Draft:James D. M. Ritchey

James Daniel Marrs Ritchey (born 21 April 1989) is a Canadian, actor, musician, director, cinematographer, television host, script writer, stand-up comedian, and influencer who is best known for hosting the television series Glorious North.

Personal life
Despite applying twice to the Canadian Armed Forces, he has never served.

Education
He graduated from Prince George Secondary School in 2007, and since then has studied New Media at the University of Lethbridge, and English at Athabasca University. He is also an alumnus of the Justice Institute of British Columbia, and Careerstep.

Family
Ritchey has one younger sibling. His sister was a co-founder of Vancouver Island Voices for Eating Disorders. James's great grandparents Lionel Marrs and Hilda Marrs (née Armour) immigrated to Canada from Great Britain in 1912. In the end, they settled on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, approximately 600 kilometers from Ritchey's home town of Prince George.

Social Media Presence
On social media Ritchey is most well known for his application to season 5 of Big Brother Canada. While his application was declined, his vlog about applying received a great deal of attention, including over 220,000 views, making it his most watched YouTube video at the time.

He has deleted many of the videos from his YouTube channel. In late 2016 he deleted most of the videos from his YouTube channel, notably including "57. Current Chart - Y2016M7D24", the source of the Heartbroken Cowboy meme. The Heartbroken Cowboy meme entry on Know Your Meme received over 125,000 views within the first 9 months, and its template is available on most meme generators.

Ritchey's DeviantArt profile has received over 180,000 views, and his artwork "March Whiteout" notably received over 20,000 views in its first month on DeviantArt.

Open Source Contributions
Ritchey's involvement in the open source community has included creating free software licenses, developing open source projects, and running websites related to open source topics.

Websites
On 10 December 2018, Christin Löhner announced the Linux Counter project would end, citing lack of time and user interest. In 2019 Ritchey launched Lius as a replacement. By 2020 the site had 324,048 users. In mid 2020 Ritchey announced Lius would be shutting down so that he could focus his time on other pursuits.

Licenses
He has authored several free licenses most of which are permissive, or copyleft in nature. The most well established is the Ritchey Permissive License, which is a permissive license designed for open source projects. Version 11 of this license was rejected by the OSI for inclusion in their list of open source licenses.

Open Source Projects
He has created many open source works, typically using one of his free licenses to release them.

Film Career
While attending the University of Lethbridge, he took acting classes as part of his major in New Media. His first television role was as an extra in TheKiddiePreneurs ; he played a parent. In 2017, he continued his entrance into television, as the host of the series Glorious North. His first movie role was playing John Cantel, in the independent film Lost In Capanira. As of January 9th 2018, he was ranked 154,045 on the IMDB StarMeter.

Film
Ritchey has done two movies, both of the survival genre, and one comedy short film.

Television
His television career has primarily consisted of hosting seasons one and two of the series Glorious North.

Music Career
In 2020 Ritchey released his first single So?.