About Me / The Site

Shamus Young passed away June 15, 2022. You can read the explanation here.

Shamus Young, was a 50 year old writer and software engineer and enthusiastically married father of 3. In his free time he tended to play videogames and write software of dubious value. He also wrote about these things here. If you want to buy his books, look here.

This blog is big. He’d been posting an average of five times a week since September of 2005. If you run those numbers, you will realize that this place has a staggering amount of content. All of this was more or less an accident.

This site began in late 2005. He was running a D&D campaign for my friends, and wanted to write the campaign out in story form. This is why the site is called “Twenty Sided”, even though he hadn’t written anything about tabletop gaming in ages. Since he already had a blog, he started using this space to write about whatever stuff amused him at the time.

A year later, his wife got him a bit of comic book creating software for his birthday. Mostly as an excuse to use it, he began writing DM of the Rings, which grew in popularity until it pretty much consumed the site. Then it ended, but a lot of the audience hung around, hoping he would do something else to amuse them. The last 17 years have been his response to that hope.

If you’d like to contact his family the email is: shamus -at- shamusyoung dot com

If you’re looking for a bunch of personal info, here’s the short version:

He was a Christian, but a nontraditional one who is happy to live harmoniously with other people without forcing his values on them. He kept his politics to himself, because he’d rather have friends than “win” arguments. He didn’t have a degree.

If you want the long version, then you can find more than you ever wanted to know here:

  • The Autoblography – The story of growing up and trying to become a programmer before such a thing was properly invented. (1971 – 1998)
  • Crash Dot Com – His rags-to-riches-to-rags journey through the Dot-com bubble. (1998 – 2001)
  • The Twelve Year Mistake – A blunder that took over a decade to figure out. (2000 – 2013)
  • Something in the Water – A dumb story of dumb things that happened. (2014)

Books available here.