Well, uh, um, well, it's like this....I have this huge website that I have to update regularly, I work a full 40-hour week, I have a lot of newsgroups on Usenet I monitor, I read a lot....

Oh. You're not interested in _excuses_.

Oh well.

On to the introduction proper. My name is Joe Admire (hence the username "jadmire"; not imaginative, but then, I've always suffered from a serious imagination failure when it comes to user names.) I've been a fan of UF since early '98 when I first found the old site while I was looking for Ah! My Goddess fan fiction (I disremember which search engine I was using at the time, but it picked up on the presence of the three Norns in "Twilight".)

Right now, I'm in the middle of reading SoS, and I'm sure I'll have comments of my own to add later, but in the meantime, here's a bit more about myself to get started with:

- I'm acquainted with Redneck, having exchanged a fair number of posts with him back in '99 when he was posting to the alt.callahans newsgroup on Usenet (and also to soc.history.what-if). I've even had the honor to meet him, at Katsucon '00 in D.C. (even helped him out at the WLP booth for a few hours.)

- My particular interests in anime are AMG (referred to above) and giant-mecha shows of the 1970's (I think Lesser Mazinger is one of my favorite characters in SoS) - in fact, I watched many of the giant-mecha classics (Mazinger, Gaiking, Raideen, Combatra-V, etc.) on their original broadcast runs on Japanese TV when I was living on Okinawa, 1974-77. A collection of toys from those shows still holds places of honor on the bookshelves in my front room.

- Aside from that, I like ST: TOS, SW, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and 1960's spy TV shows and movies in general, and especially alternate history (I own every AH novel Harry /Turtledove has published since "The Guns of the South", inclusive, in hardback and just finished reading S. M. Stirling's terrific AH romp "The Peshawar Lancers").

- The aforementioned website: well, it's kind of interesting, because it concerns a certain item of clothing that more than a few of the female characters in UF like to wear on formal occasions. Not that one necessarily has anything to do with the other, but I just thought it was an odd coincidence. The URL:

http://www.operagloves.com/glovmain.html

Unusual? Certainly. Bizarre? You decide. (Though, considering all the seriously strange websites I've come across since I first fired up Netscape at the beginning of '95, mine may seem somewhat pedestrian by contrast.)

Anyway, good evening, glad to meet you all.

-Joe-