User:Shadowdancer
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Shadowdancer is the name of a fairly well-known RuneScape player. He joined Wikipedia on September 28, 2005. His first name is Mike, born January 28, 1974, and he resides in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.
Before RuneScape
[edit]Childhood, Etc
[edit]Mike was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada to mother Barbara and father Richard. He is an only child.
His family always lived in apartment buildings, save for a brief period when he was around 2-3 years old; they rented a duplex townhouse in the west end of town for approximately 6 months. He fondly remembers playing in a wading pool, chewing happily on a chocolate chip cookie that the neighbour gave him.
Mike's mother was always unhappy with where they currently lived, and as a result they were always moving from place to place across town. This led to the young Michael having to switch schools up to three times per school year, which made it rather difficult to make (and, more to the point, maintain) friendships.
When he was approximately four years of age, Michael was outside playing. He was attempting to "sneak up" on the people inside the laundry room of the apartment building he lived in by walking up to the window (which was situated taller than he was) and jumping up and shouting "Boo!". Unfortunately, he failed to look up - the window was the crank style that opened using a handle, much like rolling a car window up or down, causing it to swing outwards. He jumped and promptly cracked his head on the metal frame of the window, shrieking in pain and agony and covered in blood. No serious damage resulted from this event, although he sometimes attributes his quirky behaviour to it.
As Michael grew up (and unashamedly asked his parents to simply stop calling him "Michael" and start calling him "Mike"), he felt that schoolwork was unimportant and began concentrating on having a wonderfully great time in life, succeeding in this endeavour roughly half the time.
At age 13, Mike's parents finally divorced, with his mother leaving the picture. His father more or less abandoned Mike to his own machinations, which largely involved plotting ways to evade doing his homework and programming his Commodore 64 computer.
Four years passed by, until finally his Aunt Sandra one day arrived on the scene and moved in to live with his father common-law, accompanied by his cousin David. Apparently Sandra had divorced her husband to be with her real childhood love, which was his father.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months. Sandra turned from being one of Mike's favourite aunts into a deranged sociopathic version of his mother - rules were drawn up which were virtually impossible to obey, and his father was of no help to him at all. Eventually Sandra racked up enough "infractions" (ranging from, say, drinking too much Pepsi to coming home 40 seconds past the appointed curfew, to using the telephone for longer than 5 minutes per call), Sandra made her case to Mike's father, telling him he had to be kicked out. Lacking any kind of spine whatsoever, his father complied, informing Michael that he had to leave.
This led to him eventually being asked to leave his high school, Sir James Dunn Collegiate & Vocational School at age 17, two weeks after being kicked out of the house by his father. The reason for this was that his grades were so low they were actually damaging the school's academic reputation within the city.
Young Adulthood & The "Real World"
[edit]At this point, Mike was living off of the municipal welfare system, largely due to the fact that he had no support system to help him remain in school so that he might one day get a job.
Having more or less estranged himself from his father as well as his mother, he began to associate with friends he met through other friends that were into the "retro computing" scene at the time. He would be invited to parties and such, but adamantly refused to drink alcohol or take drugs of any kind. Mike no longer had any curfew to follow, and he began to wander the streets of Sault Ste. Marie at all hours of the night with his friends, causing mild mischief here and there but never getting involved in any serious lawbreaking. The most notable event was when he went down to the local park one evening and met some friends from school. Bored, he suggested to the group that they go to his father's yacht, docked at the nearby marina, and hang out. The group of 15 or so teenagers went to the marina and boarded said boat, with Mike "breaking in" through the window (by merely sliding it open and getting the ignition keys from inside the cabin). People hung out and threw junk into the water and played with the Marine VHF radio, but Mike drew the line at actually starting the engines.
Later, Mike was confronted by his father, as several of his boating buddies had witnessed the crowd of noisy teenagers boarding the craft. His father threatened police charges the next time it happened.
At the age of 21, Mike met a girl one day named "Marcelle" from Ottawa. She had apparently hitchhiked to Sault Ste. Marie to attend a party, and she invited him to hitchhike back to Ottawa with her. He reluctantly accepted, and after a 2 day trip they finally arrived at her mother's place, completely exhausted. He would spend the next 6 weeks here getting a job as a telemarketer for a carpet-cleaning business and meeting her friends, most of whom were either cocaine addicts or insane. Mike eventually decided he was hanging out with the wrong crowd and fled Ottawa the first chance he got and returned to the Sault, where his father had filed a missing persons report with the city police.
Within a year Mike was living in Toronto, trying to find himself and learn some degree of independence. He learned some street smarts, and made some friends (and a few enemies, mostly by simply smiling at them as he walked past). He even attempted romance twice, but both of these encounters worked out badly on account of them both being rather emotionally unstable.
In 1994, Mike decided to hitchhike to Nova Scotia where his mother had moved to some time before. He had saved up some money from working odd jobs and then packed a backpack and trekked east through the rest of Ontario and all of Quebec, New Brunswick, and most of Nova Scotia before finally arriving at Yarmouth. He arrived and rented a room which was literally a closet with a bed and a sink in it for $15 a night. After some hunting around he discovered that his mother did not live at the address he thought she did, and therefore decided he would trek onwards to Newfoundland to track down his uncle David and cousins Kelly and David (his uncle David was his aunt Sandra's ex-husband).
