Who is TwoSkeletons???

hello! i am you humble webapprentice (i would not presume to call myself a webmaster), TwoSkeletons. i hope you are enjoying the website so far. this page is just here to give a little bit of background on me and my life online.

i'm canadian, born in quebec and raised mostly in newfoundland, where i still live today. i work as an information management technician in the public service, to put it deliberately vaguely, and i spend altogether too much time on the internet.

me on the internet

my earliest memories of the internet are of visiting northpole.com, i think at my grandparents' house in quebec; another image, from our house in newfoundland, is of printing off pokemon colouring sheets on our big noisy dot matrix printer. but my online explorations really took off around 2003, when i was hooked into the online lego fandom by the release of the indiana jones-inspired line 'orient expedition'. i discovered christian lindblad rasmussen's adventurer's site and through it core sites like brickshelf and lugnet. a few years later i would join the lego.com, classic-castle.com, and bzpower forums (lying about my age in the latter two cases; you had to be thirteen, and i was twelve). i was only active on them for a couple of years - i don't recall posting much on bzpower at all - but i cringe a bit looking back all the same. i wasn't a bad or obnoxious kid or anything but i imagine i must have been a bit of a nuisance to the adults on the forum. but it is what it is. i kept finding more great lego sites, stories like the kingdom of ikros and games like brikwars. i had a couple of piczo sites, now perhaps mercifully lost to time. once i drifted away from the forums, i rarely used the internet socially for years. but in the meantime i discovered youtube, which had teen titans fan videos, and through them discovered METAL.

could you imagine, growing up listening to your dad's beach boys and buddy wasisname cassettes and then just stumbling upon linkin park and nightwish. mindblowing. nothing would ever be the same. teen titans also led me to fanfiction.net, which i still have an enormous soft spot for. around this time cell phones and social media were on the rise, but i resisted. i didn't want or need a phone or a facebook account. i had a hip street mp3 player full of linkin park songs i got from downloads.nl or recorded from youtube by holding a microphone next to the speaker. at this time my main interest online was comedy reviewers, and in particular the glory that was channel awesome. brad jones and todd in the shadows in particular were massive influences, though i only keep up with the latter nowadays. i took a couple shots at becoming a reviewer myself, in both video and blog form, but thankfully they never took off. but eventually i caved and made a facebook, and my parents made me get a phone when i started college. later i would be required to start a twitter account for some sort of communications or pr course (i don't recall exactly), which i actually quite enjoyed. another course, for some reason, had me make a tumblr, which i hated and deleted as soon as possible.

at first, beyond course requirements, i used twitter to "scrench" movies and shows, that is, taking amusing screenshots and posting them which humourous captions - i coined the term based on kc green's "screnshos" account, which did the same first and best. after i graduated and wasn't watching as many movies, i drifted away from it for a while before becoming active in the #FairyTaleTuesday community for a while in 2020-2021. but then i ran out of time and material to post, and fell off again; i finally deleted my twitter in the fall of 2022, around the time of, but not specifically because of, elon musk's takeover of the platform.

in 2018, driven to grand deeds and high ideals by the agony of working at canadian tire for four months, i started a wordpress, the ruinous reliquary, with the aim of sharing my love of public domain speculative fiction. while i rarely post anything most of the year, i've managed to keep up a tradition of public domain spotlights for "the witching month", showcasing macabre or horrific public domain short stories every saturday in october.

also in 2018 (or maybe 2019, but i doubt it), while searching for dungeons & dragons background music, i stumbled upon the genre of "dungeon synth" and was hooked. it wasn't long before i dug out an old electric keyboard i'd bought for $10 at a yard sale years prior and started noodling around on it, thus launching HALFLING RUNE, a lofi dungeon synth project acclaimed by the music blog heavynfld as "interesting". i took piano lessons for years a kid, because my parents wanted me to, but my heart was never really in it. now i've got three EPs on bandcamp as the mastermind behind newfoundland's worst dungeon synth project - how do you like me now. but it's all a bit of fun. i'm under no illusions that they're good in any real objective sense, but i had fun making them, my friends enjoy them, and frankly i've heard worse, so it's all good.

in 2022 i discovered neocities and created this website, under the name "tuck's blue castle" (because i like friar tuck, blue is my faovrite colour, and i like castles). i always had a softspot for the old amateur personal webpage thing, many of which i came across in my days in the lego community, before social media, youtube and reddit consolidated the internet. this site is a tribute to that "digital homestead" ethos as well as a showcase of my interests, a repository for my link collections, and to share some of my creative endeavours.

