About

I'm a 41-year-old Austrian who's been living in the UK for more than ten years. I consider myself a gamer, but a fairly monogamous one - I generally devote myself to one or two games at a time, and that devotion usually lasts for years. Gaming is an incredibly cheap hobby when you approach it like that.

I got into MMOs by purchasing World of Warcraft in late 2006, shortly before the release of the first expansion, and I loved it. At first I just gushed about it on my personal blog and on various forums, until I created a separate blog dedicated to WoW only in mid-2009. I certainly had a good time with it, made many friends, and even met a special someone in my guild for whom I eventually decided to move cross-continent. Unfortunately I grew increasingly dissatisfied with WoW during the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and then Cataclysm, until I stepped away from both the game and writing about it in early 2012. (I've since reconnected with it on a more casual level since the release of Classic.)

As far as Star Wars goes, I'm just young enough to not have seen the original trilogy in theatres until the special edition came out, which I loved. (And I don't really care who shot first.) As a result I went through a big Star Wars phase in my late teens, reading EU novels and everything, though my enthusiasm kind of fizzled out with the last of the prequels. I initially had no interest whatsoever in playing The Old Republic, until I saw a simple video demonstrating the group conversation system and heard that some of my friends were intending to play it. I then ended up making a complete turnaround from being utterly disinterested to becoming massively excited about the game within only a month or so, and even ended up pre-ordering to get into early access.

As the blog title implies, I play a Republic Commando, specifically a combat medic, on the EU server Luka Sene The Red Eclipse Darth Malgus, though I have many alts of course (as you do). I named her Shintar, after my old troll priest main from WoW.

I started my career in the game as a proud member of the Brotherhood of Remiel, a tightly knit social guild of mature players that did a little bit of everything, though they have now mostly moved on to other games. Fortunately I found a new home with the friendly folks from the Twin Suns Squadron since then. If you ever see Major Shintar O'sirisen around during your travels, or any other character with the O'sirisen legacy name on display, feel free to say hi. You can find a list of my most frequently played characters here. If you'd like to contact me out of game, you can e-mail me at shintarcommando [at] gmail [dot] com, find me on YouTube as @ShintarsVideos or on Bluesky as Shintar.

Or you can leave a comment on one of my posts here of course... I read all the comments, I just don't always have anything meaningful to say in reply. You can also comment on older blog entries if you have something to say; don't be shy - I receive automated e-mail notifications for those, so new comments will be seen.

Last updated: July 2024