Jim Abbott aka Damon Jynx or Rikki Grosevale

jmabbott

Hi All,

I'm Jim Abbott and have one major online alias, Damon Jynx that I use for most of the RPG forums I visit and my Facebook name is my old Cub Scout Leader name (the only reason I used Facebook at all, until now). I've been actively role playing with more or less the same bunch of guys since about 2000, sharing GM'ing duties with two others. Kind of like Lorelei, Damon Jynx, though not my first PC, is the name of my favourite PC, a multi-class Fighter/Rogue/Spymaster that I never seemed to manage to get beyond 13th level. Perhaps I'll re-work him to Pathfinder 1E seeing as how apart from the D100 games I run, that's what we're playing now.

I'm 57 and live in Penrith, a small-ish city west of Sydney at the foot of the Blue Mountains in NSW Australia with my partner Rose and our fostered cat Bella, a Russian Blue that is an indoors only cat. I have a stepson, Wayne who is 36 years old and with his wife Sam, they've blessed us with 2 adorable grandsons, Mason who just turned 4 and Cooper who is turning 1 at the end of October. Bella was Wayne and Sam's cat but when Mason came along she started misbehaving, so came to live with Nan and Pop.

My family emigrated to Australia from Scotland in 1964 and I would live nowhere else now. I'm the youngest of 7 and was adopted by my grandparents (an unwed mother just wasn't the done thing back in the early sixties, there are a few skeletons in that closet let me tell you but I'll save you the boring details).

I left school midway through Year 11 (1979) as I landed my first full-time job as a clerk in one the major banks of Australia, however that didn't work out due to a poor relationship with my probationary supervisor; he didn't particularly like me and I liked him even less. I got a job as a storeman in an electrical wholesalers (predominately trade only) and have been in the industry ever since; working my way up to management, being a part owner of an independent wholesaler, to finally now being in my 'retirement' job as a Purchasing Officer for a mid-sized electrical contracting firm in the commercial construction sector.

I like, reading, obviously fantasy is my fave, I've been getting into a bit of the "grimdark' sub genre lately though. I'm also a metalhead; Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Helloween and so on are some of my fave bands and I like camping and being in the outdoors - got to love that nature!

I've always had a thing for the maps in the games we play and I've had an adventure published by the Design Mechanism, as well as doing cartography commissions for them (all done in Ps); and delved into the world of publishing (laying out an adventure for a friend). I tried CC years ago, I think I downloaded a free demo version but that was in the early days of the WWW so there was nowhere near the amount of online tutorials there are these days and I found the program a real struggle. But here we are in 2020 and things are much different and I'm really enjoying the program, though running it on a Mac has some challenges...

[Deleted User]

Great to hear from a fellow Aussie - I was born and bred a Sydneysider, and spent the first 39 years of my life there. And what a great story of challenge risen to and advancement. well done.

Monsen

Great introduction. Really miss a picture of that cat of yours though :)

Medio

Welcome, and damm I want so badly to visit Australia :-D

jmabbott

https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/comment/93426#Comment_93426

You will love it. It is a beautiful country when its not on fire or in flood...it is very much a land of extremes despite being mostly temperate in climate.

@Monsen just for you.

Monsen

She's beautiful. Do she enjoy playing RPG's with you as much as my cat? He loves to roll the dice and walk/sleep on top of our papers and computers while we play. I think he's a real gamer.

jmabbott

Not really, as I rarely host now, apart from on Roll20. When we get together F2F we generally play at one of the other player's house as it's a bit more central - our group is spread over a 30-40km or thereabouts radius. She does however like to interrupt Rose or I when we're doing something other than paying her attention. For example, when I was working from home during lockdown, I had my work laptop setup on the games table and she would often lie between me and the keyboard and want to play at the most inopportune times. The chap whose house we normally play at has 2 cats and one of them likes to join in occasionally.

Loopysue

What an interesting story!

Thank you for sharing your world with us, Jim. And what a beautiful cat! :)

Medio

yeah about the fires. In the XIX century, we brought some Australian trees to Galicia as they seemed to grow very fast. The eucalyptus. The people who brought them didn´t know eucalyptus are pyrophyll... so since then, in Galicia and Portugal each summer got foret fires who kill several people per year.

The fires aren´t as bad as West Australia ones, but we appear on heavily dense population area.

Maidhc O Casain

Hi Jim! I was a committed metal-head in high school, and love me some old-school Judas Priest, Dior, Deep Purple, etc!

These days I'm much more sedate in my tastes, but I still throw on some of the old classics occasionally. I had my 6 year old head banging to Judas Priest just last week ?. Of course, right now he's into everything from Blake Shelton to AC/DC, Mumford & Sons (edited for language...) to James Taylor.

jmabbott

@Medio Definitely need good forest management practices with those trees. I think it's the eucalyptus oil that makes them so flammable...but I'm far from an expert on the subject...

@Maidhc O Casain That is so cool. I'm a fan of any music that is 'good', meaning I'll happily listen to it regardless of genre, well apart from rap (spelled with a silent 'C'), hip-hop and Roxette, though I wouldn't go and buy the album or single. Definitely an old-rocker and the harder and heavier the better. My wife is a fan of Live, Foo Fighters and Keith Urban, all of whom I like, particularly in concert. I personally wouldn't buy their stuff but I won't switch channels when they come on the radio or up on the IPod (had to have some of her music on there for when we're driving...). I was never previously a fan of Death Metal, can't stand the unintelligible growl of most of the vocalists, it turns me right off, even though a lot of the music sounds really good, but I've gotten into Amon Amarth recently, Jomsviking is a brilliant album.

Raiko

Hi Jim, thanks for sharing your story. ?

I'm quite partial to some grim-dark fantasy, Joe Abercrombie is probably my favourite author at the moment - although I've not started his new novel yet, which downloaded onto my Kindle last week.

jmabbott

I'm quite partial to some grim-dark fantasy, Joe Abercrombie is probably my favourite author at the moment

I started reading one of his ages ago, The Blade Itself, but I just couldn't get into. I might revisit it once I'm finished my current books. Currently reading Mark Lawrence's, Red Sister, it's not as action packed, and a quite a bit slower, than his Broken Empire trilogy but still an enjoyable read.

Raiko

Ha ha, I have to admit (indeed I nearly mentioned this in my previous post), I started reading The Blade Itself two or three times before actually getting into it. I've read the First Law Trilogy twice now, so that first chapter with Logan Ninefingers alone in the woods, I've read at least four times. I'm not sure exactly how far I had to read before the first book clicked for me, but I really love the setting now. West was my favourite character, and he doesn't appear much in the early chapters.

Weirdly, as a lot of the minor characters from the First Law Trilogy reappear in more important roles in his three stand-alone sequels (often with nice foreshadowing here), the trilogy was actually better on the second read through (and I did love it the first time, once I'd got going).

[Deleted User]

I have to say I love all Abercrombie's novels - at first reading. So gloriously nasty, with you rooting for the bad guys (as opposed to the bad guys)

jmabbott

@Quenten Isn't that a hallmark of the genre? It takes real narrative skill to make a ratbag 'likeable'.

What I liked about Lawrence's Broken Empire Trilogy is there are, quite literally, no nice guys, just varying degrees of bad with our hero, if you can call him that, being one of the worst. While vicious, ruthless and a downright, selfish mongrel, he still manages to somehow do the right thing...more or less.

Maidhc O Casain

I saw the Foo Fighters at the Mumford & Sons Gentlemen of the Road stopover in Walla Walla, WA a few years ago! They were great! I thought Mumford was better, but every show was excellent that weekend.