About me, I'm 22 and a senior at the University of Illinois in Urbana/Champaign, but not for long! I am a freelance artist and you can see some of my work at http://danale.com or http://evilinnocence.deviantart.com.
One of the things that interested me most about His Dark Mats was the concept of dæmons. One of the sites I googled was daemonpage.com, and they convinced me to look into it further. After taking some quizes and looking through a few animals, I decided mine would be a striped hyena. The species itself is little-known and I tend to go by unnoticed in large crowds. They are generally solitary creatures and only get together once in a while to form families or with their friends, which is exactly how I am. They eat both fruits and meat and they both hunt and scavenge, which is how I feel I react to life and all its opportunities (i.e. sometimes I go out and get what I want, and other times I wait for it to come to me or just settle on the leftovers). They are also, in my opinion, beautiful animals, but have a very weird body structure that can be kind of off-putting, which I feel reflects both my looks and my personality. Hyenas in general are associated with laughter, and I am well known for my sarcasm and sense of humor. I think it's a perfect fit!
dæmons aside, I also found the series interesting because I was raised Roman Catholic and I am all too aware of their restrictive practices. I felt certain parts of His Dark Mats was a little too biased against Christianity or organized religion, but on the whole I felt his treatment of religion and how it ties into Dust was dead-on. I am currently an agnostic atheist and felt that the theory in his books still coincided with my view of life, more or less, although I don't really believe humans have souls or spirits (oops...there goes my dæmon!).
Anyways, I've been on the Internet a long time and in and out of forums, and hopefully I'll be able to find some good discussion here. I'm a little sick of Anonymous and 4chan tainting all reasonable discussion on the Internet with their memes and cries of "serious business", and I'm hoping to find mature people here I can relate to and talk to.
That said, I look forward to meeting everyone! Oh, and as a little plug...I am currently taking art commissions, should you be interested, so just let me know!
