Wired has a lengthy rememberance of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax here.
Certain to cause Spouse’s eyes to jump out of her head and a significant amount of associated sputtering is the following passage from the article:
Many trace the origin of war games to a 1913 work by H. G. Wells titled Little Wars: A Game for Boys of Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for that More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys’ Games and Books.
H.G. Wells is SO not getting a Christmas card from us this year.
Thanks for the link — I never knew much about the man aside from having a fabulous name (I think everyone should have an ‘x’ somewhere — I advanced and theVet shot down the idea of going with some native Aztec name for figgy; it’s taking it one step too far if no one can pronounce it correctly).
You could always go with something sporty like Chalchiuhtlicue as a diminutive or nickname; you know, maybe instead of “honey”, “sweetheart” or “darling.” It kind of looks like it might rhyme with “cute” (which figgy clearly is, by the way, judging by your Flickr photostream).
It’s weird, we never really knew much about Gygax either – he was an even more elusive deity than the larger than life, er “larger than fantasy” characters in the Deities and Demigods manual (which we also pored over, attempting to commit every last detail to memory). In fact, I’m convinced that when we did refer to him (always as reverentially as possible for teenage boys), we pretty much consistently got his name and put an extraneous “R” in the middle: “Gygrax”. I guess the fact that we knew little about him is probably the most striking example of the changes in the availability of knowledge that teh Intarwebs have wrought: in today’s world, we would have Googled Gygrax (been asked if we meant “Gygax”) and gotten a wealth of information at our fingertips in .0000089 seconds.
Thus the death of mystery in the mundane.