User:Gwalla
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- Real name: Garth W. Wallace
- Birthdate: October 6, 1979
- Interests: anime, avant garde music, board games, conlangs, IRC, Japanese language and culture, modern classical music, music theory, professional wrestling, progressive rock, sequential art, skepticism, Tomiki Aikido, webcomics.
- On other wikis: Meta, Commons, Japanese Wikipedia (not used much)
- LiveJournal: [1] (http://www.livejournal.com/users/gwalla/).
Much of my work on Wikipedia consists of small fixes: correcting grammar, spelling, and punctuation; fixing broken wikicode; linkification and fixing misdirected links; categorization; checking fiction; stub sorting; and cleaning up after vandals. I contribute new information when and where I can, but the bulk of my contributions are janitorial in nature.
I'm a member of WikiProject Webcomics, WikiProject Comics, and WikiProject Professional wrestling.
I have done a lot of work on Wikipedia:Votes for deletion, but I'm currently on an indefinite vacation from it. It was taking up too much of my time and causing me a whole lot of Wikistress—something I didn't fully realize until I gave it up cold turkey. I still make occasional appearances there, but only if I run across an article with a VfD notice, or if I find an article tagged for speedy deletion that isn't a candidate and I need to start a vote; I don't trawl VfD anymore. I sometimes feel like I should be there to balance out the dogmatically hyper-preservationist voters, but that's the sort of thinking that kept me there in the first place, and it's just much better for my mental health if I stay out of the fray for the time being.
I have been a Wikipedia sysop since October 2004, although I haven't used my administrative powers often: I've deleted a few speedies and blocked a couple of persistent vandals, but that's barely a drop in the bucket. I've considered getting more involved in the resolution phase of VfD, but that would mean I'd be having regular contact with it; it'd be like having a recovering alcoholic tending bar.
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More about me
(mostly copied from my LJ userinfo)
I'm Garth W. Wallace, also known as "gwalla" online. I'm 25, male (some people get confused by that "a" in "gwalla"), and currently looking for work. Despite my Berkeley upbringing, I went to college at the University of Southern California.
webcomics
I've been into webcomics since about 1999 or so, although I've been a fan of comics since long before that. I stumbled across the first User Friendly collection in the USC bookstore's computer science section, and was susprised that O'Reilly published a book of cartoons. I read it, loved it, bought it, and discovered that it came from online. This led to a lot of time spent in the computer labs. Through a crossover, I discovered Sluggy Freelance, then through Sluggy and its publisher Plan 9 Publishing I discovered some others, and it just ballooned from there. At one point I was reading something like 20 webcomics regularly. I lost interest in UF a while back, and Sluggy is starting to pall, but I still read several. I currently read College Roomies from Hell!!!, It's Walky!, Melonpool, Nukees, and several comics on Modern Tales and GraphicSmash. I'm a longtime Keenspot supporter. I was around for the beginning of Keenspace. I was also an early supporter of Joey Manley's Modern Tales family.
communications
I'm an oper on the Nightstar IRC network (http://www.nightstar.net/). I mostly hang out in #itswalky!, #warpzone, #talkaboutcomics, and #nightstar. Sometimes I join #webcomics, #puroresu, and #progrock.
I'm a forum addict. I post a lot on the Keenspot message boards (http://forums.keenspot.com), the Nightstar Zoo (http://zoo.nightstar.net/), and TalkAboutComics.com (http://www.talkaboutcomics.com/).
music
My musical tastes are eclectic, and tend towards the obscure. I'm into prog rock, especially when that implies more avant garde stuff. I'm not so into the "big six" (or whatever) groups, aside from King Crimson and some Gentle Giant: Yes (before they went pop) is growing on me, but Genesis (before they went pop) and ELP leave me pretty cold. My favorite band is probably Magma, from France. Jazz fusion, "downtown" jazz (a la John Zorn), zeuhl, and harder-edged prog get me going. I also like a lot of electronic (especially jungle/drum and bass), J-pop, West Coast "cool" jazz, and other stuff. I find modern (as in 20th century & beyond) "classical" fascinating—Bartok is my favorite composer, along with Stravinsky, but I also like Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and Alan Hovhaness. Unusual rhythms, meters, and especially harmonies will usually get me to sit up and take notice.
