The History of Nerdular Nerdence, Part I
I've been feeling a bit unproductive lately. Of course I am thrilled about actually finding a job, but I don't have to do anything with it until August, so I still have quite a bit of free time on my hands. So, it's LiveJournal time!
My summer project has been completely redoing my bedroom. I've hated it for years, but then it was like, "Hey, I'm going to college! I only have to live here 2-3 months out of the year!", so I wasn't particularly motivated to do anything with it. But now, of course, I will be living in it continously for at least the next year, so I've decided to make it into a place that I actually won't hate spending time in (especially since my computer is going in there).
So far, I've done the following: cleaned like WHOA!, thrown out a huge amount of shit, created an equally huge pile of clothing and stuffed animals to donate, painted all my existing furniture, bought unfinished bookcases and shelves and painted them to match the furniture, picked out fabric to make curtains, bought frames for my favorite posters, decided where everything is going to go once the walls are painted, and today, I started stenciling "English ivy" onto the bookcases. Whew. Still to go: get the walls painted (hopefully while I am on vacation next week, as that will be convenient and I don't have to be banished to the spare bedroom for a few nights), hang the shelves, pictures, and new mirror, finish the stenciling, put books in the bookcases, and organize everything (including setting up the computer). I actually believe I'm almost there, but I'm sure more things will come up. If you're curious about my color scheme, the walls are going to be bright green (my carpet is a darker green), all the furniture and shelves are white, and the curtains are white with a colorful floral pattern on it. I think I will be very happy with all of this and will not mind escaping to my room when I need a break from my parents.
Other pseudo-productivity: Last Monday, me, Miguel, and Teej went down to Posa Posa because 1) it was TJ's day off and 2) that's what we do, and then we did a video game run all down Route 59. At our third stop, the game store at the Nanuet Mall, we struck gold: Phantasy Star Online Episodes 1 & 2 for the Gamecube on sale for only $9.99. Holy crap.
Now, let's backtrack a bit. My faithful readers who have known me for a long time know my obsession with the Phantasy Star series. It is tied with the Myst series for my all time favorite video games. You will never convince me that there is a better console game than the original Phantasy Star on the old Sega Master System. I LOVE that game (the others are good, too, but the original is still the best). In my younger days (and not-so-younger days), I have written fanfiction based on the series. I have had AIM screen names based on characters. I have done many other nerdtacular things related to it. I. Love. It.
Moving ahead a few years: Phantasy Star IV, the last of the original series, came out in 1994. Obviously, that was quite a long time ago. In the very late 90s, it was announced that there was going to be a new Phantasy Star game released. The online PS community rejoiced. I'm pretty sure it came out in late 2000. The bad news: it was on the brand-new (at the time) Sega Dreamcast. Despite me being somewhat of a spoiled brat, I knew that there was no way I could convince my parents to pay around $200 for just the system, never mind the $90-something for the game (and a monthly fee if I wanted to play online). My hopes of playing the latest sequel to the series I loved so much were shattered.
But let's take another look at the timeframe. Late 2000 - my junior year of high school, which was an all-around *fun* time. It was around this time that I started fucking around with dating Forrest. Forrest liked video games. Forrest liked the idea of doing naughty things with/to me. (Forrest also liked himself more than anything else, but that's a different story for a different day.) As a Valentine's Day present, Forrest went out and bought "us" a Dreamcast and a bright, shiny copy of Phantasy Star Online.
My joy was short-lived as I realize that unlike the turn-based menu-driven form of the previous for games, PSO was in real-time. In 3D. In other words, I actually had to walk around and hit targets. I was an immediate failure (though I must say that now, six years later, I am a little better at 3D games...it did take a while and a bit of hand-holding from Teej and Miguel, but I can usually hold my own now, though we still sometimes laugh when I do something completely stupid in the third dimension). I resigned myself to sitting back and watching Forrest play a few times. (We broke up about a month after this. I was distrought for about, oh, twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.)
