About Me--The Friendly Necromancer

Hi,

I’ve been needing to update my "about me" for a long time now. Up until this point, the most you would know about me and my accomplishments was this, “I'm a dad (3 kids), a husband (lovely wife), an owner (love my dog), an avid player of Wizard101, a warcaster (Mytheon), a minstrel and a champion (LOTRO and I played drums in RL), a beastlord and a cleric (Everquest), a paladin (WoW), a sorcerer (DDO), a songwriter, a poet, a beatboxer, an editor, and a blogger.”

Yeah, that doesn’t tell you much other than I like to play MMOs and I’m “colorful,” so check this out if you have the time.

First, this post will tell you why I go by the handle Stingite. That catches you up to about two years ago as far as MMOs.

Now let's talk Wizard101 and The Friendly Necromancer . . .

I've been the featured blogger for Wizard101 over two years now. In the time since starting my blog I've written around 1,100 (and growing) posts about mostly Wizard101. Some call me the father (or grandfather) of Wizard101 blogging since I was the first blog to be entirely about Wizard101. Now there are well over 100 blogs (and growing) about Wizard101. They rock! I'm always interested in the efforts of other Wizard101 bloggers.

Over those two years my blog has changed and evolved. I started out mostly talking about my adventures as my family as I worked through this game. Since that time, I’ve had a lot of other things to write about.

I’ve done a few interviews with people like Nelson Everhart (creator of the music of Wizard101), J Todd Coleman (Ambrose), Kiersten Samwell (Professor Greyrose), and even a few talented fans of Wizard101.

When it became apparent that there were so many awesome fans of Wizard101 (and I couldn’t interview them all), I decided to start creating trading cards of fans where I could include the person's stats, likes, dislikes, and advice in a short paragraph format (a mini-interview of sorts). I made 40+ of these, and that was enough to complete a Wizard101 card game made out of some Wizard101 fans.

For a long time I was very interested in answering questions for people who could not find their answers anywhere else. I always tried to give people the best answer I could within the hour or two that I had before work to write about Wizard101. This amounted to around 200 questions before I got worn out with answering all those questions. I don’t envy KI’s customer support team. ;-) You may see me answering questions randomly still (if I’m feeling up to the task).

For a while I tried my noobie'ish hand at making comics and videos . . . basically anything I could try to mix my creativity with playing Wizard101. Eventually this led me to making music remixes from a few Wizard101 songs. I try to keep them all loaded up on Google Docs as well.

I’ve also been interested in helping the alternative Wizard101 community grow (Wizard101 Central is KING of all Wizard101 websites, but there are a lot of cool options out there for people who like to surf around--like My Diary of a Wizard). I am responsible for initiating a good portion of the early Dragonspyre information over on Wikia. I made a few posts trying to encourage my readers to participate and add to the information there. Many seemed to take on my call.

I was an early adopter with Ravenwood Radio and can now be heard on a number of their podcasts, with one of them featuring me as a guest with Stephen and Leesha (episode 5). Ravenwood Radio was the first Wizard101 podcast. It’s my pleasure to be associated with Ravenwood Radio. It’s a lot of fun (and I’ve met Leesha in real life now so ;p).

Probably my biggest claim to "fame" (if you can call it that) is from an idea to add your friend code to Halloween candy. This idea was featured in the game's patcher and my hits a day went from 1,500 to 11,000 a day while being featured in the patcher (it hovers around 2,000 hits a day now). I gained a lot of loyal readers at that time.

For a long time when housing came out I did a "housing item of the day" post over on my blog that featured an item and told where to get it and whose house I had found it at. You can still find these on my blog, but now I also have a long list of furniture items maintained in a Google Docs file for everyone to use. (see link up top, yo.)

Likewise, I also did a feature called “pet of the day” as we ramped up to the pet enhancements release. (and yeah, my skeletal pirate April fool's joke caused some fuss over at Central. hehe) There’s a long list of pets that I maintain on a Google Docs files as well. This has helped a lot of people find their perfect pet.

As far as my involvement over at Central, I'm a member of the Wizened Wizards. I'm also the person that asked for someone to take on the project of making maps of reagents. Evil Theurgists (Joseph) took that on. I helped where I could. My time and efforts are mostly concentrated on my blog here rather than on Central.

I guess I can also claim to have had some influence with the Petnome project. After seeing that all pets had a static set of talents (for the most part), I made the call to the community that someone needed to step up and lead people to unveiling those talents. Kevin Battleblood took that on. I helped where I could.

A few months before Celestia was released, I became a freelance writer for Beckett’s Massive Online Gamer Magazine as their top Wizard101 reporter. I write not only for MOG but for Beckett’s Fun Online Games. When articles are due, you see me get sparse around here. It’s a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of fun to work closely with the people at KingsIsle when I gather information.

If you stick around here long enough, you’ll probably see a raffle or two happen on my blog. I like to give away stuff when I can! KingsIsle has rewarded my efforts as a longstanding member of the community and vicariously let me reward my readers with gifts once in a while.

And finally, if you hang out here enough, you'll see me chatting about my wonderful family: Uber wife, Amber, Kyle, and Diapermancer.

It’s taken quite a bit to get to the point where I’m at now with this blog, and it’s definitely a labor of love. My site is ad free for the most part (there are ads that pop up if you search my site). I'm not really in this for the money . . . as I told my mother-in-law (Nanamancer) when she asked me why I went to this much effort for this game: It makes it more fun for me. Plus, I can’t help myself. I love to write about videogames, and Wizard101 is a great family MMO. The Wizard101 community rocks!

Thanks for your time, and, as always, my catch phrase:

Happy Dueling!