My name is Julian Sean Milam. I came from a small town in Southern Arkansas. A place where at night I could roam the streets, not a single other living soul was there. The night sky was vast and visible, unlike in the big cities. The smell of nature was always present, woods, earth, flowers, and grass. I'd say the air was cleaner than it is here in the city. The town was idle for relaxing, but it lacked something fundamental. It lacked entertainment, so I spent most my time in movies and books. When I was not doing that I was pursuing artistic endeavors. I would spend a lot of time writing short stories and poems. I had been a published poet since 13. My friend and I also drew comic books together. I traded short stories to other friends for ones they wrote that I enjoyed.

1996: We get a single computer in our small town that has the internet. I take to a chatroom and my mind is blown, I am talking to some guy in Australia. The internet was clunky back then, but it was still magical. I eventually found my way to the Healthy Choice Chatrooms, when I wasn't looking up stuff for Ultima 7 or Diablo. In the healthy choice chatrooms I rped as Fox Mulder along side a girl who played Scully. I can't remember her name, I only ever saw her on the HCC. Sometimes I would introduce something from Ultima 7 or Diablo into the mix or Xena/Hercules. It was the beginnings of my love for fantasy and scifi writing.

1997: I graduate high school, yeah I'm that old. I migrated from the HCC to Bianca's Smut Shack. OMG the amount of rp there was crazy. Also they had a lot of sexual roleplay, but there was a room called the Basement. It was supposed to be dedicated to BDSM, but it was instead a virtual kingdom ruled by Lord Mariner and his wife The Mastered Beauty. They were both in wheelchairs IRL and so they were on a lot. Practically everyone that joined the chat respected them and somehow I ended up in their good graces. I was roleplaying my pirate character at the time and I had a few..ok a lot of enemies in chat.

I was 18 and prone to bouts of blustering and pissing contests. I ended up getting my ass handed to me in a fight and so Lord Mariner suggested his wife teach me a few things. I know sounds kinky, but get your mind out of the gutter. She starts teaching me this turn based style of text fighting, I guess it was T1. It forced me to type more than one liners. She also introduced the concept of magic in fighting. I was attacking her, but then it turned out to be her shadow, an after image. My poor little pirate characters butt was completely addled by such sorcery.

After she taught me a few things on sword fighting and magic, it seemed I could take on the world. At this point I introduced my character's flying ship, which sometimes I used in fights. A signal from my character and the ship would fire on the location. I know a cheap trick, but I had a freaking black powder pistol. Also more and more abnormal characters were entering the realm. People with powers that would force me to create a new character. Sadly Bianca's Smut Shack is no longer in service, much like Yahoo's chat.

1998: I started a tripod page dedicated to my pirate character Donhal Ashbane, who was loosely based off Don Carnage from tailspin *shakes head*. Don't judge me. I eventually moved from Bianca's basement into lycos chat which didn't make feel embarrassed for being caught chatting there. I was married at a young age, 18. My wife didn't understand what I was doing on a chatroom dedicated to BDSM for so many hours of the night. . Lycos chat sucked. I saw her on yahoo messenger one day and asked her what the hell that was. I was taking college classes at the time and one of them was a computer course. I knew a lot about computers so I spent the entire class in yahoo chat. I passed that class with an A. I started off in the teen chat sections, still seeing myself identifying being a Teen. I had a job, rented an apartment, was married, and had a daughter, not very teenish. I no idea where to start in yahoo at the time.

I made a small circle of friends there under my persona of celtic_shaman. I found the fighting style to be nothing new, but I decided to no longer try to keep up with the fighting styles. I went back to one lining for some reason, maybe because everyone I saw was doing the same. I usually try to adapt to things so its possible. To this day I don't know why I went from para to one line again. I made a separate character named celtic_druid and I made a story that they were connected by blood. I began calling my celtic_shaman character Lord Blackthorne and eventually a few other people joined in. I never expected to start a following, or movement, I don't know why people joined.

1999: I spent this whole year living somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The town had a population of 98, NO LIE! It seriously had only 98 people, but there were lakes nearby and it was the first house I had since moving out at 18. I was 20 now, I was trying to figure out what it meant to be an adult. I gave up a lot of my hobbies, my wife said they were childish, like my art, poems, chat rp, and video games. I ended up just working day and night, cleaning the house, working, I had a night shift job. One day I trained a new guy that introduced me to magic the gathering and dungeons and dragons. I use to make fun of people that played dungeons and dragons. SO he starts in about roleplaying, and suddenly I realized I had been roleplaying in chat for a while, but never called it roleplay. I was a roleplayer, apparently had always been one and never knew it.

