It’s the day before Thanksgiving (here in the USA), and I’m at work. There are very people in today, and I’m bored. No new messages, the forums are fairly low key right now. Got about five more hours before I can realistically abandon ship. So I figured I’d give a shot at making one of the (in?)famous boxpigs.

Nobody here at work had any real glue, so I had to use one of those lousey glue-sticks, which never seem to work. So I’m not sure how stable it is. I’ll leave it over the four-day weekend and see if the glue sets properly, otherwise I’ll try to bring it home to fix. Either that, or I’ll make a different one. This was fun, and I think I’m kinda hooked.

I woke up this morning to the following e-mail address in my @hellokitty box:

They didn’t say exactly which contest, because there were three. I’m pretty sure if wasn’t Blog for Thought, since my post was pretty lame, and I didn’t enter the Crop Circles contest. So I’m sure it must have been for the Body Double.  Since I was basically the only male avatar who submitted an entry, I guess kinda won by default :) I don’t know when they’ll post the official announcements. I wanted to wait for the official posting first, but I’m so excited I couldn’t wait.

(one of my fellow Misfits, HKera, is a male, but he played a female avatar, so I don’t know how the judges will weigh that)

If you’re interested, you can see my Body Double video at

http://video.sanriotown.com/video/cd9c027a40e07665

Founders’ Beta is over, so I am writing this mostly for myself. Maybe someone else will see this and enjoy, and I’m going to tag this for the Founders’ Finale: Blog for Thought.

It was a fun time, meeting a lot of new people, and playing a new game. There was some good-hearted competition amongst guilds, but it was surely for a good cause. Unfortunately, sometimes there is outright hostility.In a server population this size, relatively small, and a small virtual world, we can’t help but to meet the same people over and over. We all get to be a little familiar with the names of people we pass by when we’re walking from here to there. Sometimes they’re friends, or maybe guild-mates, sometimes they’re strangers, but remember that there are always real people behind the cute pixels.

Let’s all forget the drama, stress and other negative feelings we might have harbored. In that vein, I’ve put together a little video of memories from my experiences. Yes, it’s very azog-centric; after all, I am the one making the video! But the end of Founders’ Beta is not the end. Many of us are all waiting anxiously for Open Beta. And at some point in the unknown future, even the production release. We all had part of a special little world, and while that world may be currently inactive, our friends are still our friends.

I deleted the video. It was all wonky. When I first created it, the screenshots appeared fine on my screen. Then when I looked at it a few days later, the screenshots were all out of proportion, only a portion of the screen would appear, and text was flowing off the visual areas. I wish someone had told me, now I feel like a tool :(  And now I notice that the deadline is only a few hours away, so I tried to fix it up, but only made it worse and worse, and finally just bit the bullet and deleted it.

So, watch the video, and I hope you don’t mind my sappy little sermon above :P

There’s supposed to be music, but for some reason, it’s not playing when I embed it! So go to http://video.sanriotown.com/video/ec7fe30197c6b4ac

The end of Founders Beta. A lot of us were putting the last mad rush on building houses. A few people came over to mine to help, but we got around 4000/6000 before the evenings events started.

The final events were to start at 10:00pm, so I headed over the Harbour. I bet this is the most people the Harbour ever saw in the FB.

The GM’s ran two simple events: one was a 5-question guessing game, and the other was apparently a hide-and-seek. After the main events, they also announced the top guilds for Food For Friends, and my guild, The Misfits, took third place. I didn’t get a screenie of the announcement, tho.

Waiting for the final moment to arrive, at midnight (my time), a lot of people were hanging out on the beach. We all took off our clothing, and made a beach party.

Some of the GM’s joined us. Neverender is in front of the group. Hello Kitty even joined us. When the final disconnection came, I was too tired and neglected to get a screenie of “The End”.

Well, the end of Founder’s Beta is closing in fast, so last night I traded in my keys for deeds to a house, and started to build what I think is going to be the mulberrie (sic) house. FB ends in less than 27 hours as of this posting, and I am about 1800/6000 into it, so I doubt I will finish it.

Here’s what it looked like when I claimed the deed. The rest of the construction looks like what I posted in a previous message.

The GM’s ran a fun event, they called it GM Piñata. Basically the GM’s were teleporting all over the map, and you had to get close enough to open a trade window, and they’d give you a prize. The first three people would get prizes before they’d teleport somewhere else. I got two peices of girl’s appearance clothing, so I’ll see if I can trade them for a boy’s equivalant. Some of my guild members got sheep pets.

Here’s the map view.

Speaking of houses. Some players were able to get deeds to player houses. You had to basically be lucky and catch the GM while he was online and in “deed mode”. Building a house is hard work. You use your entire energy bar to make one tickmark out of 6000. You need lots of food, but up to five people can help.

Here is me helping someone. I think this was around the 700/6000 point.

Periodically it appears that the construction equipment changes. Here is around the 1600/6000 mark.

My guild, the Misfits, won one of the Build New York competitions. They (I wasn’t online at the time) were the first to finish building Grand Central Station. Not only that, they were two minutes short of winning another building.

This is the third building, the Statue of Liberty.

Apparently this is a full-fledged house. All three buildings are built on three different farms. I hope all the members get to keep these on release. Inside of the “house”:

The birthday party in HKO, inside the party room. That was nuts.

November 1st is Kitty’s birthday, and HKO is having a weeklong series of events to celebrate. Unfortunately, it also marks the end of the Founders Beta :(

To help with the party, you need to help bake a cake and then bring it to Kitty. They changed a little bit of the London map to include a party room. This is outside the area which I call Westminster Abbey. They’ve really decked out the place.

But wait till you go inside. Everybody is waiting!

Someone didn’t skimp on the catering.

And here is Kitty with Daniel. Aw, aren’t they cute?

She’s very happy everyone remembered!