So who’s this guy anyways? Good question, not entirely sure myself.
My name is Lutz, the person behind this website. I was born in Germany in August ’84 and have been living in and around Hamburg since 1990. During my time on this earth I was trained as an IT technician, but i’ve also worked several jobs as Electrician, System Administrator, Salesman, PC & Notebook Repair Technician and Web Designer. Currently I am employed as a Recovery Manager for SMC-A at Telefonica Germany. Our operations team is responsible for monitoring and troubleshooting a large internal Cisco SD-WAN network for one of Europe’s largest grocery chains.
So much for the professional side. During my spare time I keep myself busy with our cats, my wife or just playing games. I do some side work with web design and backend work as well, but in the last couple years this has become less relevant. Not sure if many people are interested, but when I was asking my wife if she’d be okay with me sharing pictures of us both with the world, she said that I should mention how we even met each other. Sure, she’s been a big part of my life at this point and it would feel wrong to leave her out of this, wouldn’t it?
So Lizi and I have actually met at school in around 1999. Mostly during Religion and the following Confirmation (yes I was a catholic at some point) which took place at the local church. In the beginning she thought I was a total loss. No clue what I was doing, how all this stuff works and without any friends. Well she wasn’t totally wrong and so she introduced me to her buddies and I hung out with them for the time being. One of the activities we were doing was a visit to a cloister where we spent a week to connect better with each other and god. A night near the end of the trip Lizi and I were sitting in one of the meeting rooms and were just talking to each other for hours until sunrise and I guess that’s when it clicked for us both. Our love lasted about a year, mostly because I was young, an idiot and way too busy with PC gaming than to keep a relationship going. But little did I know this wouldn’t be the end of it.
During the next 10 years we saw each other a couple times here and there, but since friend groups were vastly different anyways and I’ve moved a couple times around Hamburg we never spoke more than a couple hours max during that time. Fate would have it that she always met me when she was at a low point in her life and I somehow always showed up to cheer her up. At some point Lizi decided to visit all her ex lovers when she had a very rough spot in her marriage. She saved me for last, because our relationship always meant a lot to her, since apparently I was her first “real” one. Guess same goes for me. After some misunderstandings she suddenly stood before my door with my mom just on her way to visit me. Well to say it was a surprise when my mom saw her sitting on the couch would be an understatement and both of them spent hours catching up. Anyways, after we were left alone again we finally had some time to talk and noticed we still clicked and started seeing each other again every couple days. Since Lizi was sure that she didn’t want to stay married we somehow started another relationship after all those years.
She asked me at some point if I ever wanted to marry and well, I guess I didn’t say no to that offer. Took a while to get her to the registry office though, because even though Lizi was sure that she wanted to marry again, the scars left her scared. 5 years into our relationship we finally managed to get down to it though and when the official told us the available dates my soon to be wife asked if they still had some thing for this year (it was September). Guess we’re planning a wedding in 2 month now. On November, 30th 2018 we gathered all our friends and family in the castle of Reinbek and got officially married. While her “yes” sounded more like she was used to it at this point, I am sure she knew exactly what she was getting into. It’s been 6 years since at this point and while not everything was smooth or easy I can confidently say that Lizi is the best thing that has happened to me in my life. Thank you.
Online Life
Now, why did I chose “shark5060” as my username? Well after being done using variations of my real name, Neo (you know, Matrix is cool and shit) or some l337 h4x0r name I settled on shark, simply because I liked sharks at this point and it sounded cool. Since every username with shark is probably taken everywhere I had to add some numbers, and 5060 was the record I had set at the origial GameBoy Tetris back then so I just used that. At least that’s how I remember – it surely wasn’t 5060 lines, so probably points? no clue honestly.
Ever since I sat in front of a PC I was drawn to gaming. Stuff like Sokoban, PacMan and Tetris were early beginnings, followed by Indiana Jones, Prince of Persia and Castlevania. Once the 3D FPS era hit I was all for it. Doom, Quake III and Counter-Strike were my go-to games, but I also played a lot of Unreal Tournament and many of it’s modded maps. At some point my CS 1.6 Clan was even in the Top 100 Germany ranking of the ESL but when I started my job training this “career” ended before it even had begun.
