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Ethawn

Member Since 20 Mar 2015
Offline Last Active Mar 01 2016 11:45 AM
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Topics I've Started

Ethawn's Application (Elly_Roo's other half)

20 March 2015 - 06:43 PM

In Game Name: Ethawn
 
Real Name/Preferred Name: In my real life everyone calls me "JD". In my gaming life everyone calls me "Ethawn". They are largely inter-changeable for me.
 
What I am: As of today, I am a 42 year old male gamer geek that has worked in the Technical Support trenches for almost 20 years and recently found himself promoted to role of Supervisor over a group of folks that spent the prior year and a few months knowing me only as a peer.
 
Who I am: If I had to choose my identity, I'd have to say that I am a profoundly unapologetic Geek with a foundation of Gamer. My journey started when I was maybe 8 or 9 (roughly 1980) and the "rich" house with the high fence and exotic bamboo garden in the back suffered a malfunction of the home alarm system and 5 or 6 of the bravest of us neighborhood kids decided to investigate what was sure to be a horrible crime of theft that we needed to put a stop to immediately. The home owners were so impressed that they invited us all in to see this new thing they had called an Atari...
 
From there it was a journey that took me down the path of 3am trips to the local arcade to spend questionably obtained quarters, to late nights on the Commadore 64, Apple IIe, Commadore 128, Atari, Intellivision, Nintendo (usually at friends houses since I was generally too poor to have my own) and on and on.
 
If I wasn't playing Dungeons and Dragons with my older brother and his friends, I was playing video games or thinking about video games. The sheer magnitude of gaming memories I have is a little staggering, it seems like I cannot remember most of my childhood, but I can remember Standing Stones, Azteca, Bard's Tale, Ultima IV, World of Xeen, or the first time I played on of the Gold Box D&D games.
 
Although I know where the path begun, I consider the most important moment of my gaming life to be the night I visited my brothers house and saw him load up Ultima Online. Seeing him point to the screen and say "That is a real person, and that is a real person, and that is..." completely altered my life.
 
As an avid MMO gamer, I have had 3 great loves in my life:
 
Ultima Online (including a stint as a Counselor)
Asheron's Call (including a stint as a member of the "Vanguard" testing team)
Dark Age of Camelot
 
There have been a lot of affairs of course, from EverQuest to Anarchy Online, City of Heroes to Guild Wars 2, and countless alpha and betas for everything I can sign up for. My longest relationship was with World of Warcraft, through which I actually met my wife (I was her tank, she was my healer).
 
During all of this I had crossed paths with Minecraft many times but my appreciation for what it offers took a lot of time to really mature. As I became increasingly jaded with what my MMO or multiplayer games offered my wife and I, the perfection of the experiences within Minecraft really began to crystalize.
 
It has undoubtedly become the standard for adventure, exploration, and possibilities when I measure what is available and what is on the way.
 
During all of this time life has continued to happen. Online gaming friendships have given way to marriages, babies, home ownership, and in my case job promotions...
 
A great game may be the foundation of what draws me in, but I have come to realize that it is the people that keep me around. My wife and I have found ourselves orphaned by the maturing of our friends home circumstances and as great as our time in Minecraft together has been it has been empty in a way that no mod package has managed to solve.
 
Elly_Roo gets the credit for finding Sixty Gig, the About Us and Rules and Etiquette sections get the credit for drawning me in.
 
Fundamentally I am hoping to find a community of people that my wife and I can enjoy the Minecraft experience with. Ideally, I think it would be nice if perhaps we picked up a new gaming friend or two along the way.
 
 
With all of that said, gaming is not the only thing I get up to (lest you think I am a one-note automaton). I have begun to venture into costume and prop making (I completed my Captain America shield last Halloween and am slowly working on a suit of Mark IV Iron Man armor) and am in the planning stages of replacing my pathetic wardrobe with clothes I've sewn myself.
 
I also sing to my cats... Because they are cats, and frankly I think it is the law that you sing to them... Mockingly...
 
Anyway, I'll stow away the Shield-Wall-Of-Text and simply say that I appreciate the opportunity to apply, regardless of the outcome.