Nostalgia

Dear Blog,

As you can see it has, again, been forever since I last wrote. This entry does not stem from the random impulse to once again revive my blog into something it has never really been. (which is, a blog that gets updated once a day, every day)

However, today I remembered there's something I wanted to write down so I wouldn't forget.

It's about Aion, and it's about the initial play time invested by Sepher, Baer, Demo, Fabi, Frenzied, Rakoo and myself. I know it's been a long time since we played Aion, and yeah on further inspection the game might not have been as awesome as we'd hoped, but there's something to be said for those first few months. To start with the character creation interface, which is still the best I've ever seen so far. Don't ask me how, when the options were limitless, I ended up with what probably most resembled an anime character. She was short, red-haired, and big-eyed. Seriously, they don't give you any idea of how short your character is going to look in comparison to the ingame characters. However, when you've spend at least an hour figuring out how your character should look, you have to defend her when other players point out her various faults. I should have just created a new one right there an then, when I was still level one. Alas I was too stubborn, and for the next 49 levels I looked upon Sepher's full-breasted blonde with envy. Rakoo's african-american amazon-chick wasn't bad either, she was, of course, better than mine, but she wasn't "xarvana" either. For as far as I can remember Demo was a blackhaired-dude, kindof skinny, Baer was a big bald-headed dude, not skinny at all, Frenzied was another blond beauty who somehow managed to outshine my redhead (even though I pointedly denied this) and Fabi, well, he played a female but this was perhaps the only one I wasn't particularly envious about. I think she had two braids. Fabi was picky like that, had go have his own thing. And sometimes, when we gave him hell for his char's looks, I suspect he too worked hard at pretending to like his char. Then again he watched anime, so maybe there was some truth to his beliefs. In this aspect Fabi might also have been the only one who liked my char at least kind of, what with the whole anime thing and all.

Anyway enough about the chars. The thing I remember most about Aion is the endless grinding. See, quests usually only got you halway, 3/4 if you were lucky. So the nights spend in the famous grinding area called the Kaiden Headquarters were plentiful. We were there hours on end, all night, evey night. We started playing Aion immediatly after release, so the people in our levelarea were mostly just as nerdy as us. Suffice it to say if you found a group to grind with, even your random member didn't have to leave after maybe 2 hours. No people, this was hardcore. This was a Korean game, and we were finding that out the hard way. I particularly remember one night in the Kaiden Headquarters, we were in a party of 6 as is normal in Aion, Sepher, Demo, Rakoo and I were there, and two randoms whos names I don't remember. What I do remember was that it must've been about 3.30 in the morning, and we were standing around regenerating when we decided to check how long our random mates were up for staying with us. The replies were positive. And then the one guy said something along the lines of "I just have to be afk for 1,5 hours, then I'm good to go". This was met with awkward silence on our part, mostly we were busy imagining what he had to go do in the middle of the night for one and a half hours. (the possibilities were endless) It turned out he had to deliver some newspapers, but would be back to join us in our seemingly neverending quest for xp.

I can positively say that this is among the highlights of the nerdisshness of my life. Not so much because he had to go deliver some papers, but because we'd actually be there waiting for him when he got back. Call it what you will but we sure had some fun with those Kaiden dudes.