Fast-forward to a few weeks ago. Miguel acquired a "Sega Classics" game for his Playstation. To my extreme delight, there was a remake of Golden Axe (another fine Sega Classic), which we happily played. After we beat it for the second time, we got the idea to play the original (which I had at home). Miguel had also recently acquired a Sega Genesis, but didn't have many games for it, and also coveted the long-lost Master System Converter for it. By sheer luck, a few days earlier, my mother had asked me if she could throw out all my Sega stuff that was collecting dust under the TV, and while I had told her she could, she hadn't gotten around to it yet. Miguel and I jumped into my car, sped over to my house, and I handed over my Genesis, all my wires, and a huge bag of my Genesis and Master System games (I will point out that before I handed over my beloved Phantasy Star cartridge, I gave him a speech about how important it was to me and how I was trusting it to him and that I expected him to treat it with the utmost respect and care...actually, I'm a tiny bit surprised that I gave it to him, but I'm glad I did...read on). He was happy, I was happy, and my mother would be thrilled that there was less crap in our house. Everybody won.
We played some old games (including the original Golden Axe and Streets of Rage, woo-hoo!) for the rest of the night before I decided that sleeping was probably a good idea. The next time I spoke to Miguel, he told me that he had started playing the original Phantasy Star and completely loved it and thought that it was an awesome game. My heart practically burst with joy. For so long, I had been looking for someone to share this love with (when we were dating, Marc did play through all four games and while he enjoyed them, he didn't love them like I do), and finally, one of my best friends discovered the awesomeness of this game. While I doubt that he will ever become as obsessed with it as I was/am, it's still really cool to have someone to discuss it with in real life. Yes, we're big dorks. Shut the fuck up.
So, Monday: while browsing the shelves, Miguel and I came upon the aforementioned treasure. However, out of the three of us, TJ is the only one who owns a Gamecube. TJ was talking to one of the clerks, but clearly, we were more important, so I went over and dragged him back to the sacred shelf. He agreed that we could all use his Gamecube to play the game and since it was his system and the game was only $9.99 (a STEAL, I tell you), he would spring for it since it would most likely eventually wind up in his collection anyway. To reward him, we agreed to stop at Tower Records so he could feed his CD addiction.
After the Tower stop, we headed back to TJ's so he could get the Gamecube to bring back over to Miguel's. Since Teej had sort of been fighting with his mother for the past two days, he didn't want us to come in and preferred to do a stealth ninja manuever to get the Gamecube out as quickly as possible. Fair enough. Miguel had been reading the manual and looking at the box while I had been driving, so while we were parked outside TJ's, I demanded that he share. We oohed and aahed over the pictures on the box, dreamed of what our characters would be like, and otherwise eagerly anticipated the playing of the game. TJ soon emerged from his house, box of Gamecube accoutrements in hand, and we took off for Miguel's house.
We burst into the house, plugged in the Gamecube...and stopped. While TJ did have several memory cards on him, none of them were empty and we couldn't be completely positive that there was enough room on any of them to play the game. We realized that we would need to go back out and get a new one and I told Miguel (nicely) that it was his turn to drive because I was tired of it. We piled into his car and took off for Woodbury, because Miguel likes that GameStop better. Since he was driving, Teej and I didn't care at all (and it's not that much further than the other stores). We got to the store and asked the clerk to help us out. They only had previously used memory cards - the smaller, name-brand one was around $10, and the bigger, third-part one was about $20. Choosing to err on the side of caution, we selected the bigger one and each threw in some money. "It's like the three of us adopted a child...but that would be weird!", I said on our way back through the parking lot. On the way home, TJ unwrapped the card and discovered that the previous owner had written "AXEL" on it. "Neat, our child already has a name," I said.
Returning to Miguel's one last time, we popped the game and AXEL into the Gamecube and turned it on (I feel the need to point out that we had split a large pie at Posa, so dinner wasn't really on our minds). Success! We created our characters - Miguel and Teej had a list of names they had used for characters in other games, but I was having difficulties coming up with a name for mine. TJ tried to give me pointers: "It should be like something from a fantasy world...like maybe something similar to Tolkien."
"Tolkien-esque?", I asked. "Like...Jeniladriel?" There was an eruption of laughter. Jeniladriel I became (though there was some discussion of what the spelling should be). After what actually turned out to be less time than we expected, Jeniladriel, Poban Reefji, and Nael Odet (nicknamed Nael Diamond Armstrong) set out to...do whatever the game wanted us to do, the manual wasn't too clear on the story.
