Anthony's CSU Stan

Howdy, blog perusers! Sorry this post is late! I’ve been busy with birthdays and house sitting and all that jazz!

Now, let’s talk fantasy. I’ve been a huge Lord of the Rings fan since I was in elementary school. I read the whole trilogy of books when I was in sixth grade, and boy was that a quest all its own! I fell in love with the world of Middle Earth quickly, through both the literature and the movies. I used to borrow rings from my sister’s jewelry box and play Lord of the Rings with my brother at the park nearby. Recently, after seeing The Hobbit, my love for the land of Middle Earth and all that happens there has grown! My friends and I recently threw a Hobbit-themed birthday party for my girlfriend, where I dressed like a little hobbit. We all sang songs, ate hobbit food, and shared riddles. My friends and I have been re-watching the film trilogy, so we’ve been having long conversations about them, from the symbolism to the CGI.

Now, let’s talk a bit about the playground games I was talking about earlier. I’ve always been an imaginative person, and role playing as my favorite characters from literature, film, and video games, was always something I really enjoyed. In my senior year of high school, this lead to my decision to join theater, which was one of the best decisions of my life. Theater helped me break out of my shell. The stage helped me find confidence, and I learned how to form strong relationships with people along the way. My first production I was in during my high school career was a Harry Potter murder mystery. I played Draco Malfoy and wore a temporary dark mark tattoo for the week of performances.

Harry Potter has been a huge part of my life since I was seven or eight. I still remember the day I got the first book from my dad. I treasured each and every Harry Potter book I got after that, and I still have every one of them. Harry Potter turned me into an avid reader. I gained my love for drawing from sketching characters from the book series in my own little adventures. I followed those characters for the majority of my young life, and being able to play a character from those books, even a villainous one, was perfect. Let’s face it though…the villains are always more interesting anyway.

After I graduated from high school, I decided to get a tattoo to celebrate my life changing theater experiences, and my love for Harry Potter.

I got that temporary dark mark made permanent!

Today, I’m still role playing as fantasy characters pretty regularly, through a game called Dungeons and Dragons. You might know it from parodies and jokes concerning it in the media, but really it’s a great game! You get together with a group of friends, which is already part of the fun. One of you, the Dungeon Master, gets to invent a whole world from your imagination. The other players then create characters, such as elves, dwarves, and gnomes, and play through a story created by the Dungeon Master. The game is complex and intensely details, but that allows the DM and players to do pretty much anything they can imagine with it. Currently, I’m DM’ing a campaign involving three brothers from a royal family who are trying to reclaim their kingdom after it was ravaged by a plague and taken over by a group of evil escaped prisoners. To do this, they must travel back in time to find a lost cure for the plague. Yeah, all of that can be done in this game. It’s amazing.

My friends and I have even considered starting a D&D club at the school, because it’s definitely a game for groups, and it will encourage group communication and help people socialize with people they may have never have met otherwise.

If you read this all, good job, you get +50 experience! That was a lame joke, but still, thanks! Fantasy (and Science Fiction, but that’s for a later post) is a very important part of my life. It means a lot to me, and these worlds have been very real to me in many ways.

Song I’m Blogging To: “Scythian Empire” by Andrew Bird.