The Dark Furie

I wanna tell you a story about true love.

We've all heard the story. Boy meets girl online. They are a similar age and have similar interests so they start chatting more and more, then eventually fall in love. Within months they're living together and planning a wedding. It's a common story, shared by the two people pictured above as their Second Life avatars at their virtual wedding. But, as with all virtual things, reality can be a pretty tough pill to swallow.

In real life these people aren't the mid-twenties go getters they pretend to be online. Must have been a shock for them when they finally met offline in real life, but it didn't stop the virtual love. In fact this image is from their real life wedding, so they obviously didn't mind the fact that they'd been deceiving each other with their fantasy lives.

However, when Amy discovered her new husband was cheating on her she'd had enough and filed for divorce, both real and virtual. She'd already caught his avatar having sex with a virtual prostitute (look in the mirror right now to see the expression I had when I read that) but they'd managed to patch things up.

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I went mad. I was so hurt. I just couldn't believe what he'd done. I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It's cheating as far as I'm concerned. But he didn't see it as a problem, and couldn't see why I was so upset. He said I was just making a big fuss and tried to make out it was my fault for not giving him enough attention.

But then, in April this year, she caught her husband's avatar in another compromising position. She claims he was having cybersex with a female player in America.

I caught him cuddling a woman on a sofa in the game. It looked really affectionate. He turned off the computer monitor and I turned it back on and demanded to look at his chat history. But he turned off the computer so the history was all deleted and I ended up going off in floods of tears. He confessed he'd been talking to this woman player in America for one or two weeks, and said our marriage was over and he didn't love me any more, and we should never have got married.

Gee, sucks to be her eh? Well the unhappy couple have each found someone else now. Dave is dating the 55 year old virtual stripper he was last caught cheating with, and Amy found her true love on World of Warcraft. You'd think by now they'd have learned that their happiness isn't going to be found online. At least not without them being a little bit more honest about who they really are. Oh well, that's internet romances for you.

80s Flashback
The fortunate ones.
To be fast and free and young,
I wanna count myself among
The fortunate ones.
We wont be denied.
We know that time is on our side.
We've got the passion and the pride.
We wont be denied.
This generation.
With fire in our eyes.
Strong are the ties that bind.
We don't need no alibis.
Cause nothing's gonna stand in our way,
Nothing's gonna stand in our way,
Nothing's gonna stand in our way,
Not tonight.

So, it's my birthday today. Another year older, another year making you guys wiser, another step closer to the graves of my enemies, another swimming pool full of cynicism dived into. Last year I gave you guys The Beast and a friendly poke at Espen. This year you can make do with Obama becoming President and an 80s song.

Went to bed late and woke up early but apart from that I'm having a pretty good day. Just want to relax and that's exactly how things are playing out so far. Got my favourite meal coming up later and I'm watching my favourite movie at the moment. Look up the song on the right if you want to know which 80s rock and metal movie it is. It reminds me of a simpler time when I was younger.

I've also got two new phone browsers and some new applications to play with. Not only did Opera Mini release a new beta yesterday but I've got a new version of the Gmail application and the Skyfire beta browser amongst others. Mini still beats all the web based apps though.

I'm off for a wander round my watchlist and I'm sure I'll see some of you guys on there. If not you can give me my present when I get back here. Oh, didn't I tell you all what I want this year? Well I'd like for people commenting here to be more honest with me. I'm after a group of friends not a bunch of "yes men." If I post something you like, tell me. If you don't like it, still tell me. I respect honesty like that and maybe I'll get better at tailoring this page to your individual needs. So that's what I want as my present this year. Well, that and a Stretch Armstrong.

Back Again.
Furie's back.
Tell a friend.

