This Day In Blogging: August 1, 2006

Since this blog is ancient, I thought it would be fun to see what I was blogging back on this day in history. The earliest post that was marked as August 1st in my blog backlog was actually a nostalgic look at my previous blog, Darfstellar. Since I did that somewhere around 1998-1999, I have been blogging to some extent for 25 years.

Header image is a 3D rendering I made looking from my office window in Ryan Ranch, Monterey, California, using the Persistence of Vision ray tracer, sometime in the mid-late 90s.

I was working at Archipelago Productions at that time, at the time an education products company doing videos and apps for online universities. I don’t know if the current video production company by that name is related to the one I worked for; the new one is in Toronto, and the one I worked at was in Monterey, California. I doubt they are related, but who knows?

Because I was being super extra, I also wrote a post on that same day in 2006 about the differences between raiding in WoW and EverQuest 2. I was still playing a Troubadour, then. I’d wanted to play a bard in the worst way back in the original EverQuest, but that never worked out, really, because I wanted to play every class back in the original EverQuest. I think I did eventually play most of them.

I started off as an Erudite Wizard in EverQuest, then changed to Halfling Druid for a long time, before I switched to Halfling Rogue, Warrior and finally Cleric.

The next pair of posts that happened to land on the first of August came in 2008. One was about joining the guild “Nostalgia the Guild” in EverQuest 2, along with a few other happenings in that game. I think this came before or after we attempted to restart EverQuest (the original game) and work our way to raiding. (We made it to the Plane of Air before we went poof, which, in retrospect, was pretty good).

The other August 1st post from 2008 was me wondering if an MMO could prevent getting stale by essentially bundling multiple MMOs into one MMO. Each continent would have its own leveling system. You could take your character there, but only levels gained on that continent would count.

Sword Art Online, post-Aincrad, had this system. You could copy your character to any game built on the Aincrad Seed, but you’d start from zero in that game. Gun Gale Online and Elfheim were two seeds shown in the anime; the Underworld total immersion game was built on a different engine.

There were no more August 1st posts until 2012, when I mourned the loss of Microsoft’s last flight simulator before this latest one, Microsoft Flight. It was a free-to-play flight simulator that, out of the box, let you fly the storied ICON A5 amphibious plane around the big island in Hawai’i. Anything more than that required buying DLC.

When they released the new Microsoft Flight Simulator, things had improved with the (simulated) A5 and, by abandoning F2P, became a really excellent game.

There’s a little voice in my head that makes sure I don’t do anything with other people. “Do you think, if you asked someone, would they really want you to talk to them/sit near them/look at them/exist?”, and the answer is always, no, of course not, nobody would want you to exist near them, and so I happily keep to myself and try to stay invisible.

This has probably made me miss out on a lot of things in life, but it had the advantage of letting me do things by myself. Long bike rides alone, going bridge hunting alone, climbing mountains alone, and all sorts of other things you could do alone. By definition a lonely life, but I got by. Then my daughter moved nearby, my son moved back home, and I met my boyfriend (in EverQuest 2!) and he, after awhile, moved in. Lonesome no more!

The very next August 1st post was eight years later, in 2020, and was the occasion of my first Blaugust! Which brings us very nearly up to date… getting into the previous Blaugusts would be a little recursive, but feel free to look them up in the archive browser over there on the right.