User:Wrye

This user is an Administrator on the wiki.

This user is a Monkey.

This monkey is NOT working on Fallout 3.

Wrye recommends: Wrye's Fun Oblivion Videos

Wrye recommends: A's List of Recommended Mods

Wrye Musings has Moved!

My website, formerly at wrye.ufrealms.net has moved to wryemusings.com.

Unforgotten Realms had long hosted Wrye Musings along with a number of other popular Elder Scrolls associated websites. However, the site went down (apparently due to hackers) in September and the long time host lacked the resources to bring it back. I'm sorry to see UFRealms go down, but I extend my thanks to Silmarillion for freely hosting me (and others) for so long!

Note: As of this date the site has mostly been recovered, but I still need to update links in internal documents, and post some of the older Morrowind mods to standard download sites. --Wrye 21:53, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Note: Wrymusings.com is down as of late 2015. Archived versions of the legendary site are still available on Wayback Machine.

Status: Retired/Inactive

I'll still be checking in occasionally, but I've been pretty much retired for the last six months.

I'm very pleased to see that UESP is still doing very well -- in fact is one of the premier gaming wikis on the web! Having spent so much time working on the site in the past, it's really cool to see that it continues to have such a strong editing/managing community. Good job guys and gals! :)

As for what I'm doing now: Playing a lot of World of Warcraft. Good thing I avoided playing it for so long or else I wouldn't have gotten nearly as much Wrye stuff done! :D

Note: The rest of the page is a bit historical since it reflects my previous activity status. I'm forgoing modifying it since it's just so cool as is!

About Me

In real life, I'm a monkey living in a major metropolitan zoo in the United States. Life as a zoo animal isn't so bad -- lots of free food, zoo-keepers constantly bringing in monkey females for me to mate with, and best of all -- those damn pythons are safely locked away behind a good foot or so of solid glass! Whenever I'm feeling a little low, I just run around the cage, screaming and making faces at them, and laugh at them because they have no hands to play computer games with. Idiots.

When I'm not taunting the pythons, eating or mating with the monkey females that the zoo keepers bring around, I play computer games. Yes, I do play games other than Elder Scrolls games. Tomb Raider Legend is great, but I wish Lara was covered with hair and said "Ook!" more. But the way she climbs those walls, ropes, etc... Well it's pretty clear she's part monkey. Umm, yeah! Baby! Anyway, back to Elder Scrolls...

As ElderScrollian

I'm not sure what I'm best known for. Right now, probably for allowing people to relevel NPCs so that they can use Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul with older games. (Apparently 3/4 of the human male population plays OOO.) That and allowing users to import faces between savegames and/or mods. Apparently a lot of players want the faces of their previous PCs put on NPC companions in new games they play. Hmm... I'm going to leave that one alone.

Anyway, that's all very nice, but not really not fair because there's a lot more to this monkey then a pretty face! What I should best be known for are Wrye Mash and Wrye Bash, two kitchen-sinkish utilities that do all sorts of wonderful things for Morrowind and Oblivion respectively. Bash is pretty useful if you're playing Oblivion, but Mash is crucial if you're playing Morrowind. Trust the monkey. It is.

Other than that, I've released my own small (but vastly important, of course) mods and contributed and/or taken up the mantle on several other major mods. For personal Morrowind mods, there's Wrye World and Wrye Patches. The main team mod is Living Cities of Vvardenfell which is the classic scheduling mod for Morrowind, and to which this monkey has made modest contributions. (Okay, I'm lying. Huge contributions. Really big... Lights get dimmer at night! Amazing, huh? No, no applause, just send money.)

For Oblivion, I'm mainly known for putting signs on Ayleid wells that say "Ayleid Well". But really, I should be better known for Rational Names which solves the crucial problem of letting you know that that handbill lying on the window ledge isn't just a "Handbill", but a "Handbill, Southern Stables". How humans live without such clarifications, I don't know. (Sometimes I suspect that humans climbed one step too far up the evolutionary ladder. But then I play Tomb Raider Legend, and after a while, I'm screaming "Swing! Yeah! Swing like a monkey, Lara!" I gotta admit -- those microchips are pretty nifty. And you know what they are? Sand! They're just $400 dollar specs of sand! I have to admit, no monkey could have invented something like that. Or foot thick glass. Good Job humans!)

Anyway, if you want to know more about all that, check out my home page: Wrye Musings.

Odd Facts

I'm also famous for revealing that Britney Spears is in fact a 38 year old troll-ish man from Milwaukee. Strange but true. I know because "she" and Kevin were walking by my cage once, and "Britney" said to Kevin, "Oh, what a funny Monkey! And, by the way did you know that I'm DarkFlame?" At which point "she" pulled off her Britney mask. Pretty scary, I'm telling you. Oh, Kevin's response? "That's great honey, but you better put the mask back on before we get outside. You know... Paparazzi."

Celebrities. They're just not primates.