2000: We moved back to the apartments at the end of 00. I had some more rp and influence under my belt now. I started taking more college classes. I ended up again in the teen chat under my old persona. This time I heard about a place called the Arts and Entertainment section of yahoo. I thought to myself why would there be rp in the A & E section? I left my old band of friends, finding the Teen Chat a bit too young for my liking. They constantly talked about DBZ this and that. I got in a bit of a tussle in the Ayenee section of yahoo. I decided to move away from my shaman character and start playing druid Blackthorne. I met Raine Jensen at this time who seemed perturbed that I simply went by Lord Blackthorne. While she was discussing suitable first names I decided to hit the vending machine. I got my favorite a Reese's peanut butter cup and I was like Reese Blackthorne, that sounds really good. So I started a new character named Reese Blackthorne, who then married Raine Jensen (a saiyan). My friend IC Raynee Blacktear married the two in her tavern, The Blacktear Tavern I believe it was called. I started making numerous alts and joining various other rp guilds, clans, and families. Before long I had a little black book I carried with me, that listed my various s/n's and passwords, with little paragraphs about their background and recent interactions.

2001: So I sit down one day and actually watched Gundam Wing and DBZ, and Sailor Moon, cause my daughter was there with me. We loved those shows and suddenly I realized I like certain anime. My marriage life was an unhappy one. So I tried to fix, I tried to repair it, but my wife was just so resistant. I threw myself in mtg, dnd, and of course yahoo chat. The wife would not come home, never answer my calls, I had to juggle kids, house, and work. We were living separate lives, and so at the end of the day I would rp. It usually was me and the kids in the living room, I'd be rping while they played and watched tv. When they were not there I'd have a few beers and rp, which led to some of my most outlandish rps. There was an ice storm that left us with 10 inches of snow, no power, no gas, no phone, no water for a month. I remember driving home that night, explosions of blue light as transformers by the 100's were exploding. Trees fell into the road in front of my head lights as snow fell. It was surreal, more of a story than real life. I arrived at home to find a tree on top of my porch.

2002: The Blackthornes had been established in yahoo chat and Ayenee. I never planned on such a huge following to something in chat. I had checked our members and we had over 150 Blackthorne names on our website. I was just floored, if I had over 150 behind something IRL, I could have built a house. 2002 marked the year Reese fell in love a second time and she was this time a servant of his sister and some creep named Jared Darkthorne. OOC I had no idea this was going on until I found out IC so it was actual surprise. I had taken a lot of people under my wing and tutored them in rp the same way I had been. At this time I had more friends online than irl since the people I considered friends were all sleeping with my wife.

2003: I am divorced, living with my parents back in that small town. I spent nights searching for some meaning, something that would explain why things failed. I never came to answer those questions. At this point my life was nothing but rp. I had lost my wife and kids, my car, my job. I lived in a town where there were no jobs and since I could not drive out of town there was no chance of leaving any time soon. Things IC were not all butterflies and rainbows though. The person I had elected to help co-run the clan of over 150 members, started giving issue. At one point she said, “I hope your fucking kids die!” I decided to have nothing to do with her, or course she took two of the siblings that were key to the story. I had Desmond because secretly I was playing Desmond. I found someone to play Desmond and recruited my friend Ryan as Adrian Blackthorne, a half brother of Reese.

I also was heavy into the Darkthornes story at this time, often just hiding on my Darkthorne personas. I like to say I don't play the characters, I am the mouth piece with which they express themselves. I never knew what the characters were going to do or where they were going to go. I never plan anything, plans are meant to be foiled after all. My characters live and breath, sometimes in ways I would not have chosen. Anyway I was still dating my ex wife at this time, there was no one else to see in my little world. That summer we had a power outage for over a week, sweltering heat, and the sounds of generators all night and day.

Around this time I met Chris Kaos, turned out we lived about two hours from one another. I was not surprised to find another Arkansas rper. I made a lot of good friends during this time. I also joined the Ayenee.com boards.

2004: I took a character from one of my short stories and inserted them into the Ayenee world of chat and forums. Atreyu Coldheart became my new focus at this time. The name Reese Blackthorne held a lot of heavy memories for me. I threw myself into the forums. The person that brought me to the forums was in an online relationship with me. I had hoped to make it something real, but at that moment they broke up with me. Maybe I was just being catfished, who knows lol. So I had a lot of anger towards that person, who was a mod on the .com forums. I was banned, I then circumvented those bans with proxy ips, I acquired boot programs and booted her off yahoo along with the other .com mods anytime I saw them on.

I used the name Demigod of Vast, I became another name on the forums using the sweettooth image as my signature and befriends her and everyone there. I then revealed myself and was backed up by another ex of hers the leader of the Kinetic clan. We had become close friends by complaining to each other about her flighty behavior. I allied myself with Celio aka April whom I talked with over the phone many nights. I was becoming a villain, the opposite of everything I had been before. Or maybe I was simply changing. My exwife was still in my life, and one night after she left my place, I found her car parked out in front of my cousins house. After confronting him, I decided it was time to leave town, there was no peace here for me anymore.

