Introducing Dvandom

...sssssssssssssss...I am the pirate signal, let me in....Hiya Chuck....

Wait, no, wrong introduction.

I'm Dvandom, aka Dave Van Domelen.  I'm part of the old rec.arts.comics.* crowd, like Greg Morrow is.  I've got a PhD in physics, like Greg Morrow does.  I've done some science advising for comics writers, like Greg Morrow has.  I live in Texas, like Greg Morrow does.

Wait, am I Greg Morrow?

No, I don't have to deal with Houston traffic, so I must not be him.

Very old guard.  Undead Suicide Squid old.

Anyway, there's a decent chance you've seen me somewhere else before, especially if you're involved in one of the fandoms I'm vocal about.  If you haven't, just google "Dvandom" and you'll get a load of stuff.  As one of the old guard, I have a pretty large internet footprint, and I'm told it's surprisingly unscandalous, in part because I didn't really get online until graduate school, by which time I'd mostly gotten any Young And Stupid out of my system.  And when your career goal is "physics professor," a lot of legal but embarrassing stuff involving being an adult who plays with toys and reads comics is not a liability.  (Aside: owning 6000 comics when it came time to move out of grad school was a liability, from a purely logistical standpoint.  But being known to be an adult who read 6000 comics was not a liability.  We are expected to be geeks.)

Since I'm pretty easy to research online, I figure I'll use this introduction to bring up a few things that I probably haven't talked about enough online to show up in the first few pages of results.  If you don't feel like googling, you can always hit up my mostly text-based fiction and reviews page, my vanity domain site that's largely images, or my deviantArt page.  I'm no longer the only Van Domelen who'll turn up in comics-related searches, though...my brother has been drawing for Scout Comics lately.

While I live in Texas now and have a thirty year mortgage and all that, I'm not from Texas.  I grew up in Wisconsin, went to college in rural Missouri, grad school at The Ohio State University, then progressed through a series of non-tenure-track jobs at Michigan State, Kansas State, University of Nebraska at Kearney, and then even-more-rural Missouri's Cottey College, before settling down (I hope) at Amarillo College.  At this point, I'm simply from Flyover Country, and usually leave it at that.  (I did almost end up in Houston or its environs, I've made it to the interview finalist points for jobs at Texas A&M, Rice, and Texas A&M at Galveston.)

I read a lot of Military Science Fiction, aka MilSF (which sounds like a very outre dating site abbreviation).  Some of this is inclination, for instance I've been into David Drake since high school.  But a lot of it has to do with Baen's attitude towards ebooks and DRM: they're pro-ebooks and anti-DRM.  They give away a lot of free ebooks to get you hooked on series, and my novel-reading habits for the last decade have mostly been "read while on exercise walks or while waiting in line," so reading on an Palm or iPod or iPhone has been my main way of going about it.  Buying a lot from Baen fits in with my preferences for both logistics and philosophy.  And Baen publishes a LOT of MilSF, so I've been reading a lot of MilSF the past decade or so.

I played City of Heroes for the last several years of its existence (that's pretty obvious if you browse my dA), and I'm also on the development team for the crowdfunded successor project City of Titans.  I'm not a coder (rare among my generation of Physics students, I never really got into coding), but I'm good with game systems, and I designed a lot of the underpinnings that got handed off to the coders.  I'll probably write some articles about City of Titans as it gets closer to opening day.  Since City of Heroes closed its doors, I've played a bunch of other MMOs, some just long enough to figure out what to steal or avoid, others long enough to do all the non-endgame content and get tired of them.  As some of you might have guessed from the top of this intro, I'm currently playing Secret World Legends, which is kindasorta a superhero game, albeit superheroes meet Call of Cthulhu.  I still don't consider myself a twitch gamer, but I have to admit I've gotten better at it than I ever thought I would.

I am not much of a traveler by inclination, but my choice of career has led me to live in more states than the entire rest of my nuclear family (parents, brother and sister) combined.  Most of my travel prior to 2010 was for conferences, and most of my travel since then has been for job interviews (I have not gotten offered any job I flew out for in the post-2010 era, so I've started associating flying with "wasting everyone's time and not getting a job."  Every job I got recently came from driving out for the interview, or Skype interviews.)  Needless to say, I'm currently quite happy not leaving town except for occasional family visits.

Anyway, since I already have several outlets for writing, I might not be one of the most active participants here, and I'm going to focus on writing content for Fifth World that doesn't fit as well into my existing venues.  I am aggressively miscellaneous.