Japan and martial arts
I'm a bit of a nipponophile. Ever since I was small I wanted to visit Japan. I've been an anime fan since Robotech was on the air, and a manga fan since my parents used to pick up issues of Urusei Yatsura and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind at the comic shop. I took Japanese in college, although I didn't get very good grades. In college I got involved in Tomiki Aikido, and I'm currently a brown belt. I've been to one national tournament, which was awesome although I got my butt kicked mercilessly.
language and conlanging
I started conlanging in high school while taking Latin, and rediscovered the hobby online in college. My conlangs tend to be involved in world-building projects intended for use in fiction, although I have yet to get one anywhere near the appropriate level of usability. I have a lot of fun with grammar and phonology, but I get bogged down when it comes to making words for the lexicon.
skepticism and religion
I consider myself a skeptic and "hard" agnostic, the latter meaning I have essentially ruled out the possibility that any organized religion could be literally true but do not believe that there is enough evidence to make an informed decision between atheism and deism. Although I'm not religious, I find religion (especially esoteric religion, early Christianity, and Gnosticism) interesting in an academic sense. I despise pseudoscience. I'm not a member of The Skeptics Society or the James Randi Educational Foundation, mostly due to lack of money I can spare on dues.
pro wrestling
Thanks to a friend, I've gotten interested in pro wrestling. I watch some WWE, of course, and I also follow a local indie fed, APW.
Things I've done
- major expansion to Tod Browning
- lots of copyediting, link fixing, wikicode fixing, categorizing, etc. in various articles
Articles I've started
- London After Midnight (movie)
- Tomiki Aikido
- Professional wrestling holds
- Professional wrestling throws
- Suffixaufnahme
- Fraser alphabet
- Initiation (phonetics)
- Category:Outsider music
- Hentaigana
- Category:Koryu bujutsu
- Category:Chaturanga game family and Category:Shogi — a refactor of the Chess category hierarchy
- Garo
- Dominion: Tank Police
- RINGS
- Cartoon Art Museum
Tools
- /Mozilla keywords — shortcuts for Mozilla users
Current projects
These are things I tell myself I'm going to work on. My follow-through has been less than stellar, however.
New articles in the works:
- /modal verb
- /modality (linguistics)
- Pro wrestling title histories:
- WWE World Championship Title
- WWE World Heavyweight Title
- WWE Undisputed World Heavyweight Title
- after that, lesser WWE titles, and WCW titles. Then maybe get into stuff like ECW, NWA, New Japan, etc.
- Space cadet keyboard - possibly also bucky bit. Work from [2] (http://www.clueless.com/jargon3.0.0/space-cadet_keyboard.html)
- Psychology (professional wrestling)
Temporarily stored offsite
- Cartoon Art Museum: [3] (http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=User:Gwalla/Cartoon_Art_Museum)
- Steinhardt Aquarium: [4] (http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=User:Gwalla/Steinhardt_Aquarium&redirect=no)
To research and expand:
- Professional wrestling match types - needs a lot of work. Currently reads like it was written by a 13-year-old boy (which it probably was)
- Antonio Inoki
- CJK - needs some info on typographical conventions: character cells, halfwidth and fullwidth characters)
- bujutsu - sad little substub needs love - need to check out Draeger's book again
- Martin Goodman - need to fish out that ish of Comic Book Artist on Atlas Comics
- Kenji Tomiki
- Kabocha
- Metreon - needs expansion, links
NPOVification and cleanup:
- Goetic magick - needs to be rewritten so as to not assume the existence of the supernatural. Lots of "Practitioners of Goetic magick claim" I think.
- Jiro Taniguchi - probably not written by a native speaker of English (although their English is better than my Japanese!): needs more naturally flowing prose, copyediting. Already did a quick wikifix.
- NWA World Heavyweight Championship - A lot of company-history stuff that isn't really relevant to the title, concluding with TNA boosterism.
Need merging or moving
- Bon Odori with Bon Festival
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Voicing with Phonation andVoice production(?) -Voicing should be dab page (also link to Inversion (music)),Voice production is possible copyvio
- Voicing now a disambig; wasn't much to merge with phonation besides links. Still not sure what to do about voice production: rereading it, it seems to be more about articulation in general, but I'm not sure.
- Lip-rounding with labialisation
- Pan Class with Pancrase