Can-HEIK… sto-HEIK… hiccup-HEIK… ing…!

HEIK!

…

……….HEIK!

D: HEIK!

I’m thinking about whether it’s time to de-list my Whirled catalog (not delete them mind you, just hide the listings). I’ve kept them up this long because, frankly, it was nice to continue cashing out. But it’s an old consideration that I’m starting to examine again more closely.

Whirled continues to make disappointing progress in the wrong directions; progress I don’t want to support anymore. And I’m tired of it, all of it. I want to be able to delete my Whirled bookmark and leave it to die, which I know it will do.

My main thoughts here are:

1) I do not want to continue providing content for the community as it is. I think there has come a point now where the majority has shifted in favour of the braindead idiot children that Triplo seem to want to cater to. There’s still good people around, but just not enough of them anymore, and they’re no longer the target audience. It’s a shame to stop supporting these people, but if they have any sense, they will be getting out too.

2) Similarly, there are just as many thieves and rippers now as there ever was– probably moreso. Whirled makes virtually no effort to discourage this behaviour, beyond a slap on the wrist and a warning. They’re able to profit from stolen work and don’t even so much as get banned from the site. It’s appauling.

3) I want to do something that says, “I no longer endorse Whirled”. I don’t support it in its current direction and administration. I want to hide my content so that it no longer contributes to or provides any benefits towards Whirled’s quality.

Obviously I don’t want to do something like that without considering it very carefully first. But it’s definitely on the table at this point. I imagine that doing this would finally allow me to stop caring about the site. That’s been a major problem since I ‘left’ and stopped developing content; I get drawn back to the tired old debates and discussions time and again so easily, because I haven’t been able to sever the emotional connection I had built up during my time there. Seeing as how I’m completely convinced now that it’s all going to go rapidly downhill in the future, those emotions no longer have any purpose.

Whereas I’d always try to fight to be heard and understood, doing that now feels keenly pointless. What ever comes of it, anyway? I was looking at a discussion I’d been arguing in today and thought, “I can predict this thread five replies ahead of mine, and I already know the outcome, because it’s the same every single time. So why am I still here? Why does it matter?”

And that itself is not a unique thought. These things have gone round and round my head so many times, I’m just tired of it. But the answer probably lies in the stuff I still have listed in the shop; as long as it remains visible there, I will always be connected to it, and it will always matter what’s going on over there, because I guess I’m still ‘part of it’. Hopefully, removing those things will effectively ‘unchain’ me from it altogether. I’m almost desperate to get away from it at this point.

Would have been nice to get a souvenir to go, though. Nemo still owes me a print that I won last year, but that’s been put off for so long that he doesn’t even respond to reminders anymore.

Not sure how I ended up browsing user post histories over at Lionhead.com today, but wow, what a blast from the past. All those familiar names flooding back to me- FrostyAtom, Godofgothenburg, Sabre, Din, Stormy (Mia)…

Holy crap, I miss all my old friends. Well… almost all of them.

It’s easy to notice parallels between the people I knew back then, and the people I know now; Alex is probably closest to Godofgothenburg (I used to call him Groggy, but everyone else just used ‘GoG’); Seperot is DEFINITELY related to Sabre in some manner– okay, so maybe I don’t know Seperot anymore, but thankfully nobody else is filling those annoying characteristics in my life at the moment. Let’s see, who else was there… ohh, I remember Jamountain, hahaha. And THEAD. Oh my god, Thead. LOL. Okay, so I may be a little glad I can’t compare EVERYONE to the old B&W gang. ;)

I remember the ‘enemies’ as well. SubAtomic was one of those trollish brutes who was an ‘oldbie’ when I was a ‘newbie’, but he wasn’t exactly a friendly sort. At least, not to us kids. Didn’t see him around much though. I could probably relate more to him today than I could back then. Who else hated me there…? Someone beginning with K? Kar… Korn…? Hmm… nope, it’s not coming to me. Probably best that way. They were all in that one infamous clan; it was always ‘us versus them’ in the tourneys. Good players, intimidating people. xD

Kinda makes me wonder if any of them remember me the same way. I wonder who they’d compare me to now? I was so different back then, and they are probably very different to what I remember today. Hard to believe how young I was, early teens… I was still a kid when I moved on to Planeshift, and it felt like an age away even then.

Losing touch with Mia was always saddening. Still is. She was an amazingly gentle and kind girl, always doing everything she could for others and not asking one whit in return– but one day, she just vanished. For many years after, she was only seen once, maybe twice again, but she never left a way for anyone to contact her. Gosh, that was 6 or 7 years ago now. Come to think of it, that all started when her dad…

Ah, what a cliche, but those really were simpler, happier times. 2001-2004, and everyone I knew during that time: I miss you.

You know you’re going to have a bad head-day when the first thing you remember upon waking up, is that you were just on the Starship Enterprise, as a female Commander Riker, accompanying the real Riker to go meet an alien diplomat. Except he ditched you to go to the men’s room and you ended up lost and somehow found yourself back at primary school.

Since then I’ve had the familiar suffering that always accompanies a bad sleep, but I’ve also been stupid and have strained my eyes a little too much today. So now, not only do I have a nagging headache and general grogginess, but I also feel a bit sick. Oh yeah, the omlette I had earlier is definitely to blame for that… just thinking about eggs right now… urk.

It’s days like this that I’m more prone to screwing things up; today, in my groggy stupor, I managed to corrupt an ancient savegame that had seen many, many hours of gameplay over several months. Yay me.

They say you can cure nausea by pinching the webbed part in between your thumb and forefinger, but whoever “they” are, they’re liars.

Guh. Where’s my ibuprofen…

Well, my game’s almost back to normal now… It was the Mod Manager causing the data wipes, though I still have no idea why or how. It shouldn’t even be able to do something like that…

But is it still worth it?

Hell yes. 10GB of improved gameplay is definitely worth every second of this hell. I’ve probably spent 5% of the time actually playing the game and 95% of the time installing, fixing, debugging and reinstalling the mods, but those brief windows in which I can run around the gameworld and have a completely refreshing experience is worth its weight in (virtual) gold.

Due to all this mucking around, I only managed to play briefly today. But while I did, I finished one of the Sheogorath quests (Staff of the Everscamp), escorting the annoying little runts to a cave just outside Leyawinn so I could be rid of them. The cave was populated by almost completely non-vanilla monsters, which was cool; I haven’t even seen half the new things Mart’s Monster Mod adds to the game yet.

I ran across Hellbeasts (flaming wolves), Lesser Balrogs, and a creature that perhaps my TEF friends would appreciate (but Mookie would definitely call ‘creepy’):

I lit him up with my dagger magic for better viewing. I can’t remember what they were called… Hershine? Hearsin? Something weird, anyway. Should’ve snapped a picture of a Balrog while I was at it, they were cool. I had to cheat and kill them off with the console, though, because those fuckers are endgame creatures and there were two of them blocking my path with no way to sneak past. >_<