My focus shifted to MMORPGs and it really started off with Ragnarok Online, which brought many competitive activities like War of Emperium or Battlegrounds and I played that game for more than five years until it had lost its glory and charm. It really ways a crazy time, and I met many new friends – some of which I still have contact to this day. Of course if you put a bunch of kids and wannabes into a competitive game and forums you will get drama. And oh lord did we have a lot of it. I am not ashamed to say that my nickname “Sir Flame-a-lot” back then didn’t came from nothing and nowadays this probably would be considered cyberbullying or something similar. Well, we eventually survived that era of gaming and when the servers were pretty much stale after several merges, I sold all my in-game currency and joined friends in World of Warcraft.
Even if you’re not a gamer you probably have heard of WoW by now. It’s one of the longest standing titles of this genre and is still being updated with new content by Blizzard. I joined during the last months of The Burning Crusade and just stumbled along not knowing wtf I was doing. The friends that brought me into the game had stopped playing at some point while I had a better idea about the game I wasn’t even raiding. That’s when I met Alex and Chris, two of the friends I have to this day (Alex was even my best man during our wedding) and they invited me to their clan and showed me the ropes. We then moved to several new servers, other Clans and even had Vanion as our Raid Lead at some point (daCore if I remember correctly). I’ve never been an exceptional player at WoW, and my interest was more focussed on developing addons and interface designs than raiding every single week, so naturally I took several breaks over the years of playing the game. First break was between MoP and WoD, second was between Legion and Shadowlands. I don’t know why, but World of Warcraft is a game I can just pick up at any time, re-learn the things that have changed over the years and instantly have fun again for a while.
During my WoW breaks I also tried out games like AION, TERA and Final Fantasy XIV as well as similar games that were “WoW Killers”, so if you ever met someone named Blackbird, Shark5060 or something similar – chances are that was me.
Another game that I have played for a very long time, maybe even longer than World of Warcraft was EVE Online. While I wasn’t online all the time it’s a game that never stops. Some of the biggest wars in gaming history were fought while the servers tried to keep up with the vast amount of players and ships that participated at the same time. I don’t really like going into details for most of the stuff I did in the game, since there are some plans that still have to pay out, but my official Character Shark5060 was part of the EVE University (as a student) and I enjoyed playing many ops with them and learn the basics to use in other aspects. If you ever want to get into the game, the EVE University Corporation is a great way to start and to get a hold of the vast amount of things possible.
Nowadays I mostly play Destiny 2, Once Human and recently Path of Exile 2 (after playing the first one in 2010). Sadly Bungie has kinda abandoned Destiny 2 after the 10-year saga concluded and while not necessarily their own fault, I personally still blame the management for the failure. Episodes were supposed to be larger, more story focussed content, but it’s basically just the seasonal content with a new name and fewer updates.
Once Human and Path of Exile 2 are still pretty fresh games (PoE2 is currently in early access) and we’ll see if they can keep me entertained for long. I have met some nice people in both games and enjoy playing the current “Way of Winter” scenario where you not only have to keep track of hunger and thirst, but also the temperature of your surroundings.
Another game that I will always come back to is League of Legends. I know, fits my toxic personality. While I only ever managed to reach Gold in Ranked I have since just been playing the ARAM game mode and some normal games here and there with friends. I would be lying if I said I keep up with all the changes to champions and items and whatever else, so it’s always an “experience” picking the game up again and playing a couple rounds.
So much for the PC games that I’ve been busy with. But we live in the era of mobile games and of course those didn’t escape my attention either. Mostly started playing Ark of War, a PvP focussed game where you build and lose troops while taking part in cross server spanning wars and local skirmishes. I’ve quit that one about two years after starting because it just became repetitive, I am still in love with the community though and thus help admin the largest community Discord of that game and helped them develop a Discord Bot which takes care of several of the ingame calculations.
Another game that keeps me addicted is Epic Seven. Classic gatcha style with very nice and fluid animations and even after so many years it still doesn’t feel boring. The meta gets disrupted every couple months due to addition or adjustment of new heroes and while power-creep is a real thing, I have enough resources to be always prepared for the changes. The climb to the top of the PvP ladder is near impossible nowadays though since they changed the way the points are calculated, so I stay comfortable at my Champion V rank without doing much, since my defense team takes care of it. Point losses are rare and are almost always recouped when another player thinks they can take me on.
While not necessarily exclusive to mobile, I am really enjoying playing Wuthering Waves and can’t wait until the next content update to continue with the story. So far it’s really promising and I am curious if it will evolve as far as Genshin Impact of the same developer did.
History
Well, if you want to know how I changed my looks over the years, I did a little digging and found some really old pictures of mine and decided to create a gallery. Enjoy.
