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An Embarrassment of Me

Over the years, I’ve managed to leave bits of my self all over the web, including places I didn’t even know I’d been. On impulse, I thought I’d pick out some of the more amusing or interesting ones.

Blogging and suchlike: LiveJournal and Facebook
What more do you need to know?
Fonts: Magic Medieval
Jesper and I picked out “Goudy Medieval” to be the font we’d use for the title of all the Magic: the Gathering cards. We were putting the same lettering on both dark and light backgrounds, so we set it up to be white (actually very light gray) with a hairline black drop shadow to help pick it off of the White magic cards. On darker backgrounds, the lettering tended to get very spindly, so I used Fontographer (I think) to create a somewhat bolder version of the font, and added a bunch of missing characters (smart quotes, letters with umlauts and accents, stuff like that). I renamed it “Magic Medieval” so we could pick it out of the font menus. Somebody at the company, a few years after I’d gotten out of production, then gave the font to somebody not at the company, and basically it got loose in the wild.
Costuming with Julie Zetterberg: Magic Carpet Ride and Carnevale on Mars
Twice I’ve had the pleasure of being a supporting cast member for Julie Zetterberg’s amazing costume presentation as WorldCons. The first one, I am “backdrop support right,” which nevertheless resulted in me carrying home a ribbon inscribed “Best in Class: Master Class.” In the Carnevale picture, I’m 3rd from the left, behind the shiny gold masque, and also behind, and mostly obscured by, Julie herself.
Game Designer: BoardGameGeek/GeekDo
I’ve done a lot of work with James Ernest on his games, and he’s even recently started referring to “Howell’s Theorem” in speeches about game design (thanks!), but I’ve only actually qualified as a co-designer for one tiny little game, which was originally published as “Lamarckian Poker,” but changed its name to “Darwinian Poker” a bit later. But that’s enough to land me on the list of designers at BoardGameGeek. I also have a handful of role-playing game credits, also recorded there.
Wikipedia:
Every few years I find yet another reference to me on Wikipedia, although I still don’t have an actual page about me there. I am mildly dismayed to see that (as of March 2020) I'm not cited in the article about Magic: the Gatherering, nor in the entry for Eurogame. Hmph.

Not Me

There are, according to whitepages.com, over 1,300 David Howells in the United States. I’m not the golfing Dave Howell, nor the Portland iPhone developer who is a former Apple employee (alas), nor am I a well-known general. Hopefully General David Howell Petraeus doesn’t get too many emails from people who think they’re going to reach me. I probably should send the same good wishes for avoiding email confusion to David Howell Evans, although most people know him better as The Edge.

I’m also none of the Dave Howells who tweet, nor the founder of Fat Cat Records. I’ve never played football for the Miami Hurricanes. I’m not a Mixed Martial Arts fighter, the Baron of Guilford, a novelist, a cowboy poet, leader and tenor sax player for a jazz quartet, a chess Grandmaster, or a surfboard shaper. Happily, I am neither of the Dave Howells whose billing became entangled.

I admit that I am quite startled to discover that I am also not the Dave Howell who wrote E-publishing in a Week.

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