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Regular readers will know I'm an avid video game player, but it wasn't always that way. Years ago I decided that video games couldn't get much better graphically than they were at that point and that there was never going to be a computer role playing game that suited my particular needs. It was 1991 and I just knew that Streetfighter 2 was as good as games could possibly get graphically. The gorgeous cartoonish characters were better than any I'd seen up to that point. Somewhere, someone was talking about 3d games becoming more popular but I'd already played all the old isometric puzzle games and couldn't see them coming back into fashion anytime soon. I'd been trying out some of the new computer first person view Dungeons & Dragons games but they were very glitchy and I never saw the appeal of not being able to see what role you're playing in a role-playing game, so I knew that these first person games would soon be a thing of the past (Yeah, I know now. But this was before they combined guns with the childlike mentality and disposable income of sofa soldiers). My main problem with role playing games back then is that there wasn't really any way to play a role. You just killed monsters, hunted for treasure and used experience from killing monsters to level up til you could kill stronger monsters. It was abysmal, so I quit playing videogames.

From time to time my friends tried to get me back into games with the current flavour of the month. Doom I found to be a shallow experience that caused many arguments about the fact that real people can aim a gun higher without having to jump or climb. Nights Into Dreams was a sublime game but didn't have anything to keep me coming back. It seemed like gaming wouldn't offer me what I wanted in my lifetime. Then I met Kim in 2002, we moved in together and bought a cheap Playstation and some games she'd enjoyed as a kid. As I watched her play a wonderous adventure story full of twists and turns, swords and magic my love for gaming was slowly rekindled. I found that I could remember enemies specific weaknesses better than Kim and after a while I was coming up with strategies to help her in battles. When she eventually coaxed me into playing for myself I was suddenly a gamer again and will always remember Final Fantasy 9 for that reason. So I started playing again and started catching up on some things I'd missed out on. But soon the same prolem was bugging me. Role-playing games were all about killing things and levelling up to kill more things. What little actual role-playing there was in these games was limited to occasional dialogue choices that didn't make any real difference to the game. I found myself wondering if a game would ever come out that would give me what I wanted.

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I sit here writing this post and I wonder just how many people will be writing posts about poverty for Blog Action Day and yet still ignore a homeless person? I know a lot of you will protest about that point of view. "Hell, it's just Furie being cynical again." Want to bet on that? Remember the tsunami a few Christmases ago? The local supermarket by us had buckets at the tills where anyone could donate. Those buckets were full and getting emptied more than once an hour according to the girl at the counter. I stood outside that supermarket before going shopping and afterwards and watched dozens (perhaps hundreds) of shoppers walking past a homeless guy, ignoring him, treating him like he wasn't even there. The same shoppers who reached deep into their pockets in the store to help when others were watching wouldn't even look at someone right next to them who was asking for help. Gotta love humanity eh?

"He'll only spend it on booze/drugs.", "They're just ungrateful/lazy.", "It's their choice that they're homeless."
Things I've heard said about beggars this week.

I remember quite a while back I'd moved into a shared house and one of the guys already living there welcomed me to the house with a good (and I mean GOOD) bottle of brandy. We sat up most of the night chatting, smoking and drinking. He told me a little about his life. How he'd been homeless for years, begging for money, scrimping and saving, trying to survive. He made me realise that where I could spend ten to twenty pounds on a week's food shopping, that wouldn't really go as far on the streets. Without a roof over his head and somewhere to actually cook food he had to rely on fast food if he wanted it hot. Obviously that costs more than buying something fresh or frozen and cooking it when you get hungry. I learned things like that I'd never realised before about being homeless. And then he thanked me.

Turns out a couple of years before I'd been having a good week at work, gotten a load of tips, and was generally doing quite well for myself. I'd spotted a homeless guy outside McDonalds and not only bought him a meal, but slipped him £50 as well. Now here I was sipping brandy with the same guy, having him tell me how that money had been the final amount needed to get him a place to live. How he'd saved up so much but winter was starting to scratch away at it. How after he'd gotten a place that had lead to a job, and the job had lead to a better place. In the end he'd gotten the biggest room in that house and always wanted to thank the guy who helped him out. And we stayed up all night talking far past the end of that bottle.

Writing a post about poverty helps out very little. Even when masses of us do it, nothing helps as much as actually helping. When you see someone who needs help, don't ignore them, don't excuse yourself by convincing yourself they'll spend it on booze or drugs. Even if someone does make the wrong choice, at least you can do the right thing.