Friday 13 December 2002

Pic of the day: Illustration picture from DAoC. To protect the innocent, I did not take screenshots of the actual characters.

Return of the old women

I survived Friday 13th, and am happy for that. I did get a scare when I woke up from my afternoon nap and found the back of my palate swollen. But the swelling has receded rather than grown since, so I will not complain further. The warranty of our bodies ran out at 40, did it not? We should be thankful for each new day. Largely I am, too.

***

As for today's title, there are two reasons for this. I played some Dark Age of Camelot, as I use to do a bit each day. This time I had created a new character to play part-time, a Lurikeen hero. Lurikeen are like small elves, and the character creation screen warned me that life as a fighter would be very hard for me. Actually a pure mundane class is always hard for me, as I am used to healing magic or a pet that fights for me, or both. So I was pleasantly surprised when another newbie, a naturalist, asked to join me.

Naturalists are the healers of Hibernia, and she both helped me fight and healed as needed. I was surprised to hear that she had only played the game for a couple hours. We came to talk, and I mentioned some part of the game that takes patience. She replied that patience comes with age, and she was old indeed. Now that was intriguing. She was 42, she explained. Wow. That is old. I am 43. ^_^

I am not going to refer here what we talked about, it would be a breach of trust and unbecoming for a decent man. Except that I see no reason to disbelieve that she really was a woman: If she were looking for that kind of attention, she would have chosen another age. I find this slightly ironic, given my humorous comments in the past about meeting women on the coop server. Not like I'm expecting to see her again or anything, but it was still unexpected to meet someone almost exactly my own age. (Not that I feel like I'm 43, mind you. I feel like I'm 63, I just act like I'm 23.)

***

The other return is the Diary-L mailing list. Shortly after the Fall of the Towers, I was unable to post to this list from any of my Norwegian e- mail accounts. When I tried to correct this by unsubscribing and re- subscribing, I was not allowed back in. This was an automated response, and I could not get through on e-mail to the technical moderator of the list either, one of my fellow journalers from that community. So I have been without the list for this long time. Today I tried and managed to subscribe again. I even got one message, though so far only one. Perhaps the list is no longer very active. It was one of my favorite inputs of the day back then, so it would be kinda shame if it has wilted.

And what's with the old women? Well, that's where women of my generation are likely to be found. As diarists, rather than gamers. Or so I thought...

(Not that I am cruising for women or anything, of course. For new readers, I am the Destroyer of Romance, known among female friends as the guy who replaced the light bulbs in his flat with fluorescent lamps.)