After a daunting 14 hour ferryboat ride, Mike arrived at Port_aux_basques, Newfoundland, and resumed hitchhiking until finally arriving at the tiny community of Foxtrot. He simply began asking the locals if they knew his uncle - by name - and he soon found his uncle's work phone number and called him. His uncle Dave gave him walking directions to the house he lived at, and the next 11 days he spent with his uncle, his new girlfriend, and his cousin David (Kelly, ironically enough, had gone to Toronto to live with her grandmother). After the 11 days of visiting, he found his mother's new address and went back to Nova Scotia and stayed with her for a few months. In Yarmouth, he developed the nickname "Ontario", for being from there, and somehow became a minor celebrity for reasons that elude him to this day.
After living in Yarmouth for most of a year, Mike got homesick for Toronto and made the move back - this time, by Greyhound bus. A year after returning to Toronto, he further sojourned back to Sault Ste. Marie, where he made contact with his father briefly again and began to believe in God more seriously.
In October of 1997, Mike headed west for Red Deer, Alberta with two friends of his - a newly married Christian couple who were moving out that way. Having received a $2000 tax return, he decided to move out there with them and see what western Canada had to offer him. It was there, in Red Deer, that Mike would become engaged and, after the relationship ended, discover RuneScape.
RuneScape
[edit]From RuneScape To RuneScape II Beta
[edit]Towards the end of 2001, Mike/Shadowdancer took a hiatus from RuneScape to concentrate on the real world and to move from Alberta to Ontario. Once re-established in Windsor, he once again loaded the RuneScape website to discover that Jagex had indeed activated their pay-to-play subscription service. He decided to cave in and send in a 3-month subscription to see what membership had to offer.
During the spring and summertime of 2002, Shadowdancer started to become a familiar name within the community. The RuneScape forums had returned (they had been pulled shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks), and he began to post on there with a vengeance. Similarily, he was also registered with a few other fansite forums such as Tip.it, Runescape Community and RuneVillage. It is interesting to note that his accounts on these 3 forums were either banned or disabled by administrative staff for vague reasons.
Shadowdancer became an outspoken advocate of more strict rules enforcement, as he felt strongly that Jagex was allowing people to get away with virtually all kinds of rulebreaking in the game. He would routinely rail against the existing system, claiming that people were macroing night and day without any intervention from Jagex.
Also, he became something of a scam website "headhunter", scouring the Internet for shady websites that were put up for the sole intention of stealing the accounts of other players. Such sites were reported to Jagex's customer support team, as well as the websites hosts. Sites that were advertised on the official forums and in-game were equally dealt with. This activity continued through to the day he left the RuneScape community.
RuneScape II Launch To Present
[edit]Main Article: RuneScape
Shadowdancer launched his own website in December 2003, at first hosted by the Angelfire free hosting network, and then on www.runescapehaven.com (the server space being donated to him free of charge by RuneScape player Deathoflight). This website featured a daily commentary, complete with a "Screenshot Of The Day" and an almost minute-by-minute log of his daily playing habits. Eventually posting up a daily weblog proved to be too draining for him and he scaled back to once a week, and then eventually gave up completely. The site had other features, including ShadowDancerVision, which was a program used to capture the active window every 15 seconds and upload it to an FTP server, where a web page would have code that reloaded the latest uploaded image. The other famous aspect of the website was the Hall Of Lame, where people who were exceptionally stupid, rude, or downright evil (at least, in his eyes) were exposed via the "name and shame" method of public embarrassment. The Hall of Lame was discontinued after people complained en masse, thinking that Shadowdancer was leading a witchhunt on any player he happpened to be annoyed with at the moment. The website also featured a forum, The Blackhole Experience, where Shadowdancer gathered a following of admirers and helpers in his quest to clean up Runescape of rulebreakers and scammers. Unfortunately as time went on, egos inflated and some of Shadowdancer's followers turned on him, leading ultimately to the closure of the forums. But for a time he successfully lead a very loyal following.
RuneScape II Beta ended on March 29, 2004, and was replaced with the full launch of RuneScape II (which was of course renamed simply to RuneScape; what was RuneScape I was renamed to RuneScape Classic). During this period of time Mike had returned to school to finish earning his High School Diploma at an adult high school, while still having time to play RuneScape daily.
Life After RuneScape
[edit]Shadowdancer - now known again simply as Mike - occupies his time with his school studies. At the time of this article, he has completed semester 1 of his HVAC course at St Clair College in Windsor, Ontario and has switched his progam to Power Engineering. He is getting his spiritual life back in order as a dedicated Christian and has great plans for the rest of his life.
He also hangs around Wikipedia, editing various articles here and there. He tends to browse Random Articles in search of pages that are vandalised and need reverting, and/or articles which need improvement/expansion/disambiguation and the like. He also talks in the 3rd person on his User Talk page for some strange reason.
Mike holds an interest in the tabletop strategy game Battletech, although he has not actively played since around 2000.