"But I am a girlie!"
The running game I have going is to try and guess the obscure pop-culture reference of the above title which I will reveal in the next entry. The answer to the last entry ("You're not the time Kent, you're not the time!") is once again a reference to the Simpsons. I can't actually remember what was going on in the episode at the time, this quote just popped into my mind for no apparent reason one day. I do remember there was a conversation between the atypical generic reporter/anchorman Kent Brochman (which is probably spelled incorrectly) and the "news-chopper" guy "Ardie". I think it was one of those Halloween episodes and Ardie's chopper was going down or maybe it was Ardie yelling something at Kent and Kent telling him it wasn't the time to which Ardie replies with this line. Like I say I don't remember. The line was memorable though, if not the episode.
And for part two of my-experience-with-Neocron....
Where last we left off a group of us Neocron players were trying to keep track of each other despite the client of this online-only computer game in its beta stage. And, incidentally, my character name started out as Sgt. Dubois. Eventually (I won't try to remember when) we gave our quasi-clan the name Knights in Red, or KIR. It was supposed to a play on that movie Men in Black or MIB for short. Our matching uniforms reflected this in the black pants and red shirts of us all. At this time in the game the most fun to be had by the small dedicated group of testers was an event involving the developers of the game miraculously "spawning" various monsters in various numbers for all the players to kill commonly called a "spawn event". I'm fairly certain this was also some-what utilitarian as far as load testing the servers, troubleshooting and related functions. One or more devs would some times spawn about 20 or so copies of one monster or another and a whole group of 50 or more players would all sit there and kill them all which was great for those of us still trying to make our characters strong. Other players at these events would notice the group of us in matching clothes and ask us questions and some even had the bright idea to rip the matching clothes scheme. Even though the game wasn't really that good at the time this is one of my more fondly remembered experiences from this period.
Eventually that beta stage was coming to a close. This would be about June of 2002. At this point we all decided we really wanted to keep up with each other while the in between betas (stage four was supposed to be starting soon). So I suggested we use the Yahoo's group feature as it provided an easy and free facility for a forum, java-based chat room, little web page and a little place for keeping images and other files. Well this worked out pretty well because we were able to keep up with each other until we could play again. This is the point at which I renamed my character "Col. Dubois" to both reflects my more matured knowledge of the game and in an effort to sort of playing along with the book that I had used to get the name Dubois.
Well that's about it for the most part. There's actually a lot more to be told. Not to mention actually talking about the individual characters and mentioning which ones of them are from Canada (which he's now sensitive about I've brought up so many times *wink*). But for now this is good. I can't believe it has alread been a year since that beta!