me offline

i spend a lot of time on the computer, both at work and at home - more than i like, frankly. but i do do other stuff, and i'm always looking for more opportunities to engage with the physical world and the local community, because that's where most of the really important stuff happens, as well as the most fun stuff. i go to the gym three times a week - usually - and on sunday i like to take myself out for lunch, park somewhere semi-private with a nice view, and enjoy a podcast or two. i love books and movies, especially fantasy and stuff with monsters, and for the last two years i've managed to read over 50 books a year (and you KNOW i count graphic novels and audiobooks towards that). i like worldbuilding but only occasionally force myself to sit down and try to write fiction to go with it.

i like role-playing games; i've mostly played dungeons & dragons 5e, but i've also played fairyland and dread and tried to run 4e back in high school. i've also tried the fabled lands and four against darkness solo rpg systems. i've got a whole shelf of other games i want to try (admittedly pretty much all d20-based fantasy games) but don't know enough people to start a group and am very wary of getting stuck as forever dm. but i'm gonna have to or else it was all a waste of money and shelf space! what a world! i am, as noted above, a longtime lego fan, though for many years now my engagement has been mostly with making minifigs rather than builing anything. and while the years and the increasingly isolating world we live in have taken a toll on my social circle, i've still got a couple of good friends locally that i can get together which for the occasional movie night. i've also experimented with making staves, attended the nl renaissance fair out in paradise, and i recently started journaling. so yeah, that's me offline.

why "TwoSkeletons, what does that mean"

it's just a reference to that playstation skeletons meme. i didn't know it was a meme at first, i thought it was just something funny my friend had found in an old magazine or something so i set my discord name to "TwoSkeletons". at the time i calling myself "paperbacktuck" on most sites but eventually decided that "TwoSkeletons" was better so i rebranded most of my accounts, including this site.

the faves section

  • favorite colour: blue
  • favorite animal: brown bear (overall fave; other animal types listed below)
  • favorite food: mazotti (this is an egg noodle dish my mom made a few times that i think is a mutation of an american dish called "johnny marzetti". god knows how she found it but it's delicious)
  • favourite season: fall
  • favorite dc superhero: captain marvel, the world's mightiest mortal (the shazam guy)
  • favorite marvel superhero: multiple man
  • favorite ultraman: blazar
  • favorite monster: frankenstein (the karloff verison) (yes frankenstein is also the monster, get off your high horse)
  • favorite kaiju: heisei gamera
  • favorite movie: raiders of the lost ark is the traditional answer but i think it's probably the mythica series now
  • favorite actor: jeffrey combs
  • favorite book: the hobbit is, again, the traditional answer, but i haven't read it in ages
  • favorite video game: the elder scrolls v: skyrim
  • favorite skyrim mod: become a bard
  • favorite board game: master labyrinth
  • favorite musician/album: the historian himself/junglecat technique
  • favorite tv show: probably clone high honestly, not the revival though (it's not awful just not as good)
  • favorite anime: fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood
  • favorite manga: library wars: love & war
  • favorite fantasy race: half-giants
  • favorite dinosaur: allosaurus
  • favorite bird: barn owl
  • favorite amphibian: american toad
  • favorite knight of the round table: bors
  • favorite lego set: 79003 an unexpected gathering
  • favorite bionicle: onua mata
  • favorite lego castle faction: fright knights
  • favorite lego space faction: blacktron
  • favorite weapon: quarterstaff

interesting (???) facts

  • i have travelled to france, spain, and germany (only for a couple of hours in the munich airport, though)
  • i cried the first time i saw spaceballs when dark helmet, col. sandurz and president scroob were trying to get into the escape pods and no one would let them in
  • whales sorta creep me out
  • i once attended a local sci-fi convention wearing a black fedora and black jacket and claimed i was "dark indiana jones"
  • i was born in quebec to english-speaking parents, which legally makes me, a straight able-bodied white man, a minority
  • the first time i ever rapped was over the battle options menu music from super bomberman 3 for snes
  • the longest book i've ever read is the guild america edition of grimm's complete fairy tales, which runs 636 pages

Topsters

here are some charts i made on topsters of some of my favorite movies, books, albums, games, and tv shows. they're not in any particular order, for the most part, nor are they exhaustive or definitive, but they give a good overview of my tastes.