Another one such memorable events in Aion happened some time after that. There was an epic quest in Aion, that rewarded the player with a awesome weapon, and in Aion epic REALLY means epic. The quest took forever, had about a million steps, and it was among the final and most difficult steps of this quest that this story takes place. Demo, Rakoo, myself and three randoms were in a party, on our way to the final step of beforementioned epic quest. For this quest, you had to travel through a rift into enemy territory, fight your way through an elite-area to one of their instances and the defeat the boss in said instance. These rifts only spawned once every few hours or so, and you had to have the exact correct one to get to the instance. When we hear the rift was there, we quickly partied up and went on our way. This was a journey of epic proportions. (befitting the quest) Remember folks, this was when Aion was brand new, and elite mobs were ELITE. Needless to say we had some very close calls. When we finally made it to the instance we were pretty happy with ourselves, and pretty tired of the outside snowy-scenery, so inside we went. Which is where the real fun started. Don't remember how often we had to run outside because someone added the whole room instead of a few mobs, but there was some progress. It was, I think, during one of those "oh shit the whole room added let's get out of here"-pulls that one of our randoms (thankfully not the healer) died. Now, dying isn't exactly the end of the world when you have a priest along who can revive the unfortunate player. However, this player wasn't just unfortunate, he was also stupid. He pressed the release button which pretty much brought him back to life on the other side of the rift, with no way for him to get back to us since the rift we used had disappeared. Though not without lack of trying on his part, he found another rift and wandered though enemy territory the rest of the evening. Stayed in ventrilo with us too, I think we all felt kind of bad for him. We did finish the instance without him though. I think we only had respawn once. It was the ultimate hard-work-pays-off moment in aion, we all got an awesome weapon for our trouble, felt kind of invincible afterwards i guess (at least i did). Totally awkward for random guy #2 though, since he went through more trouble than anyone and didn't get any reward. Such is the nature of the game I guess. You snooze you lose.

It's memories like this that make me miss gaming. It's why Rakoo and I are currently looking for a new mmorpg to try out, I mean even if it sucks, in the beginning everything is new, nothing is nerfed, and exploring new stuff with a party of friends is just about the most fun you'll ever get in an mmorpg, because pretty soon nothing's gonna be new anymore, just look at WoW. In the beginning everything was better. Blizzard gets this in a way that they keep adding new content, they just kind of forget that the items you achieve while conquering new stuff are half the fun, and if they keep making your acquirements useless by introducing better stuff that easier to get (basically nullifying your achievement) the game gets old. Fast.

Anyway, I hope there's some moments like the ones I've described in my future, it would have to be my near future because somehow the older I get the more embarrassed about gaming I become. Somehow gaming isn't that cool when you're 35. (says the girl who's dad plays WoW)

On the other hand, it shouldn't matter all that much how old I am, as long as we have fun together and it's something I can look back on years later and smile about. However cheesy that may sound.

Dear blog,

It says something about my day when I have to conclude that the most exiting thing that happened is finding a specific shade of blue nail polish. Looking at houses with my sister comes in second, with my visit to the supermarket in the gracious third place.

A little minecraft et voila! Day gone.

Note to self: don't rub eyes after cutting red cayenne pepper. Ouch.

Ud just downed something. I totally heard it. I was sitting in the raid channel just half tuned in as usual when suddenly they were are real happy and stuff. S'nice, that. Perhaps even better than when things suck and Lorril is all mr. evil-raidleaderguy. Then again, maybe not.

Dear Blog,

Stupid blog! I just wrote a long an interesting entry and then you refused to post it claiming some error! Bad blog!

So the short version then:

Stayed up way too late yesterday (5.30-ish) woke up way too late (14.30-ish, bad Ri!). The staying up late was due to a book that just too exciting to put away.
Played Hon yesterday with Tommy and Fabi and sucked ass. Had witch slayer and somehow ended up with 0 - 4. It was sad. We did win somehow because apparently on the other side of the map things were going a lot better. I think Tommy might have secretly regret asking me to play :(

Now I'm going to eat my banana breakfast.

I stopped playing WoW after the first few weeks of cataclysm. I now play HoN and minecraft sometimes but that's it.

Found this old blog just now, funny to read back.

However I'm totally stalling because what I should be doing is writing a paper for meta-etics which is due in about 24 hours so I really should just get to it.

Dear Blog,

I've neglected you again for way too long. I'm sorry.

A lot has happened since my last entry but I don't feel like writing much so here's a summary.

Summerholidays have started, I passed Dialectology and failed Vertaalwetenschappen which I will do again next year. Rakoo and I went to Vienna and visited Baer and Sepher which was cool, I took a picture of the Liliputbahn for Demo. On the day we were supposed to fly home we discovered someone hacked my WoW account which made me very sad. By the time we got home Blizzard returned all my stuff which cheered me up quite a bit.

I went to see the new twilight movie Eclipse with Rakoo and have to admit it was kind of boring but it was to be expected cause the third book was also the stupidest. Rakoo was very brave and didn't fall asleep once.

