Didn't spell check, deal:
It all started on May 28th, 1984. Yes, I’m a Gemini. Yes, you don’t care. I was born in Ottawa, Ontario Canada as a baby of the human caliber. Originally I was like any little kid. I was happy and I was entertained by the meekest of jokes and objects, but I had very bad asthma. For some reason I can still remember memories from back when I was one year old. I always remembered a place we went with a lot of old ruined castles and ferryboats. I asked my mom just recently what that was and she was amazed I remember that because I was only one at the time. Before my first birthday my asthma condition worsened to the point where they thought I might die. I was hospitalized in a oxygen tent for two or three weeks and apparently ate nothing by vanilla ice cream and apple juice all day long. I wish I could get me some of that action now… minus the asthma thing of course. Needless to say I got over it. I have no memories of being ill in the slightest aside from asthma as a kid.
So I grew a little bit and it was time to be off to regular public school. I went to JR. Kindergarten and wasted some time, then regular kindergarten and actually learnt some stuff. After grade 2 I learned my family was going to be moving to Toronto because my dad was getting a new job and a huge raise (he works at the Bank of Montreal). I protested, all my friends were in Ottawa and I didn’t want to leave. But I was young, and stupid. Once I got to Toronto and went in to my class in grade 3 I realized things weren’t going to be so bad. Halfway through the year I puked all over our Health teacher and was the most popular kid in class for doing so. Everyone believed it was because of the stuff she was teaching us, but I was just really sick that day, probably from a bad egg. Elementary school from grade 3 – 8 was a piece of cake. I went to the biggest piece of shit school called Parkside. Despite its name it had only three baseball diamonds and no parks of any sort, not even those shitty parks no one wants to use. The school itself has since been condemned for being so worn out. The building itself was just a giant hallway, but I didn’t complain. I didn’t really care either way. I cut class a lot yet still managed to keep up an A average. I think this is where I developed my major obsession with procrastination. I would wait to do projects the night before it was due and still manage to pull an A or B.
Anyway, next is high school. Things are a little different here. In grades 9 and 10 I goofed off almost exclusively with friends. In grade 9 I got 100% in business. I have to credit a kid named Andrew (another kid) who sat next to me. I used to cheat off of him all the time and he really knew what he was doing. In grade 10 everything was as non-shalont as possible. I wouldn’t do most assignments and often just sat in the class and made fun of the faggy kids with dry sarcasm. This was back when gay was the new hip word everyone used. There was this one kid named Andrew Reeves (yes, there are a lot of Andrews in my history) who used to bug the hell out of me. He was just to fucking… ugh. It’s hard to explain. He’s one of those kids you just want to go ape on because of his personality. So I got through grade 10 by the skin of my teeth. In grade 11 and 12 I pulled up my socks and brought my average up to about an 85%. Grade 11 and 12 are what colleges look at when you apply around here (for the most part) and luckily I knew this information. I never got depressed and I never had ‘teen angst’. I personally find both to be the most fake pieces of shit excuses in the world… but I’ve never experienced them so I could be dead wrong. Depression is an excuse to lock yourself in a room and mope around all day, again I could be wrong, but I don’t care. As for teen angst… I always thought high school and teen problems were so little and didn’t matter. I can shrug the biggest teen situation off with no remorse. I'm one of those lucky kids that had good parents. Sure, they fight. But they aren’t douche bags or anything.
I also got into the web heavily. I own and used to run www.WrestlingGames.com, now defunct. We got a mention on Game Informer and IGN for our coverage back when No Mercy and Wrestlemania 2000 were coming out from THQ. Through the months of September 1st – November 1st we received 28 million page servers, and about 700,000 of those were unique. But this was at a time when the internet was in it’s big downturn cycle, so before I could capitalize on this all the banner ads went out of business. Adcast (a banner service) owes me 5,000 dollars, and I’ve come to terms that I’ll never see that money. But oh well. I ran the shittiest board off that sites also… it was so shitty. It was like Gamefaqs, but with stupid nerds who think they can run everything. Ugh… I still own the domain name and register it every two years to spite my ex-employee who wants it more than anything. We're creditted in both Smackdown 2 and No Mercy's credits for our coverage of their games, so that's pretty cool that I'm creditted in the last good wrestling game, stateside.
Throughout all of high school I was the biggest jerk/asshole you’d ever meet. I’d make fun of any and everything from your face to your cats face. I always had some snaky comment.
I’m also lucky because don’t have to worry about money either, because my dads a banker. Any money I borrow off of him I have to pay back, but it’s nice to have a security net. Must suck not to. I pay for my school entirely on my own. This is why I work at Pizza hut. I use the money from there to put myself through school because my parents believe in me making my own way. They’re right, I don’t want to turn out like Napalm. So I work my ass off for little pay and do it a lot and that’s where I am.
Throughout my whole life I’ve been good at art when I apply myself and enrolled in a design program at Durham College / The University of Ontario. I don’t want to be a graphic designer, I want to be an animator. I want to work on animating for movies, videogames and doing special effects. You need a three year art course to even be considered for approval to any programs. I hope to go to Sheridan College once I’m done, but it’s expensive and far away. Disney, EA, Dreamworks, ILM and others all go to Sheridan College to look for animators and I hope I can get in there. If not I know I can get in to Seneca College’s animation course. It’s closer and has a reputation as well, just not as much of one as Sheridan College.
Anyway, Durham is a good school with a reputation for a high job success rate for graduates and the Graphic Design program here has one of the highest reputations in the entire country. Recently some kid was shot in killed at the On Campus Bar, EP Taylors, so that sucks. I now know why Durham College has such a high reputation. They teach you how to creatively think and organize things. Last week alone I had nine projects due, all huge, in one day and they teach you thoroughly about colours and prepress, which most people don’t know about when they graduate (there’s more to design than just making something look nice). I’m currently wrapping up my second year. I’m not into design all that much and have to force myself through it instead of dropping out like most people would do in my position (I’m not used to giving up). My average is a B-, so I’m doing all right (that’s an average average for this course. They mark really hard) I’m currently learning Flash and did my first animating for Joystick Adventures, which failed. But I’m still trying though. That robot animation was my first attempt at animating something properly (not key framing everything, for those in the know). It turned out okay. But during the summer expect to see more flash animating out of me.
My points of interest are improving my animating skills and ability to time sound properly. Very important.
I have my own garage videogame team. Gibbits from the boards is one of the programmers in it, and I, of course, am a graphic/visual designer for them. It’s progressing at a snails pace but we’re coming along. I hope to one day be able to head to E3 and actually announce games. But that’s a long long ways away. But that’s why I love animation; it opens up so many avenues. And if I do make it, you know I’ll hook you guys up with free shit.
So that’s where I am right now. Nothing to interesting here… after reading some of your back-stories I realize how good of an upbringing I had. But then I again, I always realized it. I’m lucky in the way that I like to stop and smell the daisies every once and awhile. I hate to look back on something and say: “Man that was a great time.” I always like to say: Yeah, this is a good time right now.
That’s where I am now. I’m boring and maybe someday will be rich.
p.s. I outgrew my asthma around age 10.