2004: I managed to get a job, and eventually a car, I made friends with Dyshanke on the .com forums. I spent long hours talking with her on the phone. I think I spent about a 1000 dollars on a phone bill just talking to her, but it was nice to have someone to talk to. I moved out into my own apartment, it was in the ghetto. I was a member of law enforcement and I felt scared in my apartment complex lol. I remember one day I was going out to get some smokes, and walked out into a guy handing another guy money, and that guy handing the other a bag of pot. I was like, whoop, I can go later, shut the door locked the three locks on it. I was focused on starting my own forums at this point, I don't know why.

I ended up meeting someone on the .com forums Carrie known as Noble Kissington and other names. She lived in Dallas which was close by, we met and she moved in. It was nice to no longer be alone, to have someone in my life that shared my interests. She couldn't get a job though, she had no DL and some sketchy story about why she couldn't get it. I didn't care, I was with someone that shared my interests and liked me.

2005: I changed jobs out of fear for my life. She introduced me to all kinds of other things, from movies, to books, to other rp genres on the internet. It felt weird being happy and content, but I enjoyed it. If I had not met her I would have never healed from the wounds left on me previous. We tried to start our own forums a few times. I tried to host Varsinax's forums on my web domain so he wouldn't lose them. That's when I started talking with Shaun Tebo.

2006: Shaun Tebo came down from Alaska and stayed with us for a while. Everyone I worked with started in jokes that he was sleeping with my gf while I was at work. After having that happened to me from my past relationship, I became paranoid despite my best efforts not to. I started having to work harder now, because I had two people to support. I started working a second job and donating plasma, as well as asking for money from my coworkers from time to time. The stress was crazy and I don't think that I got much done in rp terms. At this point we had moved from the Dark Realmz to our own Forum that Tebo was the tech guru of. I eventually asked Tebo to move out, the stress load was too much on me. I had started revealing the darkness behind Reese's ic plights as the Dark Effigy at this time.

2007: Around the last weeks of January, Carrie asked me to buy her a game called World of Warcraft. I had heard nothing about the game except there were a lot of people at the store I worked out for the expansion Burning Crusades when it was released. I agreed and bought the game and after a while of playing it myself I was hooked. So began my wow addiction which I still play from time to time today. We tried to rp in wow, but it was just not working for me, people wanted to be vampire demon blood elves that were secretly heirs to thrones. I took up a character I had played on the .com forums Cefka.

2007-2009: I played wow during this time. One day I joined a bg for WSG and I am minding my own business. Then this blood elf Varsinax starts telling everyone what to do if we want to win. I was like WTF!? I didn't know Varsinax played wow or that I would ever randomly meet another Ayenee rper lol. At the end of 2009 I told Carrie to move out. The two jobs and plasma donation was causing so much stress on my body, I thought I was going to die. I was either left with 5 bucks, and empty gas tank, or no money and an empty gas tank. I had to steal food from the employee fridge just to eat.

2010 -2012: I moved up to New Jersey after meeting someone on wow. I gave up half of my belongings and moved. Three days later I am rushing her to the hospital. The doctors tell me she wouldn't have made it one more day. We are getting married here in June, we have three kids and a house.

2012-2015: I tried to start my rp back up on Valucre, but for some reason all the rpers in it suddenly up and vanished. After some time the thread itself disappeared. Anytime I suggested starting something on Valucre or someone mentioning the same to me, it would fall through.

2016-2017: I spent years writing short stories about my characters and their adventures. I was contemplating putting them in a single text format. I have them in notebooks, printed out pages, and text documents in various formats. Some of these notebooks go back to 1998, I even have maps where I was trying to determine the location of various Ayenee kingdoms in relation to one another. The items brought up a renewed interest in my old rps and I started talking to my wife about it and she wonders why I am not currently rping.

She stated that if I enjoyed it so much I should still do it. I tried to tell her that the landscape of Ayenee has been broken over the years to the point where I doubt it even exists anymore. So I get on the internet and find Ayenee.org, I see that I have three of my s/ns on here Eduard, Reese, and Eseer. I was like wow, because I don't even remember coming here three years ago. So now I am trying to revive my rps, and Ayenee itself is in need of life support. These stories got us through bad times, helped us work out who we are. I look around and see Ayenee disappearing, fading as though it were never there. I realize it needs to be saved or it will die with us.

So start up Dionne Warwick - “That's What Friends Are For” because you guys are more than friends, and acquaintances, you're family. Whether we have known each other for years or have only just met.

This page was originally created by J on Sat 03-06-17.