Downtime

Several days back, I wrote about how it came to be that Starsider was our new home away from real life. Our adventures started out well enough, and we even added a new friend along the way.

But things took a terrible turn for the worse on this, the Unofficial Roleplay Rarely Playable Server. For some unexplained reason, Starsider would crash and/or be down for extended periods.

To this day, Cyra and I are able to evoke those exact feelings of frustration and disappointment when we hear the character select screen music looping on end while we waited for something - anything - to kick the Starsider hamsters into high gear. The music! That gosh-darned music!

I guess we could have turned it off, but it was like we were unable to function without Starsider. There is more truth in that statement then we should like to admit all these years later.

The other servers did not suffer this same problem; whatever said problem was. Shakkara began to have serious misgivings and was ready to dump everything and start anew elsewhere, but Cyra and I held fast; we had gotten our proper names afterall!

For absolutely no reason, here's a picture of some NPCs lined up. Maybe they, too, were here because they were waiting for Starsider to come back online.

At any rate, we did want to play this new game that consumed our every waking moment. We made a pact to pop on over to Flurry and play alts when Starsider was down. We didn't need to do this very often, and within a week or so Starsider's rock road became paved and stable.

Despite Starsider's dubious launch during the middle of 2003, it turned into one of the most populated servers, for better or worse. No matter what, it was our home and we made the most of it as you'll see as we continue down this Memory Lane.

Maybe we loved it all the more because we lived through all these troubled times, listening to that loading music. That gosh-darned loading music!