Introductions

Hello everyone. My name is Garin Dangler. I am a Computer Science/Software Engineering major with a Mathematics minor in my senior year. I am a commuter student, though you probably would not be able to tell considering the amount of time I spend on campus.

I have been enthralled by graphic novels and video games since I was very young. I began playing video games at approximately four years old. I had severely bad allergies as a child, and as a result I was not able to go outside for extended amounts of time at all. Video games were the means of entertainment that my parents bought me to occupy me since I could not go outside or do sports or the like. By the time I was about 9 years old, I was a complete video game addict, playing for 16 hours a day on average when I had no school. On school days, I would get home at roughly 3 p.m. and play until I went to bed at roughly 10-11 p.m. I continued this routine until I started attending college. I still play them, but it is far more sparingly.

As for graphic novels, I started gaining an interest in them as a result of cartoons and anime on television. I was in a comic books store as a child and noticed graphic novels of one of my favorite anime at the time, Inuyasha. That is what introduced me to the world of graphic novels. To be more specific though, these graphic novels were actually manga (or, in other words, Japanese graphic novels). I did not read terribly many of these, or for long. But I still do every now and then and do enjoy them quite a bit.

On a side note about manga, look forward to Elliott Wilson’s Guru quest!

Besides video games and graphic novels, which are the topic of the class, I have another hobby that is among the same category. That hobby is anime. I first got into watching anime from shows like Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z being on Toonami as a child. I would always watch the anime that aired on Toonami and, eventually, Adult Swim. Eventually I discovered the world on anime on the internet and have not looked back since. Anime is so much vaster than what is shown on American television. However, anime on American television has been expanding over the past few years, growing bit by bit, including the revival of Toonami by Adult Swim.

On a side note about anime, look forward to my Guru quest!

Yet another similar hobby that is among the same category as video games, graphic novels, and anime, is visual novels. This is my most recent obsession, only having been introduced to this form of media in the past two years. Visual novels are like a book in the way that you read text, but like a graphic novel in the sense that you have pictures to go along with the text. Also, the pictures are a combination of sprites, animation, and entire backgrounds. There is also accompanying music to go along with it while you are ‘playing.’ All in all, they are a very unique and entertaining way of experiencing, rather than just reading, a story.

On a side note about visual novels, look forward to Kevin Ross’s Guru quest!

Lastly, I will mention my MMO experiences. I have not played terribly many of them. I was introduced to them via Runescape, which I played dedicatedly for three years. After that I quit MMOs for quite a while, until I was convinced to try World of Warcraft. I played that for only one month before I quit, as I did not think it was worth spending $15 a month on it. After that I did not play any for quite a while again, until I decided to give Ragnarok Online a try because a friend was a huge fan of it. I played it for an entire summer break, but was not entertained enough by it to continue playing past that. Around that time, I heard/saw about Tera. I waited until the official North America version launched, and I have been playing that dedicatedly for almost a year now.

If anyone wants to give Tera a try, it’s now free to play as of last week. The combat is quite unlike any other; I highly recommend it. Let me know if you want to give it a try, I can help/explain things.

That’s about it for me and my previous experiences before enrolling in this class. I look forward to a fun semester with everyone!