Another post to get deeper into the world of Baccanasta. Who are Baccanasta’s founders? And who actually is in the Baccanasta team?
In my previous post, I already presented the founders: Moksone, Zenion and me. I know Moksone since 1993, when we were classmates; then, we both met Zenion when we applied to the University (2002). At the moment, the team includes other two people: ninjino and Gui Yan Wang. Of course there are other members in the forum, but we consider part of the team only those who contribute to projects.
This is the moment to present better our heroes:
Moksone goes first. He is a long time friend, and deserves the first place in my list. The best thing to associate him with is imagination, which for him has no limits. I have never seen a person capable of such a fantasy like him. This is great in our team, and we often laugh a lot because of his jokes.
His imagination makes him a pseudo-inventor; I could call him a desk-inventor, meaning that he likes to build things as long as he sits at his desk: from ammunitions for his home made blowpipe (made of mathces and sticks!), to the new material for his wallet.
He has always been attracted by computers (since when he used to play with his Nintendo 8 bit), and this passion continues right now; the only thing capable of averting his attention from his PC are women. This is what distinguish him from a geek: he likes women a lot. Lately he discovered that the best thing to put together PCs and women is social networking, and he became quite addicted to it.
Obviously, in Baccanasta his imagination helps us to design all our projects.

The other founder, Zenion, is more addicted to the PC than Moksone. He is trying to get a Bachelor degree in Computer Science, but since he started playing World of Warcraft (immediately after its launch) the progress has been slowed down a lot. We all believe that he is not really with us, but the person that we see is an avatar of his real essence. Aside from that, WoW made him find a girlfriend, even if she lives 500 Km from where we live. The difference between him and a Chinese WoW munchkin is its calm; stress turns around when sees him…
Thanks to Zenion, we always finds good features and addons to add to our projects.

I use to address Moksone and Zenion as “founders” of this portal, together with me. Actually, founder could be a wrong word, since ninjino and Gui Yan Wang were also involved in the project from the beginning; the difference is that Moksone, Zenion and me are the owners of the website (we pay it!), and all the technical stuff is managed by us.

And so, we come to Gui Yan Wang. He is our Dungeon Master, but he should be addressed as THE Master. Really, he knows the universe of D&D better that any other person I know; he has been playing D&D since the launch of the first edition. The ambientation we play with has been created by him and includes ALL ambientations developed by Wizards of The Coast. He succedeed on grouping together all the different aspects of them, and he created a story which starts from the origins of the Universe, giving an explanation for everything. A lot of times happened that what he invented in our campaign was then included in a new accessory published by Wizards of the Coast.
In addition to D&D, his life concerns also his “job”; he is a Ph.D. student in Biotech, a very interesting area of research (he does a lot of DNA-related research); I can also say that he is very good in his job. Well, he is a nerd, maybe a quite normal one, but still a nerd.

The last member of the team: ninjino. Its name reflects how he is and what he likes; he is athlethic and loves ninjas. In D&D, he chooses the ninja; in other RPGs, he chooses the rogue; if there is not a rogue character, he chooses the most stealthy. He just got his M.S. degree in Biotech (Congratulations!), and now he is looking for a job in our poor Italy.
He is really good at painting; he loves mangas and draws a lot of pictures in oriental style. Every image in Baccanasta is done by him, we also force him to do pictures for our D&D adventures.

And now it comes to me; I already introduced myself in the first post. I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, and my Ph.D. will focus on dealing with massive amounts of data; this is a wide area of research, as it can be seen by looking at the big amount of data that nowadays are involved in every kind of application. I am not talking only about data generated by the LHC at the Cern, but also to common mobile phones; if an e-mail folder arrives to contain 1GB of data, then someone has to handle it. So, I study algorithms; they are very interesting, especially when you have to deal with extremely complicated solutions.
Of course I love D&D; I like it very much, even if I started playing it only 6 years ago (it’s still a lot of time!). I spend a lot of time at my PC, of course, and not only to study. I also like fantasy literature; it is unnecessary to say that I love novels like Lord of the Ring, and so on. At the moment I am reading The Wheel of Time, by Robert Jordan; I am reading the 7th book, but I’m trying to slow down the process, to finish the 11th book only when the last one (12th) will be published.
I have a girlfriend, and we plan to marry soon, but I suppose we have to wait for me to finish my Ph.D..
Actually, I don’t consider myself an intelligent person; I don’t even think that I am good at my work. From this point of view I am very pessimistic. However, it helps me a lot to have friends which are very intelligent and with which I can stress even high-level topics.
For what concerns Baccanasta, usually I am the person which sets up the environment and the core of the projects. Very often, I also spend some time thinking about how to implement ideas which seems very difficult to realize.

This is everything for what concerns Baccanasta’s people; just a mention for another member: Mangiast. He just joined our group, and he is not yet so confident about Baccanasta’s projects; but we hope that in some way he will get involved in them.

I am happy that I wrote this post in such a short time; I promise that I will immediately start to think about the next one. For the moment I am still focusing on topics related to Baccanasta, but in a while I will mix with other arguments. I am also thinking of writing something about the social situation in Italy, but it would become a criticism; maybe I could write a column with a title such as “Don’t come to live in Italy because of: <topic-of-the-day>”, or “Go away from Italy because of: <topic-of-the-day>”.
Suggestions are welcome.

Haldo

Hello again!
As I predicted, I cannot post very frequently for the moment; maybe this will change when there will be more interesting things in my work (yes, there is a slow-start).
This post is to introduce Baccanasta, what it is and how it was born.
First of all: what is Baccanasta? Well, it is just this portal; as usual, we have to thank moksone for the name (you need a name for something? Ask him!), but we are still wondering about what the word means, probably nothing.

To understand what Baccanasta is, it is better to start from who we are (with “we”, I mean the founders of Baccanasta). We are a group of friends, and we have been friends for a long time (I hope we will continue to be friends for ten times such a time). Of course in the beginning (10 years ago) only some of us knew someone else of the actual group; the first gathering managed to come up when some people decided to play Dungeons & Dragons; this game is probably a founding stone of Baccanasta (as you probably noticed looking at the website). I wasn’t in that first group, but moksone was there (he is always there!), and our Dungeon Master too.

In 2002 some people decided that playing was not interesting any more, and the group changed to include other people. In that very moment, Zenion and me started playing D&D, together with moksone and other friends. After 5 years of game, the company had evolved to a very big party; however, for some internal problems, a split occured. Some of us decided to continue playing D&D, to maintain a tight contact, and of course to play (we like it very much!).

In the same time, Moksone, Zenion, and me, decided to build up a website to keep in touch with all our friends, and possibly to have some fun. In the beginning the website was just a forum hosted for free; then we bought our hosting space and built up the website. The first version of the website was built upon a CMS and a forum; we managed to make everything work, but the idea of a portal was not so good, and too much complex for what we intended. Therefore, we deleted the CMS part, and left the forum, with some addons.

After the start of the forum, we began to think to side projects; all these additional project are under construction, and can be accessed by our forum. We think that they are very interesting, and we hope that they will bring lots of people to participate to the forum. And here we are! Baccanasta is this forum, but it remained a portal; the portal to all our projects.

Believe me, it will be interesting to follow them up.