The Ermarian Network

About me

Here's some brief personal info about me. I normally try to be discrete with this, but savvy people can get all that and more from my domain name anyway. In any case, it's Google I'm more worried about, and people I know in real life finding this site, innocent as it is.

  • Name: Arancaytar. The fictional last names Ilyaran Belyen go with that on occasion, but I don't need them usually.
  • Birth date: 18th July 1987
  • Born in: Manhattan, New York, US
  • Now living in: Germany
  • Occupation: Student (5th semester)

Bio

I found my first Spiderweb game, Exile III, in the shareware collection of the popular German computer magazine c't, in December 2000. Back then, I had no internet access, but when I finally had one in Summer 2001, one of the first sites I visited was spidweb.com. I found Blades of Exile, and started to experiment with the editor - I also briefly visited the forums in what must have been after September, because it was definitely on UBB by then.

A year passed, and we moved, and suddenly had a new DSL access instead of dial-up. It was another half year however before I actually joined the forums in May 2003.

One of the first actual contributions I made to the Blades community was a collection of terrain and ground graphics for BoA - several monoliths, and some scorched ground tiles (available at the Louvre) that had slopes, which was then so new that Brett got me to write a tutorial for making these.

Next came the Encyclopedia Ermariana, then a simple Geocities site that I updated about weekly with new contributions that were emailed to me.

In August 2003, I played my first roleplay, called Baltazar the Mad. It was a completely new experience - so far, my only experience with roleplays stemmed from passing familiarity with various pen & paper RPGs like The Dark Eye and computer games like Albion. I didn't even know you could rp without dice.

Apparently I took to it well, because I was invited to come over to Polaris to roleplay shortly later. This is about the highest you can go when it comes to Spiderweb RPs.

Early in 2005, I began to learn PHP and started to make a program that would later become the Spiderweb Stat Spider - named after the Polaris project that originally did the work manually, the Great Endeavor.

In 2004, the Spiderweb forums were partially purged to free up diskspace, and a group of selfless individuals took it upon themselves to make backups of the entire forum before it got erased. This happened again later that year, and the threads were collected, but not made publically available until more than a year later. It was in January 2006 that the third board purge was announced, and this time I was ready to use my PHP program (tentatively titled "Magic Flute") I literally finished in the last instance. The archives were then made available under the name that Alec had given the project back in 2004: The Pied Piper Project. Since they were put online in January 2006, the PPP archives have been updated frequently. The site engine itself has been improved gradually as I learnt more about PHP. Since November 2006, it uses a heavily extended Drupal environment.

The next project on my list is titled the "Blades Forge". Basically, I intend to make a Drupal site that is specifically tailored and extended to allow users to host Blades scenarios, graphics and scripts, and rate and review them - a centralized location that is nonetheless editable by each individual contributor.