User:Christoph Schrader

Bienvenue!
That is, Welcome!

If I were to be honest, which I shall, I would call myself a sporadic contributor at best, but I do hope to become more regular as my real life allows. I am currently working on a standard format for magic pages in the hope of improving upon the one we already have. It is here posted for your perusal.

Qui suis-je?
Who am I, you ask? I should hope you would know because you clicked a link that brought you to a page with a title you should have read! Oh, well, since you have asked, you may call me Christoph. That is the German version of Christopher, probably based on the French Christophe, neither of which is my real name, though I do happen to fancy them. Schrader, or Schraeder as it should properly, or Schräder as it should more properly, be spelt, is the German word for taylor, apparently, though I also like the variants Schroeder/Schröder, which appears as the Japanese form of the name in that infobox you see somewhere or other on this page, I hope.

I wish there were some sort of deep significance to my pseudonym, though the simple truth behind it is that I fancy German names....

Interests
I can say, without hesitation, that my most enduring interest is literature. I absolutely love to read, especially the great novels of yesteryear which show both how great a novel can be and how poorly many of my contemporaries who fancy themselves writers of the literary sort understand their craft. I am the eternal adversary of the silly writers who fancy themselves "modernists" and who think that their nonsensical experimentations with language constitute artistic products. They do not, and never shall.

English is my native language, and, should you dare abuse it in my presence, you should prepare yourself for the worst. Perhaps ironically, I am a proponent of orthographic reform. This does not mean I support a switch to phonetic spelling, which would be entirely stupid, mind you, but rather the ammending of the system we already have to fix the inconsistencies, largely by applying our native English and Norman spellings to the foreign words which do not conform to them.

I also have an abiding love of video games, which, of course, include Kingdom Hearts, and also Tales, Star Ocean, Pokemon, Zelda, and Mario. Final Fantasy once held a certain charm for me, but has soured in recent years owing to the influence of a friend combined with my own finding many of the stories of a decidedly inferior quality than that which they are generally said to possess.

One of my favourite pastimes is writing, samples of which may be perused here:

http://countchristoph.deviantart.com/

I encourage you not to like it too well, for that is the thing I want least and my ego wants most!

And why Kingdom Hearts?
But why not? I must own I found the premise a bit outlandish at first, but I grew to find the games quite endearing, and it was through them that I discovered Final Fantasy, some of which I have also enjoyed immensely -- largely because I love all manner of fanciful things, though I never could quite stomach much in the way of what claims to be modern fantasy literature. There is simply something endearing about the series that cannot be easily explained, even though I was rather disappointed by Kingdom Hearts II (which I did enjoy nonetheless) in the anti-facelift given Hollow Bastion. I liked the rather melancholy world of pipes and pillars a fair deal better better before the town was rebuilt. This also bids one wonder what was done with all the incorrectly-moving water to reveal the immense amounts of now-columnar crystal.