User:Mases554@legacy41957662

=Biography= Born October 11th, 1986 in Morton Grove, Illinois, a suburb to the north of Chicago. I still reside in Morton Grove, where I've lived all 22 years of my glorious life. In the summer time I get outside a lot doing various activities. I love swimming, bike riding, and playing various sports, especially baseball. I also umpire and coach little league baseball, which I find to be a lot of fun.

I'm currently a student at the University of Illinois @ Chicago studying Economics. I should be through with my bachelors degree in Spring of 2009 and then I am most likely will be off to graduate school to get my MBA.

In my online world, I spend a majority of my time working on my own Zelda website, Zelda Dungeon. In addition to that, I used to play a bunch of online Chess as well as online Poker. I used to be a super big Starcraft fan back in the day. My favorite PC game has to be Sim City. Not sure why or how I really got into the series, but It's probably my favorite PC game of all time. I still throw in Sim City 4 every so often.

For general gaming, I love Zelda of course, although it probably isn't my favorite game series anymore, at least not the modern games. I really don't play much of anything on the current generation of consoles even though I have a Nintendo Wii and a Microsoft Xbox 360. I'm a huge fan of survival horror games, with my favorite game series being Silent Hill and Resident Evil. Not sure how I'd rank these two with Zelda, but the 3 of them combine to be my favorite game franchises. The new Silent Hill title is schedule to release in August, so it's something to look forward to.

I listen to almost any type of music you can think of, from heavy metal, to rock, to country, etc... I have over 225 CD's in my collection and my favorite artists include Garth Brooks, 3 Doors Down, Iron Maiden, Sonata Arctica, Dragonforce, Celine Dion, and a few others.

=Zelda Dungeon= I started Zelda Dungeon on August 19th of 2001 and it has ruled my online life ever since. It has been so satisfying working on the site, creating game guides, and watching the site grow to what it is today. I've met a ton of new people in the Zelda community and have created close bonds with many of the staff members that I've had at Zelda Dungeon. It's hard to believe that I've been running the website for more than 7 years now... Wow!

The site is all about game guides, which has become second nature for a lot of Zelda sites these days. Most sites and the community in general have shifted from site content towards community interactivity including fan submissions and message boards. I suppose we are old school a bit, strictly working on content and one of the few sites that actually works on full game walkthroughs, and not just item/character/enemy guides.

I launched a community message board in October of 2007 and it has grown quite rapidly over the last few months, accumulating over 400 registered members and over 15,000 total posts. A forum was one of the things that Zelda Dungeon was always lacking, but with the recent growth the site has experienced, the forum has become quite an active place to be.

=Zelda Community= When I'm not working at Zelda Dungeon and not at Zelda Wiki, there are a few places I frequently visit and participate in.

North Castle
One of the websites that I'm always looking at while surfing the Zelda community is North Castle. I'm good friends with Juliet, who owns the place and I used to be a huge fan of their fan fiction. I frequent their site and look at all the latest fan art and fan movie submissions that they have. There really is a ton of fan material at their site. North Castle is also a site that is a part of the Zelda Dungeon Alliance.

Legend of Zelda.com
You can occasionally see me posting over at LegendOfZelda.com as well. I used to help out over there by acting as a news poster. I usually didn't post basic Zelda or Nintendo news, but more random and obscure things that I find over the net. I usually just stop by every few days and make a post or two.

=Zelda Wiki= Since I re-joined the Wiki in April of 2008, there are a bunch problems I see and a lot of new ideas that I'd like to implement.

Idealogy
At the Zelda Wiki, there are a few things that I firmly believe in, and think they must be implemented in order for the Zelda Wiki to thrive. Consistency throughout, quality references, the Wiki and Quality Sourced Images.

Consistency
The Zelda Wiki needs to have more consistency and cannot settle for mediocrity. Take, enemies or characters for example. There are infobox templates for both enemies and characters, but large amount of them are not in these templates and are just randomly displayed. Many pages for enemies are very poorly written and poorly displayed.

Images
Images on the Zelda Wiki are an absolute must and we need more of them. However, we MUST properly credit any image that is added. I feel that there is nothing worse than using images from other sites without properly crediting them. In addition to that, there are too many pages that just slap images up randomly and make the page look very unprofessional. These need to be taken care of. I've worked to create the image crediting system we have at the Zelda Wiki, even though I'm not 100% satisfied with it, I think it works. My goal is to eventually have ZERO unsourced images. Ideally, we'd also like to have as many images as possible that are from the supporting sites of the Zelda Wiki, rather than relying on images of random Zelda websites.

Contributions
I've made miscellaneous adjustments to the Wiki, mostly just adding a few infoboxes to pages, some new fan sites, and managing enemy pages. My Contributions

Projects

 * Managing the revamp of the Legend of Zelda enemies.
 * -Consistency across the various enemies and the various games is needed.
 * -Sourcing official guides and instruction manuals, as well as fan sites for accurate information.
 * -Adding quality rendered artwork images and sprites for every enemy.


 * Managing the revamp of the Twilight Princess Character Page.
 * -Added correct chatacter infoboxes for all the characters.
 * -Replaced almost all images with rendered png images.


 * Standardizing Sprite Images for several games.
 * -Created sprite images for every enemy in Link's Awakening
 * -Created sprite images for eveyr enemy in Oracle of Seasons
 * -Created sprite images for every enemy in Oracle of Ages.


 * Adjust Zelda Fan Site pages.
 * -Added a few new Fan Sites to the Zelda Wiki.
 * -Added layout thumbnail images for several Fan Sites.

Friends
Here at the Zelda Wiki I've had the luxury of being able to make a few good friends. These friends have since stemmed outside of just the Zelda Wiki and Zelda community in general.


 * Ando
 * Matt
 * Steven