We played for...hmm...I would say at least three hours that night. TJ didn't completely love the game, but a small part of that might be because he died right before Miguel/Poban and I defeated the first boss and he didn't get any experience points from it (though I didn't say that out loud). When he realized that Miguel and I actually liked the game a lot, he and Miguel worked out a Gamecube-sharing schedule.
To make an exceedingly long story a smidgen shorter, Miguel and I played for at least 10 hours over Thursday and Friday. Originally, we thought it was closer to 12, but then we realized that we took an hour break to watch "It's Always Sunny in Philidelphia"*, a 45ish-minute break to go get TJ after work on Thursday and to get him some dinner, and a 10-minute break on Friday to eat my leftover birthday cake that my mother had sent me over with (the whole things taking up space in our house thing again).
On Friday, I told Miguel that when I had finally gone home and gone to sleep the night before, when I closed my eyes, I could still see the game, especially the green triangular cursor that shows you which enemy you're aiming at. By the end of that playing session, every time we closed our eyes, we could see it, and we were laughing and screaming at it. We decided that we needed a break and Saturday would be our day of rest.
Teej came to retrieve his Gamecube today, but as tomorrow's Monday (his day off) again, the three of us are planning on doing stuff again. Maybe we'll convince him to give the game another try and wind up nearly going blind again. ;)
And thus ends the longest story in the world about 1)my nerdlike qualities and 2) the only other semi-productive thing I've done in the past few weeks.
*While watching this show, we had one of those "finish each other's thoughts" moments like we used to have a lot in high school. The episode we were watching involved the 28-year-old main characters going to a high school prom and the debate over whether high school is the best or worst years of one's life. We both agreed that high school wasn't terrific and that neither one of us ever wanted to go to a prom again for the rest of our lives (between the two of us, we had SEVEN proms...that's more than enough). As we watched the show, I said, "I'm not as old as them, but at this point, I can't imagine ever wanting to date someone in high school." Before I could finish my thought out loud, Miguel did it for me and said, "I don't even think I could date anyone still in college." Then we realized, damn, we got old. It's still really hard to believe that I'll be starting my first "real" job (as in, a "career") in less than two months and he's off to med school. Where the fuck did the time go?
My summer project has been completely redoing my bedroom. I've hated it for years, but then it was like, "Hey, I'm going to college! I only have to live here 2-3 months out of the year!", so I wasn't particularly motivated to do anything with it. But now, of course, I will be living in it continously for at least the next year, so I've decided to make it into a place that I actually won't hate spending time in (especially since my computer is going in there).
So far, I've done the following: cleaned like WHOA!, thrown out a huge amount of shit, created an equally huge pile of clothing and stuffed animals to donate, painted all my existing furniture, bought unfinished bookcases and shelves and painted them to match the furniture, picked out fabric to make curtains, bought frames for my favorite posters, decided where everything is going to go once the walls are painted, and today, I started stenciling "English ivy" onto the bookcases. Whew. Still to go: get the walls painted (hopefully while I am on vacation next week, as that will be convenient and I don't have to be banished to the spare bedroom for a few nights), hang the shelves, pictures, and new mirror, finish the stenciling, put books in the bookcases, and organize everything (including setting up the computer). I actually believe I'm almost there, but I'm sure more things will come up. If you're curious about my color scheme, the walls are going to be bright green (my carpet is a darker green), all the furniture and shelves are white, and the curtains are white with a colorful floral pattern on it. I think I will be very happy with all of this and will not mind escaping to my room when I need a break from my parents.
Other pseudo-productivity: Last Monday, me, Miguel, and Teej went down to Posa Posa because 1) it was TJ's day off and 2) that's what we do, and then we did a video game run all down Route 59. At our third stop, the game store at the Nanuet Mall, we struck gold: Phantasy Star Online Episodes 1 & 2 for the Gamecube on sale for only $9.99. Holy crap.
Now, let's backtrack a bit. My faithful readers who have known me for a long time know my obsession with the Phantasy Star series. It is tied with the Myst series for my all time favorite video games. You will never convince me that there is a better console game than the original Phantasy Star on the old Sega Master System. I LOVE that game (the others are good, too, but the original is still the best). In my younger days (and not-so-younger days), I have written fanfiction based on the series. I have had AIM screen names based on characters. I have done many other nerdtacular things related to it. I. Love. It.