As UESPian

Oops, almost forgot... I do stuff here too. I used to do a lot, now I do a little (see above). Mostly, I just use my godlike sysop powers to annoy the new guys, and make sure that no python, ever, ever, ever posts anything to this site. Hah, hah, hah! (Which actually is not that hard, given their lack of limbs. Did you know that pythons used to have arms and legs, but then gave them up as too much trouble? I mean sure, I give humans grief for climbing up just so they could talk to specks of sand, but going down the ladder just so that you can become nothing but an alimentary canal covered with scales??? Pinheads.)

Don't Irc the Monkey

Someone asked why I don't use irc or IM. Here's the real reason (taken from my talk page archive)...

Sorry to interrupt here, but have you heard of this latest cool invention? It's some sort of real-time, always on, voice chat system, I think they're calling it the telephone or something like that? ;-) — Endareth^Talk–Edits 00:44, 5 December 2006 (EST)

You could use a java client.. :) --Aristeo | Talk 02:12, 5 December 2006 (EST)

The zoo keepers let us have phones for a little while, but then took them back after some monkey (*cough*, not me of course) ran up a huge bill calling the "All Lara, All the Time" 900 hotline. Actually, the only reason that we have even computers is because some of some research grant. We weren't sure what to do with them at first, so we started knocking out some goofy melodramas. The researchers got pretty excited about the one with dueling families, where two stupid kids end up whacking themselves at the end. We were knocking out quite a bit of stuff like that when Morrowind came out, and we switched to making mods. The researchers were kind of unhappy about that, but one of the other monkeys started working on a mod about this prince in Mournhold (his uncle kills his father, then the prince acts crazy, and in end just about everyone dies). Anyway that seemed to mollify the researcher. :shrug: BTW, did you know that "Oscuro" is actually the codename for a team of Monkeys in the Bronx Zoo? I mean you didn't really think that any single human could do that amount of work, did you?

As for java, we'd love to use it, but the research team is funded by Microsoft and they won't let us install it on our computers. Horatio (the Monkey doing the Mournhold prince mod) suggested that we invite the Microfties to visit the pythons, but in the end, the rest of us nixed the idea. Afraid they might mate.

So, email it is. ;) --Wrye 19:07, 5 December 2006 (EST)

Serious Monkey

Okay, putting on my "serious monkey" face... I'm "somewhat" retired these days, but am still active in several areas. I tend to focus mostly on management/integration issues.

UESP
I'm a sysop here. But I'm too busy with other stuff to be very active these days. I mainly limit myself to significant management issues and Morrowind and Oblivion modding issues.

Morrowind
I'm mainly known for Wrye Mash my mod management utility. I also have several of my own mods which (Wrye World add some nice stuff). I've also the current manager of two very well known mods: Living Cities of Vvardenfell, which brings scheduling (of a sorts) to Morrowind, and Necessities of Morrowind, which adds cooking, hunger and thirst.

However, all of that is fairly stable and is only rarely updated.

Oblivion
I'm currently most active in Oblivion, I'm well known for several items:

• Wrye Bash: A mod installer/manager plus a whole lot more. Bash is crucial for resolving many types of mod conflicts through the "Bashed Patch" feature. It also does: Save Profiles, PM Archiving, and (oddly) people tracking.
• Cobl (Common Oblivion): Cobl is both a shared library (for use by other mods) and a significant expansion mod in itself. Cobl it the product of a large team of people -- I'm the project instigator/manager/integrator.
• Misc. Mods: I also have a number of other Oblivion mods, many of which are well known (Wrye Shivering, Wrye Shivering Death, Wrye Leveling, Wrye Morph, etc.) Some of these offer some pretty cool features: Wrye Shivering Death allows the PC to survive death; Wrye Leveling gives you complete control over leveling process; Wrye Morph allows you to swap between multiple forms -- and even "doppelgang" NPCs and take their place.

Fallout 3
In order to leave myself enough time to frolic with the Lara monkeys in the hot tub, I'm not even buying Fallout 3! However, I do have advice for anyone interested in converting Wrye Bash to support Fallout.

Politics of Modding
I'm a propronent and supporter of "Integration" in mods. I.e. provide tools that make it easier for mods to work together and I encourage other modders to work in a way to make integration between mods easier. Many specific features of Mash and Bash, as well as the whole of Cobl exist to support integration. Also, my Cathedral vs. Parlor paper is a fairly well known argument for integration in modding. On the more acerbic side, several of the terms in my Somewhat Acerbic Modders Dictionary address integration and its opponents.

Mod/Tool Support
If you need support for my mods and/or tools, do not post here. Instead, go to the official forums, find the appropriate forum/topic and post there. For active tools/mods, there's is usually a RELZ (release) topic -- that's the best place to ask. But be sure to check the readme/manual first. (See Warning below.)

Warning

Monkeys have large teeth and bite quite hard. Our otherwise very fine monkey "Wrye" has a low tolerance for humans who don't read manuals, or refuse to "use the brains they developed in their quest to talk to specs of sand." Just last week we had a very unfortunate incident in which a zookeeper consulted a "Monkeys For Dummies" book while in Wrye's presence. Fortunately, grafting technology has advanced much these days, and Wrye graciously returned the fingers after we briefly allowed him to use the phone and dial the "All Lara, All the Time" hotline. Please be careful.

The Zookeepers