i wanted to play ff1 again so i visited brian carper's cool website now known as "ffclassic.net - it's broken!". i had played ff1 in my younger days but you can only get so far when you rent it for a weekend and you're 6 years old or less. no patience for the amount of grinding required. but i digress.
so after actually acquiring a copy of the game for the NES and fanboying over unne's amazing website for days? weeks? idk. I found a link on his page to some forum he was an administrator on and decided to join it for whatever reason. I posted a few times in the FF1 forum but everyone knows how inactive that place is because who wants to play a 25 year old game? the new ones are in THREEEEEEE DEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
my original joining was in late 2000, as Astos. and then one day the forums got moved to a new server or something happened and i thought my account had been deleted but i'm pretty sure I just had to log in. so I created a new account and was confused as to why I couldn't create an account as Astos again. this adds to my "i just had to log in" theory. so on March 28 2001 I registered the account Fiend. it was around this point in time that I had started to expand my Final Fantasy playing experiences beyond the first one (actually, in my desperation to play FF1 again as a 12 year old, I rented FFII (FFIV) and played that for a bit; again, not getting very far because only one weekend, and me being bad at video games as a child) and I had discovered that elemental fiends existed in more than just the original Final Fantasy, thus this was the inspiration for the new name.
so with my new name and a little more life experience in my bones, I continued to only post in the FF forums. But i reached beyond the FF1 forum, and I also discovered emulators around this point in time (this is an important fact that will affect the rest of my life beyond this point. I kid you not.). the details from here on are a little fuzzy, because I think I also stepped away from EoFF the first time a little after this. not going to look at the beginning of my post history for specific details, but I'm pretty sure I missed 2002 in EoFF history. but one day in late 2002 or early 2003, i think, for whatever reason I decided to make a triumphant return.
and did I ever return!
I don't remember what it was that brought me back to this place, but that's also not really the important part of the next 2 years. the most important foundations of my internet upbringing were two offshoot forums of our dear old Eyes On Final Fantasy, known as Aiyon and Random Foolishness.
Aiyon was the first. created by our overlord Newbie Daniel Towns, I think it was a place for some RPing world or something? I honestly can't remember the intent of the content, because that wasn't the point. this was the first forum where I was an early adopter, and began to insert myself into the community almost immediately. Aiyon was just...you had to be there, you had to EXPERIENCE it. it was just awesome :wasim:
Random Foolishness was created by Moomba Misstress, I believe? It was nowhere near the size of EoFF, not even as big or as active as Aiyon. What was important about this one were the friendships I forged there. notable names here are Psychotic, Misfit, and Rye. yeah, THEM. my activity here coincided with an increase of activity at EoFF, and also the start of my LiveJournal days.
LJ was the thing that everyone did and those of you who were around then know exactly what it was like, because it was like that. I played it just like everyone else; occasional life posts, occasional memes, constant spam on other people's entries.
and then like 2004-2009 was pretty stagnant in terms of growth. my internet life was EoFF and LJ for the most part, and I was happy like that. it worked for me. and then in 2009 or 2010 i was a big jerkface idiot and left for whatever reason. And then i completely lost contact with all my friends because i was a jerk. and then like a month or two ago i drunkenly contacted our lovely Shorty and she told me to come back and post in a thread. and so I did that, and then I decided to keep posting more. and now I'm back, in classic style, sort of.
so there, that's probably my longest ever post on this forum, and I left out six years of detail.