Moving ahead a few years: Phantasy Star IV, the last of the original series, came out in 1994. Obviously, that was quite a long time ago. In the very late 90s, it was announced that there was going to be a new Phantasy Star game released. The online PS community rejoiced. I'm pretty sure it came out in late 2000. The bad news: it was on the brand-new (at the time) Sega Dreamcast. Despite me being somewhat of a spoiled brat, I knew that there was no way I could convince my parents to pay around $200 for just the system, never mind the $90-something for the game (and a monthly fee if I wanted to play online). My hopes of playing the latest sequel to the series I loved so much were shattered.
But let's take another look at the timeframe. Late 2000 - my junior year of high school, which was an all-around *fun* time. It was around this time that I started fucking around with dating Forrest. Forrest liked video games. Forrest liked the idea of doing naughty things with/to me. (Forrest also liked himself more than anything else, but that's a different story for a different day.) As a Valentine's Day present, Forrest went out and bought "us" a Dreamcast and a bright, shiny copy of Phantasy Star Online.
My joy was short-lived as I realize that unlike the turn-based menu-driven form of the previous for games, PSO was in real-time. In 3D. In other words, I actually had to walk around and hit targets. I was an immediate failure (though I must say that now, six years later, I am a little better at 3D games...it did take a while and a bit of hand-holding from Teej and Miguel, but I can usually hold my own now, though we still sometimes laugh when I do something completely stupid in the third dimension). I resigned myself to sitting back and watching Forrest play a few times. (We broke up about a month after this. I was distrought for about, oh, twenty minutes. Maybe thirty.)
Fast-forward to a few weeks ago. Miguel acquired a "Sega Classics" game for his Playstation. To my extreme delight, there was a remake of Golden Axe (another fine Sega Classic), which we happily played. After we beat it for the second time, we got the idea to play the original (which I had at home). Miguel had also recently acquired a Sega Genesis, but didn't have many games for it, and also coveted the long-lost Master System Converter for it. By sheer luck, a few days earlier, my mother had asked me if she could throw out all my Sega stuff that was collecting dust under the TV, and while I had told her she could, she hadn't gotten around to it yet. Miguel and I jumped into my car, sped over to my house, and I handed over my Genesis, all my wires, and a huge bag of my Genesis and Master System games (I will point out that before I handed over my beloved Phantasy Star cartridge, I gave him a speech about how important it was to me and how I was trusting it to him and that I expected him to treat it with the utmost respect and care...actually, I'm a tiny bit surprised that I gave it to him, but I'm glad I did...read on). He was happy, I was happy, and my mother would be thrilled that there was less crap in our house. Everybody won.
We played some old games (including the original Golden Axe and Streets of Rage, woo-hoo!) for the rest of the night before I decided that sleeping was probably a good idea. The next time I spoke to Miguel, he told me that he had started playing the original Phantasy Star and completely loved it and thought that it was an awesome game. My heart practically burst with joy. For so long, I had been looking for someone to share this love with (when we were dating, Marc did play through all four games and while he enjoyed them, he didn't love them like I do), and finally, one of my best friends discovered the awesomeness of this game. While I doubt that he will ever become as obsessed with it as I was/am, it's still really cool to have someone to discuss it with in real life. Yes, we're big dorks. Shut the fuck up.
So, Monday: while browsing the shelves, Miguel and I came upon the aforementioned treasure. However, out of the three of us, TJ is the only one who owns a Gamecube. TJ was talking to one of the clerks, but clearly, we were more important, so I went over and dragged him back to the sacred shelf. He agreed that we could all use his Gamecube to play the game and since it was his system and the game was only $9.99 (a STEAL, I tell you), he would spring for it since it would most likely eventually wind up in his collection anyway. To reward him, we agreed to stop at Tower Records so he could feed his CD addiction.
