deeper and deeper

Not only am I deeply involved in an elicit affair with the characters from Final Fantasy X-1 (in particular Lulu and Wakka, I have to admit), but there seems to be no limits to the depths of nerdiness that I can sink.

First, there was this appearing in the Neopets News, a full 2 months after my darling little Mutant Kacheek and Halloween Zafara were summarily and, dare I say it, mistakenly, robbed of their doting owner:

Today we are implementing a new way to deal with people who break certain Terms and Conditions. If you break more minor rules, your account may only be SUSPENDED for up to 72 hours (rather than frozen completely). During your suspension you will not have access to any part of your account. After the suspension period is over, your account will be returned to you.

That said, depending on your account history and which rule you break, you could still get frozen immediately (a "suspension" is not "automatic"), and you WILL be frozen for breaking the rules more than once. Hopefully this "second chance" will make things more understandable and fairer for everyone.

So I shot off an email that arvo requesting that my case be reviewed. I will admit to a certain level of nerdishness, but, in all seriousness, my nerdicity does not reach the depths of the dank and smelly caves of people who can do what I have been accused of, that is, cheat/crack a Flash game. In fact, my nerdism rating was surprisingly low—15 out of 100. Even I was surprised. And while I was rigging that up, I came across this awesome little baby of a site, if you are into things like the periodic table.

To which I must admit more than a cursory interest. It was physics and biology I hated at school. Chemistry I could do. And while I'm on The Periodic Table, it's well worth checking out Primo Levi's novel. A very interesting and well-written autobiographical tale told through analogies to certain elements. It was a pity the poor fellow topped himself.

But back On Topic. So I fired off an email to Neopets, and do you think I have heard anything? Nooooo. Not a jot.

Harrumph.

I can but hope.

So instead, I find myself casting about for another MMOG to get myself neck deep in. First there was Ragnarok, which I had seen packing out the internet cafés and online gaming venues in Thailand a few years back. Believe me, it's leaps and bounds ahead of where it used to be, but they still want $$. And that's somewhere I'm not ready to go yet. There were a couple of others I surfed by, until I came across this little gem—MapleStory. It looks fucken amazing. To a japanophile (what, you couldn't tell?) the prospect of this über-anime, super-cute world had me barring up in no time. All there was to do was download the client. So, here we go. Left click.

Nada. Niet. Zip. Nothing. Damn bloody Koreans. I mean, you'd think that a country where playing online computer games is more than simply a competitive sport for pimply teenagers—it's a fucking national pastime with competitions airing on primetime TV—could actually work out how to get their download links working. But no.