Abridged History of Bel

This week was in theory about introducing yourself in some way on your blog. I have not done any of that thus far and since today is the last day that I actually write a blog post for the week… I feel like i should at least try and remedy that. The challenge however is the fact that I already feel like I share a lot of details about myself through normal posting. I’ve always kept a weird barrier in place in that I don’t have the names but I tell you real stories that happen to me as they are happening. This is either a positive or a negative depending on your feel about personal writing.

I grew up in a “podunk” town in Northeastern Oklahoma, that was very obviously a place that had one seen significantly better days. Wikipedia lists 3989 as the official population, but I don’t believe them at all and think that number likely got manipulated to make it seem less pathetic. By the time I was a Senior in High School, my graduating class had dwindled down to around 60. We didn’t have a valedictorian but instead had four salutatorians of which I was one of them. I gave a terribly depressing speech at my graduation where I talked about how once we left this town none of our actions in it would actually matter to the rest of the world. I lost my place in my notes and somehow skipped over the only positive chunk of the speech.

I fundamentally had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. I was ultimately torn between Art and Computer Science, and wound up getting a 2 year certificate in Desktop Video Production before ultimately transferring to a 4 year college and getting a Bachelors in Commercial Art. There was a point where I was enrolled in four colleges but couldn’t decide which path to go down… and ultimately dropped out of all of them and did a mix of Junior college credits for the first two years while driving back and forth from college each day and living at home.

The town was small enough and it was 1994… and reliable internet options were not spectacular. I remember paying $60 a month for my first internet connection, which involved a $20 charge to the phone company to make the town 30 minutes away from us a local number, which allowed me to then connect to the modem banks of the $40 a month unlimited internet provider I was using. It was in my travels as an itinerant college student that I happened to meet my wife. We were both IRC junkies at the time and were introduced by a mutual friend from Belgium, when I happened to be in his channel working on one of his bots as she happened to enter.

Turns out she lived in a similarly “shithole” town, roughly 20 minutes away from mine and that we knew a lot of the same people. We opted to meet over Memorial Day weekend holiday, hang out a bit and see a movie. We saw the remake of Sgt. Bilko… which was not exactly stellar fare and we saw it in a movie theater with all of the panache of a high school speech classroom. However over the course of the next few months I met a lot of people from her college, and opted to transfer there to finish up my degree. We were “just friends” but over the course of the summer “things happened” and we’ve been together at this point for 23 years (married for 21).

My first gaming experiences were with a Sears and Roebuck Pong clone. My uncle borrowed this from my folks and hooked it up to my grandparents zenith console television… leaving it running over night and burning stripes into the screen. This basically made everyone paranoid about any future generations of console and nixed my chances of ever getting to drag my Nintendo along with me to play at other houses. We didn’t get a computer until 1991 when we got a 386 16… with no math co-processor making anything like Doom play horribly on it. I did however play a massive amount of Wolfenstein on it, as well as pretty much every computer at the High School I could get it to run on.

My first MMORPG experience came when a friend of mine asked me to come over and play his second character during a Vox raid. He traditionally dual boxed an Iksar Monk named Chadoe with a Halfling Druid named something that was pronounced “Tim You” but I cannot remember the spelling of to save my life. Basically he gave me a five second primer of run in and cast nuke spells, and showed me which specific abilities to cast. I died… and had to run back in and then had to learn how to put spells back on my bar… and wound up getting the killing blow on Lady Vox largely cementing my connection to MMORPGs from that point forward.

I played Everquest from the Velious Expansion through to Lost Dungeons of Norrath as a Dwarven Cleric. Then when we transitioned to Dark Age of Camelot I didn’t really gain traction in that game until the opening of the Gaheris Co-Op server and starting the original Belghast, a Celt Champion. From there we started playing Horizons which is pictured above, and in that game I met a ton of interesting people through my friend Vernie and the community of crafters centered around building the huge public works projects that opened up new communities. From there we played City of Heroes and it was during that game that we started getting into the Beta of a new game being published by Blizzard.

With World of Warcraft I shifted from guild member to guild leader as I founded House Stalwart with a bunch of friends I had met through all of the MMORPGs I had been in up until that point. I original planned on playing a Paladin, but the suicide of my nephew knocked me out of commission for several weeks meaning that when I did come back i needed something I could solo to catch up with my friends. As a result Lodin the Dwarven Hunter pictured dead center above was my main for most of Vanilla. At some point I decided I wanted to run up a tank, and Belghast was reborn this time as a Human Warrior, and I duo’d it with my friend Amy ( pictured to the right on her Hunter) who wanted to level a priest.

From that point forward I have pretty much been a tank in every game I have played. I fell into the rotation of tanking the “alt” raids for Late Night raiders. I am pretty sure this was taken after I had just finished tanking a Zul’Gurub raid on the weekend. I think I was showing off my new sword that I got along the way. Look at the horrible mishmash of gear I was wearing… but in truth this is what a lot of tanks looked like back then. I still miss drillborer’s disc, which I believe is what the shield I was using was called. In part I am hoping to regain a lot of the joy I had from collecting these pieces of gear with the launch of World of Warcraft Classic.

I will close this point out with a “screenshot” of me. I’ve been mistaken for Brian Posehn, so here is an image I threw together with me on the left and him on the right. I however need to wrap this up because in truth I need to get my arse to work. I am never sure what to tell people during one of those “introduce yourself” moments, but this was a stab. I’ve not done a great job in participating in the themes but I fully expect since the next one is “Developer Appreciation Week” I will probably have some more cogent topics. I hope you have a great Friday and an awesome weekend.

4 thoughts on “Abridged History of Bel”

  1. Would you believe I met my husband on mIRC and was introduced by a mutual friend 🙂 I am very happily nostalgic about those early days on the internet.

  2. My dad being a Sears guy for everything, surprised us with a Pong for Christmas…must have been ’75. I think we played it over the rest of Christmas break and never played it again after.

    You’ve got Brian beat in the beard department I think. 🙂

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