Anyway, I've been playing Wizard101 again!
Hello, everyone. I'm the person previously known as Sierra WinterBreeze. I'm still alive, somehow. I'm 23 old now! I graduated from my graduate program back in May with a master's in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). My undergraduate degree was in Linguistics. Planning on either going to Japan, or maybe doubling down on the teaching job I have here in town where we use video games (mostly Minecraft) to teach writing to kids. Or I might go back to school and get my PhD in Applied Linguistics, because I really want to do more research., especially on things like language in fandoms or video games
I certainly never forgot about Wizard101 and The Tale of Sierra WinterBreeze, because this was such a significant part of my life. Please let me tell you now that you all mean so much to me. You made me so happy as a kid and I was so lucky to have such encouragement. Honestly, with how much of a selfish, arrogant jerk I was, I didn't deserve that support, haha. But I'm so glad I could share something you all enjoyed.
I still think about this blog every once in a while. I've actually attempted to make a post pretty much every year since Part 15 was posted. I've got no less than 7 saved drafts with various updates. But for whatever reason I never finish them.
But yes, the game really shaped my childhood, so I'll never forget it. In fact, funny story, I convinced the entirety of one of my master's degree classes to play Wizard101 together hahaha. It was a class about using video games to teach, and I brought up Wizard101, and my teacher loved it. We all played it together one class day. (Wizard101 is actually great for second language learners, you know? Someday I'd love to use it if I become an ESL teacher. :P)
And I'm also still super into fanfiction. I don't write too much anymore -- the last thing I wrote was an awful Shadow of War fanfic that no one read because who reads Shadow of War fanfics -- but I read constantly. Lately I've gotten back into Danny Phantom, which honestly has the best fanfiction I've ever seen in my life and some incredibly skilled authors. But I've also previously been into Overwatch, Magic Kaito/Detective Conan, Rise of the Guardians, and of course Zelda. My undergraduate thesis was all about the sociolinguistics of fanfiction communities, and I wrote a paper on someone who plagiarized The Tale of Sierra WinterBreeze for my forensic linguistics class, because I thought the idea of doing that was too funny to pass up.
And I play a lot of games! I still adore Skyrim, and enjoy modding it until in crashes (my current setup has like 400+ mods if you include texture replacements and the like) as well as group games like SMITE, Overwatch, and Minecraft. I have about 1400 hours in SMITE according to Steam, so, uh, yeah. I've played it too much. (If any of you play those games or are interested in trying them out, hit me up! I'm HeroineofTime in SMITE, Hylia#1889 in Overwatch, or Heroine of Time#5367 on Discord if you just wanna message me.)
Speaking of gaming, I stream regularly on Twitch! I mostly speedrun Zelda games because I'm a loser who never grew out of her Zelda phase. I'm TwilightWakerofTime, I'd love to see you there! :D
I actually ended up back into Wizard101 because of one of my gaming buddies who you all know as Hunter ThunderShield. We've been playing more competitive games together for years now, with him almost always being the support to my dps. I think I randomly mentioned to him how Wizard City got updated a couple years ago, since I loaded up the game and ran around all the new stuff for a while, and he expressed and interest in seeing it as well. And that made us both nostalgic, so we decided to start questing together.
Hello, everyone. I'm the person previously known as Sierra WinterBreeze. I'm still alive, somehow. I'm 23 old now! I graduated from my graduate program back in May with a master's in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). My undergraduate degree was in Linguistics. Planning on either going to Japan, or maybe doubling down on the teaching job I have here in town where we use video games (mostly Minecraft) to teach writing to kids. Or I might go back to school and get my PhD in Applied Linguistics, because I really want to do more research., especially on things like language in fandoms or video games
I certainly never forgot about Wizard101 and The Tale of Sierra WinterBreeze, because this was such a significant part of my life. Please let me tell you now that you all mean so much to me. You made me so happy as a kid and I was so lucky to have such encouragement. Honestly, with how much of a selfish, arrogant jerk I was, I didn't deserve that support, haha. But I'm so glad I could share something you all enjoyed.
I still think about this blog every once in a while. I've actually attempted to make a post pretty much every year since Part 15 was posted. I've got no less than 7 saved drafts with various updates. But for whatever reason I never finish them.
