So I've been hanging around for the last week or so, getting the feel of the community. And I like what I see. So I decided to register and post my hello. Hello!

My name is Daniel, and I live in Jerusalem, Israel. I'm married to a wonderful woman who's doing her doctorate in endocrinology, and I have two wonderful children under the age of three whom I teach about the joys of Cthulhu. I will be starting work as a technical writer at Intel next week.

I almost never played Final Fantasy as a child; I had a saved game of FFVII at a friend's house (the last thing I remember playing through was Cloud's crossdressing plot) and I borrowed FFVIII from my brother's friend for a few weeks before my parents decided I was enjoying it too much and returned it (the last thing I saw was a cutscene in which my character needed to scramble across a bridge before an explosion, and I discovered too late that I was actually controlling my character in said cutscene and needed to do it manually - so I died and was intending to try again with my newfound knowledge the following day when the discs mysteriously disappeared).

Once I reached college I downloaded and played through FFI, then several years later I did the same with FFII, both with walkthroughs. Eventually I decided I might as well make it official, and I proceeded to start playing through the original versions of all the games (no longer using walkthroughs) in release order - FFIII, FFA, FFIV, FFMQ, and now FFV (the middle three of which I actually purchased to play, as I plan to do for all future games that were released in English). My wife joined me beginning with FFIV after a lot of convincing, having previously been of the opinion that Final Fantasy is a game for "girls" (she prefers Half-Life and Baldur's Gate).

I've rambled enough. Nice to meet you all!