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 21 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's 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, but once this August roles around, I'll still be 21 and the site will be 7. Which means I'd be running Zelda Dungeon for 1/3 of my entire life, pretty ridiculous if you ask me.

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 walkthroughs, and not just item/character/enemy guides.

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.

Zelda Elements
Zelda Elements is my all time favorite Legend of Zelda website. I'm good friends with their webmaster, Nexus Zero, and they are a member of the Zelda Dungeon Alliance. I don't actively take part in the message boards, but I still frequent the site really often. When I was still in the early years of developing Zelda Dungeon, Zelda Elements along with Zelda Power was one of my main inspirations.

North Castle
I am somewhat of an active member at the North Castle message boards. I'm good friends with Juliet, who owns the place and I used to be a huge fan of their fan fiction. I still 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. At Zelda Dungeon's forums, The Dark World, we don't really have much at all of a non-Zelda discussion area, so I take my talk elsewhere to places like North Castle and LoZ.com. It's pretty diverse group of guys over there and a really good community for general discussion.

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.

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 looking 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.

Projects
-Managing the revamp of the Legend of Zelda enemies. Consistency across the various enemies and the various games is needed. I've only done a few of them, while simply labeling the others as stubs or pages that need work. This will be an ongoing project for me over the years.

-Adding and adjusting all the Zelda FanSite pages. Adding more sites, adding descriptions, and adding screenshots of the layouts. I've added a couple of new sites and edited a ton of other sites to give it a more standardized look.

Zelda Wiki 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