Howdy Ya'll

[The Infamous Bon Bon]

It's so hard to figure out how to start these introductions, so I will start rambling now...

I'm a 30 year old husband and father of two, one girl who is 6 and a boy who is 5 and I have a 12 year old stepson that visits us one day a week.

Politically I'm a liberal and religiously a secular humanist which isn't very popular in Wyoming so I spend a lot of time debating with people.

I work in a machine shop, spraying metal on parts 56 hours a week and RPG Making is one of the things I think about to keep me from going nuts. Its not a bad job cause I get lots of time to read, write, and listen to loud music and now I have benefits and am no longer considered working poor and I happen to be a big fan of that.

I started playing video games with my brother on the Atari and haven't really stopped, though now I mostly play with my kids, so I can't play really violent or profane games anymore, but that's okay because I never really cared for that all that much.

I started watching anime about 17 years ago with Vampire Hunter D and Ninja Scroll and have been hooked ever since. I started buying and reading manga about 10 years ago.

I use to play Dungeons and Dragons (2nd, 3.0 and 3.5) and TCGs like YuGiOh, Pokemon, and of course my biggest money suck - Magic: The Gathering where I was a sanctioned judge.

I read a lot of young adult fiction because its more fun. I really like Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Percy Jackson, and the Mortal Instruments series.

I started RPG Making (with VX) about 3 years ago and the plan was for me to learn the program and do most of the programming and my brother was going to write the story because he was an awesome story teller, but a year into learning the program (I was back in college and learning several programs at school so it took a while) my brother was killed at work and that was only 8 months after my mom died of a heart attack so I had to shelve it to spend more time with my dad. I picked it back up (actively) about 6 months ago and after learning all the new nifty scripts and accepting that I would have to write my own story (which is hard for me) I found out about Ace. I can't wait to use it (and I might actually finish a game this time).

Boy that was kind of depressing. Sorry about that.

Thanks for reading all that, it ended being long and I could probably go on forever, but I'll end with this: does anyone else remember what life was like before the internet cause we didn't have that when I was a kid or the cell phone that I typed this on?

 

[Shaz]

It's nice to know a bit more about you. That's so sad about your brother and your mom It must have been hard to pick it up and keep going. I'm glad you can enjoy it now with your kids - your brother would have loved to be a part of that, by the sounds of it!

Yeah, I can remember pre-internet. I remember getting lists of games on discs (I have no idea where the lists came from now - they were printed) and ordering a disc with half a dozen games on it for a couple of bucks and having it posted.

My parents bought us a Commodore-64 for Christmas when we were all still in school - my younger brothers and I were up from 6 in the morning until 11 at night writing our very first program that day - all that "peek"ing and "poke"ing in Basic, and at the end of it, we had a picture of a dinosaur on the screen We also started playing Dungeons & Dragons shortly after E.T. came out. I gave both of them away to focus on school, then uni, and none of my friends were interested in any of that. I sometimes wonder how differently things would have turned out if I'd kept writing programs and playing that game all this time.

 

[The Infamous Bon Bon]

It was hard, but my wife and kids were really supportive and dinking around with RPG Maker helps get my creativity out.

I found out that my dad was actually using the internet early on because he was in the military in the early 80s and they had the really basic internet then, I should ask him more about it some time. I also remember when I was like 13 or 14 years old and we would save up AOL discs (that had a free hour on them) because our friend Joe had internet. It wasn't anything like it is today, not that I'm complaining, I like the internet nowadays.

I had that atrocious E.T. game on the Atari, I heard there a landfill somewhere with thousands of the game because it sold so poorly (could just be an urban legend). I did a little QBasic programming on my TI-85 calculator and I did a Visual Basic class in high school. I was so bad with Visual Basic. It took me hours to make the simplest programs because if and else statements were the only thing I could really get down (which is why I love eventing). All my programs worked, but were thousands of lines of code when most of the guys could do the same in 2 to 5 lines, but sometimes theirs didn't work and they always took forever trying to fix it, so I didn't feel too bad about copy and pasting so many if and else statements.

It was fun but, I don't really have time for Dungeons and Dragons anymore plus my wife isn't interested, I do miss though.

I saw in your introduction that you were distance schooling your son. My wife and really looked into that, they have some really cool programs for that and we almost did it.

 

[Knightmare]

Hey its my tasty friend Bon Bon! Welcome over here! Sorry you're working such long hours I knew what that was like a few months ago, doesn't give you time to do much. Anyway nice to see you over here I'll see you around.

 

[Lunarea]

Welcome to the forums, Bon Bon! Your username makes me crave candy ... :lol:

 

[The Infamous Bon Bon]

Hey its my tasty friend Bon Bon! Welcome over here! Sorry you're working such long hours I knew what that was like a few months ago, doesn't give you time to do much. Anyway nice to see you over here I'll see you around.

The hours are brutal, but last year we cut back to 40 hours a week for about a month and I was broke. I had lots of time to play games and stuff, but stressing about money sucked a lot of the fun out of it.

Welcome to the forums, Bon Bon! Your username makes me crave candy ... :lol:

That's the idea. I'm actually an undercover agent of the dental industry and I use my powers of manipulation to drive up business. :lol:

 

[Ichi]

Hey Bon-Bon, welcome aboard! Oh man what I would do for some Dungeons and Dragons scripts for rpgmaker... /drools... and Magic, I don't even play anymore but I still impulsively buy new decks/boosters... talk about a money pit. My only hope is someday one of those shiny cards is worth some scratch.