But yes, the game really shaped my childhood, so I'll never forget it. In fact, funny story, I convinced the entirety of one of my master's degree classes to play Wizard101 together hahaha. It was a class about using video games to teach, and I brought up Wizard101, and my teacher loved it. We all played it together one class day. (Wizard101 is actually great for second language learners, you know? Someday I'd love to use it if I become an ESL teacher. :P)
And I'm also still super into fanfiction. I don't write too much anymore -- the last thing I wrote was an awful Shadow of War fanfic that no one read because who reads Shadow of War fanfics -- but I read constantly. Lately I've gotten back into Danny Phantom, which honestly has the best fanfiction I've ever seen in my life and some incredibly skilled authors. But I've also previously been into Overwatch, Magic Kaito/Detective Conan, Rise of the Guardians, and of course Zelda. My undergraduate thesis was all about the sociolinguistics of fanfiction communities, and I wrote a paper on someone who plagiarized The Tale of Sierra WinterBreeze for my forensic linguistics class, because I thought the idea of doing that was too funny to pass up.
And I play a lot of games! I still adore Skyrim, and enjoy modding it until in crashes (my current setup has like 400+ mods if you include texture replacements and the like) as well as group games like SMITE, Overwatch, and Minecraft. I have about 1400 hours in SMITE according to Steam, so, uh, yeah. I've played it too much. (If any of you play those games or are interested in trying them out, hit me up! I'm HeroineofTime in SMITE, Hylia#1889 in Overwatch, or Heroine of Time#5367 on Discord if you just wanna message me.)
Speaking of gaming, I stream regularly on Twitch! I mostly speedrun Zelda games because I'm a loser who never grew out of her Zelda phase. I'm TwilightWakerofTime, I'd love to see you there! :D
I actually ended up back into Wizard101 because of one of my gaming buddies who you all know as Hunter ThunderShield. We've been playing more competitive games together for years now, with him almost always being the support to my dps. I think I randomly mentioned to him how Wizard City got updated a couple years ago, since I loaded up the game and ran around all the new stuff for a while, and he expressed and interest in seeing it as well. And that made us both nostalgic, so we decided to start questing together.
So it's kind of funny that when we returned to Wizard101, I am more or less the support to his dps, because Ice is very obviously the tank class, and Myth... well, uh, it exists? But he does more damage than me and I'm more equipped to take damage, so I just taunt and shield a lot and occasionally Snow Angel if pips allow it.
I feel like it's very ironic, actually, that I played a tank in what is basically my first ever online game, considering I am absolute trash at tanks in every other game.
Hunter and I started out fairly close in level, with him only being slightly behind me, and we actually were on the same Wintertusk quest because him, me, and Sydney had been going through that world together a couple years ago. He caught up to me in Zafaria and now we're nearing the end of Avalon. Now we're currently going through on some lower level characters to catch another friend of ours, a Diviner named Luke, up to our level. I'm helping him out on my Death wizard, Laura DarkGlen (who I actually wrote a fanfic about forever ago, but I never published anywhere so it's DEFINITELY gone forever), and we're making our way through Krokotopia as Hunter Humungofrogs every single enemy for us. Eventually we plan on catching up to Hunter's Life wizard, who is in Zafaria, and then catching up to Sierra and going from there with a team of Luke as Storm, Hunter as Life, and me as Ice. Sounds like a good team comp to me.
Anyway. This post is mostly an update? Just in case someone checks on this blog and is curious, no matter how unlikely that might be all these years later hahaha. I love you all, every single person who's ever checked out this blog, and I feel so incredibly fortunate that I ever had any support from you. It's so surreal to me, reading all those old comments, and I regret immensely how I acted back then. I felt like I was some kind of incredibly skilled writer for having all these fans when a lot of it was just luck and an unimaginably sweet and kind community. So yes. Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you. Random stranger on the internet, please keep existing, you're so wonderful for even being here.
Does The Tale of Sierra WinterBreeze have any sort of future? Probably not. I abandoned all illusions of writing a sequel long ago, and although I've attempted to edit the story in full several times over the years, I always get stuck on characterizations. I'm, uh, really bad at writing characters. They all just sound like me. I mean, this has been a problem since 2008 when I first started writing the story but I was 12 so it was forgivable. Now I'm just bad. :P
But yeah. That's all I've got for now. If someone is actually out there reading this, hit me up on whatever messaging service, either here or on Discord or Twitch or whatevs. I'll be around.
(I can't believe I actually finished one of these posts for once lol.)