I’ve been holding off on reading these because I told myself that I wanted to give them the attention they deserved. Surely I would forget most of this if I didn’t give it the proper amount of time and the … okay, ya, I was intimidated — the amount of engineers and other professionals here, and I’m supposed to be the technical admin? What am I doing?! 😛 You guys are all amazing, even behind those fancy titles.

My name is Michael (RealityIntern on the MyExtraLife forums), I’m 29 and live in Portland, Oregon, and I’ve been a part of this community since 2002 when I discovered RealToons. I usually prefer tactile games, so I tend to favor first person shooters for the majority of my gaming time, but I enjoy many genres (one of my favorite games being Psychonauts). An exception worth noting is the RPG. I love statistics, but I also like improving at things. RPGs shelve much of that progression into character stats so that I feel like I’m just going through the paces. And since I also refuse to pay a subscription to play a game, I sometimes feel like I’m the only person on the server who DIDN’T play WoW.

So, I dabbled with Minecraft Classic a bit during the “indev” days, but waited to buy until near the end of Alpha because they were going to raise the price. I played on an in-home server with some friends until a whitelist was added to the FinalScore server a couple weeks after it was started. Like everyone else, I was intimidated by this giant world full of people. After wandering about for a bit, and without knowing it, I started clearing out an abandoned hole in a hill RIGHT next to spawn. It eventually became the Plaza Station. I kept going from there, building out the railway and stations around the world. Eventually, after noticing that all I did was build infrastructure, Scotty asked if I wanted to be a mod. (Interesting fact: I haven’t built a home on the server to this day, though the Engineers built one for me.) In late July I became an admin after stupidly volunteering for the job. I would list what I’m doing right now, but that kind of needs a whole new thread. I suppose I could mention the railways and stations in Delta that I’ve been working on.