User Blog:
My Introduction to Alltern8

Dear Reader,

Today marks the first time that I’ll be writing for Alltern8.com, and I thought I’d start simply by introducing myself – after all, what qualifies me to write in the first place?

I was born in Victoria (Canada), and quickly grew to love gaming; whether it be on console or computer, but also loved to read. I thought the greatest thing would be to combine the two together, and in my preteen years, created what I would later learn to be called a role-playing game (like Dungeons & Dragons) which I played with my friends. We had rules and even invented our own twenty sided die (we bounced a bit of paper around on a tray with numbers to simulate random number generator as we had no idea there was such a thing).

Moving on to high school and making new friends, we discovered that the existence of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and tried that out. We still played my own game too, and naively I decided to set out and create a company called Palidor Productions to publish it. Although I’ve maintained the name and still work on games on the side, I’ve learned that it will require a great deal of time to get it where I want it – and therefore it’s more of a side project. High school also saw the rise of Magic: The Gathering, and I played it intensely throughout my high school years, traveling to play and also playing locally. Around the last year of high school, I ended up eventually retiring from the scene, as I discovered it took a lot of time.

I did discover that I liked working for myself, so I went to the University of Victoria after high school to pursue a degree in Commerce (Business) with a specialty in Entrepreneurship. During this time, I traveled to Japan and the University of Doshisha and worked as a transcriber and speaker. I helped to mark papers and designed tests for students. In my last year of university, my team won the Entrepreneurship Award for making $1000 out of $20 in just seven days! (Although before you get too excited, it wasn’t practical, as it required a lot of time and effort – if you wanted to earn money the regular way at a job, it would be more reliable and much less hassle).