Posted

Jul 12th 2005

Mood

Squiggly

The day before yesterday, my grandmother and my father (using a credit card my grandmother pays, I think) bought me a laptop computer. On the positive side, it has a 100Mb hard drive 1Gb of RAM, one of those Athalon (sp?) 64 processor thingumabobs, and a graphics card that supports Final Fantasy XI. On the negative side, it has "LiveStrong" on it in a yellow font that clashes with the black body color, and I do not know how to get it online. I named it Matthew after a nice Christian Gothic kid from England, then I discovered that the name Matthew means "gift of God". How appropriate. ==

I was also praying that I would be able to reactivate my Final Fantasy XI account before the end of the "Return to Vana'diel" promotion ended. It turned out that it ends tomorrow, and yesterday I found the time to successfully reactivate Mielle. Let me see...the first things to do in Vana'diel for me are...I will put up all those excess items for auction...I cannot imagine what I thought I needed them for...then I will send something nice to Draoi, who was my friend until I kind of vanished out of existence...and maybe I will send somthing also to the girl in the Christian guild...and then I will find a way to get back to Bastok, where I actually have the streets memorized (for the most part). Then I will hone my smithing skills and try to find the courage to level up to whatever level someone who played for a full year is supposed to have reached. (*Sigh*...twelve months to level fourteen...) I am still very glad to be back. Later I will see about getting it switched over to my brand-new debit card account rather than my mother's credit card. I...guess I really am eighteen years old after all.

The third bit of news is Second Life. I heard about the online, user-created world through Torley Wong, who I heard about through the Autistic Picture Project, which I heard about after researching my own neurological status after reading an article about Edward Scissorhands, about whom I obsessed for awhile without ever having seen the movie. It is strange and remarkable how my life takes all of these twists and turns to lead me to a totally unrelated place that I never would have found otherwise. Anyway...I discovered the hard way that Second Life dislikes dial-up connections. It has got to be all of the custom content, which must be torturous for a slow connection to load. Poor little Caroline [the family computer]. Partly because the game crashed repeatedly, and partly because I have little skill in predicting how hundreds of slider-based options will affect the whole, I failed to make my avatar beautiful, but I think that I did make her reasonably non-hideous. She has white skin, long platinum-blonde hair with floppy bangs like mine, and she is wearing black eyeliner. Hurray for that.
Because of an unidentified problem, I had a lot of trouble with movement, and on the second step of the newbie tutorial, I ended up teleporting myself off of the beginners' island. What a tragedy. I did, however, meet a kindly fox anthro who explained what my problem was. I think that his name was something along the lines of "Pawsie", with an equally furry-related last name, but unfortunately I do not remember it. I should find him again and give him a positive rating. His patience with an idiotic newbie was commendable.
After standing behind said patient fox and tweaking my avatar as best I could, I ended up teleporting randomly to locations that had interesting names. The first two were M[ature] rated and caused lag. The third one I actually liked, after a few pieces of it loaded. It appeared to have a neat, science-fictionlike appeareance to it, with translucent, angular shapes forming what I presume was some type of building or city. It was beautiful. As I stood there, waiting for things to load and observing my newfound surroundings, a voice called out to me from some unseen location, "hi violet" since my avatar's name is Violet Garden (pun intended). I responded with a hello, but I was quickly drawn back into my first life by the necessity of going to bed. Woe is the person who has a schedule and a need for physical well-being. I wish I could remember the name of that new place, but it was rated PG (thankfully), and I am sure that I will find myself back there whenever I log in again. I am hoping that I will soon be able to access a broadband connection for playing Second Life, although Final Fantasy XI only requires dial-up. Bastok is my home, and Second Life is an explorational opportunity.

One of my dreams already came true through Second Life, even though I only played for one evening.
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My avatar is wearing a skirt...with black socks...WITH SANDALS!!!!!!!!!! Bwahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!