We found out Rakoo has to be at the Uni in Osnabrück at the same time we planned to be in Zoutelande. So now he's not coming. This is very sad, but I'm taking his camera and will return with many pictures.

Upcoming wednesday I'm going back home.
At my parents' house Alex from Canada is visiting and she'll also be going with us to Zoutelande.

Oh and Rakoo will start the legendary quest tomorrow and I get the mount when he finishes!

Super weather. And why not? These days always occur when I have to stay inside. In this very moment I should be writing my thesis in stead of this blog, but in my head I have already made what I have to do very easy and now my head is thinking I could just do it tonight in stead of right now. Bad head. If it's so easy I should do it now and then I'd have the evening to myself. But no way does it work that way. I'm going to be pushing it off awhile longer as I go shower and make some sandwiches... the usual. I'm very much wanting to start the third book in the series I discovered the day before yesterday but I'm not allowing myself. Go me! Apparently there's still some willpower left. It helps that I told Demo yesterday that he should flame me in WoW should he see me online. Now I can't go hopping around Dalaran either. And vt is plain boring. The perfect time, really.
So yeah I'll start right after this blog then for fucks sake. I MUST.

Rakoo is in Berlin this week and it's been boring and kind of empty without him. I got an sms that he's having a good time so that's good I guess, as long as he's not having too good of a time. In WoW not much is going on, we got another batch of trials, and a new girl, again! Still no LK down though, but oh well. Furthermore I have to convince Caspi that he really should come back, at least with cataclysm, and that there's also people here who still want him back. Though I guess in the end that's really up to Lorril. Note to self: convince Lorril.

Rakoo and I will once again be going to Vienna to visit Sepher, Baer and Frenzied and I'm very much looking forward to that :)

In the azshara forum they made this thread about lucid dreams, which reminds me I had one this morning. Obviously I was reluctant to get up considering the whole thesis-thing so I drifted around in half-sleep for awhile, which is where I had the lucid dream. It went like this: I was standing in line at a machine that gave out messages or tickets of some kind, don't remember what for. And it had a chance to randomly spit out a 50E bill. Which it did for the person before me. So we were like wow and I said gz. Then suddenly a whole bunch of tickets fell out and in the pile we both searched for more money until we came upon a HUGE stack of 50E bills. We were deliriously happy and decided to divide the money. Only then two 'bitches' showed up. And I say bitches because in my head they were the definition of the word, no kidding. All mean-faced and slutty dressed, you know the type. So they wanted to ninja our money but since I was just here getting in my lucid dream I was thinking I'd just have superpowers which I DID then. The think about lucid dreams is that it's real hard to make things happen the way you want them because to do that you have to envision everything to happen the way you want it. Anyway, I swiped at the one with my hand and imagined her flying across the street, and she did. Positively awesome. The other however I only managed to hit in the face and though her nose started to bleed she didn't fly away like the other one. Then suddenly I imagined confession power like Kaylin from Legend of the Seeker. Don't know the series? Well confession is when Kaylin put her hand on her victim's throat (which I did with said bitch) then unleashes her power and then for a moment her irises become all black and then those of her victims to do and once she's finished the victim is a total slave and will forever serve her until Kaylin dies. So I confessed this bitch, and her eyes went all black and then back to normal. Only she didn't appear to be my slave afterwards and I decided not to stick around and find out. So then I grabbed this other good person's shoulder and flew (yes flew!) us out of there. To the top of a nearby building. Only it wasn't a good roof so we visited some other buildings till we found one where we could divide the money in peace.

Funny about this particular lucid dream was that at one point I was so aware that I was dreaming and I looked around me seeing a world, my dreamworld, but it looked so real. And I looked down at my hands and they were there and I could move them, though my movements appeared to be abit laggy, lol. And I was thinking to myself that it was so weird that I didn't feel my pillow or my bed or anything even though I just knew I was lying in bed. It was seriously magical, I was just standing around in my unconscious somewhere being totally conscious of the fact that I was there. Suddenly made me aware what a powerful thing the mind really is.

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven. And ain't that the truth.