After the Tower stop, we headed back to TJ's so he could get the Gamecube to bring back over to Miguel's. Since Teej had sort of been fighting with his mother for the past two days, he didn't want us to come in and preferred to do a stealth ninja manuever to get the Gamecube out as quickly as possible. Fair enough. Miguel had been reading the manual and looking at the box while I had been driving, so while we were parked outside TJ's, I demanded that he share. We oohed and aahed over the pictures on the box, dreamed of what our characters would be like, and otherwise eagerly anticipated the playing of the game. TJ soon emerged from his house, box of Gamecube accoutrements in hand, and we took off for Miguel's house.
We burst into the house, plugged in the Gamecube...and stopped. While TJ did have several memory cards on him, none of them were empty and we couldn't be completely positive that there was enough room on any of them to play the game. We realized that we would need to go back out and get a new one and I told Miguel (nicely) that it was his turn to drive because I was tired of it. We piled into his car and took off for Woodbury, because Miguel likes that GameStop better. Since he was driving, Teej and I didn't care at all (and it's not that much further than the other stores). We got to the store and asked the clerk to help us out. They only had previously used memory cards - the smaller, name-brand one was around $10, and the bigger, third-part one was about $20. Choosing to err on the side of caution, we selected the bigger one and each threw in some money. "It's like the three of us adopted a child...but that would be weird!", I said on our way back through the parking lot. On the way home, TJ unwrapped the card and discovered that the previous owner had written "AXEL" on it. "Neat, our child already has a name," I said.
Returning to Miguel's one last time, we popped the game and AXEL into the Gamecube and turned it on (I feel the need to point out that we had split a large pie at Posa, so dinner wasn't really on our minds). Success! We created our characters - Miguel and Teej had a list of names they had used for characters in other games, but I was having difficulties coming up with a name for mine. TJ tried to give me pointers: "It should be like something from a fantasy world...like maybe something similar to Tolkien."
"Tolkien-esque?", I asked. "Like...Jeniladriel?" There was an eruption of laughter. Jeniladriel I became (though there was some discussion of what the spelling should be). After what actually turned out to be less time than we expected, Jeniladriel, Poban Reefji, and Nael Odet (nicknamed Nael Diamond Armstrong) set out to...do whatever the game wanted us to do, the manual wasn't too clear on the story.
We played for...hmm...I would say at least three hours that night. TJ didn't completely love the game, but a small part of that might be because he died right before Miguel/Poban and I defeated the first boss and he didn't get any experience points from it (though I didn't say that out loud). When he realized that Miguel and I actually liked the game a lot, he and Miguel worked out a Gamecube-sharing schedule.
To make an exceedingly long story a smidgen shorter, Miguel and I played for at least 10 hours over Thursday and Friday. Originally, we thought it was closer to 12, but then we realized that we took an hour break to watch "It's Always Sunny in Philidelphia"*, a 45ish-minute break to go get TJ after work on Thursday and to get him some dinner, and a 10-minute break on Friday to eat my leftover birthday cake that my mother had sent me over with (the whole things taking up space in our house thing again).
On Friday, I told Miguel that when I had finally gone home and gone to sleep the night before, when I closed my eyes, I could still see the game, especially the green triangular cursor that shows you which enemy you're aiming at. By the end of that playing session, every time we closed our eyes, we could see it, and we were laughing and screaming at it. We decided that we needed a break and Saturday would be our day of rest.
Teej came to retrieve his Gamecube today, but as tomorrow's Monday (his day off) again, the three of us are planning on doing stuff again. Maybe we'll convince him to give the game another try and wind up nearly going blind again. ;)
And thus ends the longest story in the world about 1)my nerdlike qualities and 2) the only other semi-productive thing I've done in the past few weeks.
*While watching this show, we had one of those "finish each other's thoughts" moments like we used to have a lot in high school. The episode we were watching involved the 28-year-old main characters going to a high school prom and the debate over whether high school is the best or worst years of one's life. We both agreed that high school wasn't terrific and that neither one of us ever wanted to go to a prom again for the rest of our lives (between the two of us, we had SEVEN proms...that's more than enough). As we watched the show, I said, "I'm not as old as them, but at this point, I can't imagine ever wanting to date someone in high school." Before I could finish my thought out loud, Miguel did it for me and said, "I don't even think I could date anyone still in college." Then we realized, damn, we got old. It's still really hard to believe that I'll be starting my first "real" job (as in, a "career") in less than two months and he's off to med school. Where the fuck did the time go?