s!
I forgot to type the “spam prevention phrase” in and the post was deleted - lucky for us both I cut and pasted.