it's just a phase, right?

ah, blog.. what can i say. i'm feeling somewhat out of sorts tonight, in one of those stupid nostalgic moods where i wonder what life would be like had nothing changed but me since i started thinking with any sort of order. i know i said i wouldn't, but sometimes i can't help but miss the things i seriously took for granted as a child, and even in the last five or six years. just technology in general makes me cringe. in twenty years, i'll probably regret not spending enough time preserving what i've got now. *stares creepily at xbox* haha. but really. just little things, little changes in how i do things, remind me of how i used to do them.

take my xbox, for example. as an example, i don't want you actually taking my xbox, of course.

..anyway. father walks into my room; it's midnight, i have work at 8am tomorrow and i want to get the most out of our borrowed copy of halo reach as i can before it goes back and i don't see it again. anyway. to the credit of my sheer bad luck when it comes to determining what will be an absolutely great time to start earning achievements, he wants the disc back. i scornfully oblige and take the disc out, and my xbox returns me to the main dashboard. and out of nowhere i get a fleeting flashback back to 2004. literally, saw myself in my head. my best friend had to go back home after a playdate at my house, and i was borrowing her copy of the sims deluxe (the original sims). she needed to take it home, of course. so i took the disc out of my computer and to my childlike amazement, MY SIMS WERE STILL MOVING. the game continued to run, without the disc.

i must have kept my computer on a successive three or four days because i genuinely believed my computer was magic, and i knew instinctively that if i closed that program, it'd ask me to insert disc 1 to play it thereafter. don't ask how i knew. this trend continued for ages, until people got smart and made PC games more foolproof. or, yvetteproof.

and that's where my flashback ended.

whoa, i thought. remember when we could take games out of our computers and they'd still run for as long as it took you to shut the program down? and i thought.. shame on you, xbox. you life-ruiner. not only do you sap me of free time and the possibility of making new friends, but you strip away the core of why i used to play games: for the fun of it, and for making me feel like a ninja when i didn't have the disc.

my second semi-nostalgic thought came soon after, when i went to clean out my computer and i found 'clonedrive'. one saturday morning, that same friend was over my house and we intended to spend the day at the ice rink, as per the norm. of course, she'd been wanting me to play this super awesome fps called medal of honor, online with her. (remember when playing online didn't mean subscribing to some scam for $90/y?) so we embarked on the painfully slow mission of pirating the damn game, since my parents weren't about to fork out to buy me ANOTHER violent gun shooting game when i was only, like, twelve or thirteen years old. and a girl.

it took about an hour into our planned skating session to work out why the hell we couldn't get it up and running - my drivers weren't good enough. and i was on dial up. SIGH. so we had to go to nvidia, and install the latest drivers, which took so long that if i had to do it again with the knowledge of what adsl2+ speeds are like now, i'd probably rather stand in front of a moving train. the only thing i miss about dial up, is that overwhelming feeling of satisfaction when the download bar moves from 99% to 100% with that anxious lag in-between virus scanning the downloaded file. ANYWAY.

we got the game working, and dashed off to skating, only to return back to our individual houses and spend the entire night playing medal of honor: allied assault. we did that every day for so long, until it got to the stage where the game simply wouldn't run due to the drivers being too advanced. i swear i'd go back to windows 95 for a month if i could just play medal of honor one more night.

ahhh~
and there you have it. the source of my lack of friends was never really the xbox, but a deep-seeded obsession combined with youthful over-exposure to simulated violence. i guess one only needs to wonder whether or not i've suffered or gained anything as a result of this. i like to think i'm turning out okay. but i also like to think that the majority of the people my age aren't complete losers who spend their time, money and efforts on sex and alcohol. hah. maybe i'll get out of this bubble one day, who knows.

..i wonder how many gamerpoints i'd earn if i did?