About Me 2022

I haven't really written an about me on my blog since 2010, so in the spirit of the Introduce Yourself Week for Blaugust, I thought I'd lay it all out, again. So, lemme catch you up with the past 12 years!

Hi. TLDR: I'm Tom. I live in a suburb of Austin, TX, but I'm originally from Utah. After working for a contractor for the Air Force for 14 years as a Technical Editor, I moved to Austin to be in the video game industry. I've been writing ever since I could keep a journal, and I've been writing about games for years. It just comes naturally to me.

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Now for the nitty-gritty. My parents were pro-journaling. I have journals dating back when I was writing about jumping in piles of snow in my front yard and my cousin stepping on my toys and breaking them. One Christmas as a kid I asked for a typewriter, and my parents delivered!  It was a cheap plastic thing, but it was a legit typewriter. I loved that thing. Yes, I was a weird kid, and I like to think I was also destined to love to write.

360 photo of my old neighborhood in Brigham City

Eventually in my late high school years I took up songwriting and poetry and started down a lyrical path with my music. In my college years, I sensed that wasn't going to work as a career for me, and I opted to major in Communication with a minor in Technical Writing and took up a job as a Technical Editor to start and support a family, which it did for 14 years.

360 photo of our old neighborhood where my wife and I started our family

As it turns out, writing about video games was pretty natural to me. I was blogging as well, but it was a personal blog that was mostly about my kids and music (I've since hid that stuff from public view. It's not really worth reading anymore). Most of my writing about video games up until 2008 was done over e-mail or on guild forums. Typically I'd just write about my thoughts, wants, and goals for my Cleric and Beastlord characters on Everquest.

My Beastlord was named "Stingite" because he was an Iksar from a land where scorpions roamed in the newbie zone, and I had this little OC backstory about my mother naming my beastlord "Stingite" because she would feed him scorpion tails.  I know.  It's kind of dumb, but the handle stuck and I'm still naming myself Stingite in video games all these years later.

In 2008, I fell in love with a new game called Wizard101, and the words just started pouring out of me. I took up the mantle of blogger and started writing about the game and how I was playing it with my family. Wizard101 liked what I was writing and made me an official fan site and their featured blogger. 

This actually led to writing about Wizard101 for Beckett's Massive Online Gamer Magazine and Beckett's Fun Online Games Magazine. Kind of cool actually being paid to write for a magazine. That used to mean something, and I was incredibly proud of seeing my byline in those magazines.

During this timeframe I started to realize how cool the video game industry was while trading emails with Kiersten Samwell, Fred Howard, Nelson Everheart, and other people that worked at or with KingsIsle. It put a bug in me, and I applied for three different jobs at KingsIsle over the period of a couple years. It never worked out. Either the job didn't pay enough to support my family of five (wife and I with 3 kids) or I was always their second choice for the position. I figured three strikes and you're out, KingsIsle, and never applied for a job there again.

Then one day in 2012 I got a phone call from Fred Howard. He wanted me to play the alpha of Pirate101, which was an exclusive honor at the time.  No more than a handful of outside people even got to play in the Alpha of Pirate101, so it felt pretty great.  After a week of playing, he called me back and offered me a job as the Community Manager for Pirate101, no interview needed.  I was floored.

So after working it out with my family and working out salary with KingsIsle, I took the job . . . and the pay cut . . . to work in the video game industry. Living the dream! I spent six and a half years in Community Management / Public Relations / Social Media / Marketing / Management and then made the jump over to Game Design. 

Old designing buddies at KingsIsle

I've now been in Design for four years: at first working as a level designer, then transitioning to more formal game design and narrative design. The past year I've been working as a Senior Designer working with outsourcing groups at WIMO Games.

I have other loves of course, outside of games, and this is mostly a history of my life through the lens of video game writing, but since this is a game blog first and foremost, I'll talk mostly about games here.  If you'd like to hear about my forays into music, well, you could head on over to my music blog or my bandcamp page. For my personal life, I usually stick to Facebook or Twitter, but I'm typically a pretty private person. Suffice to say, I am a church-goer and feel like I've been led and guided to where I am today.

Thanks for reading the Friendly Necromancer!

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!