Rose

How does a girl become a geek? It’s a long story…

It doesn’t happen overnight. It started with an interest in science fiction. Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, G.I. Joe, etc., were all favorites growing up. Then came shows like Back to the Future, A-Team, and even the gadgets in Magnum P.I. And MacGyver intrigued me.

Back when I lived in Lovelock my dad bought me an Atari game system, then later on a Commodore 64. I loved playing the adventure games. Much later I was even able to visit the studios where KingsQuest was originally designed. But that was my early exposure, nothing major.

Then in 9th grade things changed. For English we were required to read Stranger in a Strange Land. While the rest of my class tolerated the assignment, I loved it. I kept reading ahead and answering all the questions during discussion time. I still wrote bottom level quality essays, but suddenly there was a whole world of novels to read (instead of the romance novels I had been reading).

Now I have to go off on a tangent. My dad always had Issac Asmov and Robert Heinlein novels around. But those had been ” grown-up” and boring books. At first I had thought like my classmates, but now things were different

In high school I also had a friend, Jim, that was using instant messangers and going around on the internet, but I didn’t really catch on until college when I learned about MUDDs, but that’s getting ahead of the story.

What next? Well, when we had first moved to Sonora my cousin Leo was playing D&D with his friends, but I was too ” immature” to these boys to have along. I watched him draw his art, drooled over his maps and pictures on the walls, and always wondered what it would be like to play.

Then in 1992 it happened. I met a guy at college that invited me to play D&D with him and his roomies at the dorms. Unfortunately we didn’t get to play that day, but I stuck by him and eventually we did. Soon I was introduced to the Forgotten Realms novels and the Dragonlance companions. I liked it so much that in 1993 we got married! Of course, we had to buy a second computer, and ever since then we’ve been each others best friends.

In 1999 a new world of gaming came out, the MMORPG. Curtis tried this game called ” Everquest” in late March. At first I thought it was so stupid to have a game you HAD to connect to the internet to play, but then I got an account and we were hooked. Instead of going out to dinner we were going through the drive-thru at McDonalds to run home for a raid. Or we would make plans to stay up overnight to play. We had friends in Guam, Hawaii, and exotic Massachusetts. I made a site on the internet for our guild to get together, arcaneguardians.com. In 2007 I had take a class at the University of Utah for ” Management Information Systems” as part of my degree for Business Management. Part of the class was to use a program called Hot Dog to make a single web page. From there I went on to make a database for completegamer.com and sell gaming books over the internet (didn’t succeed, but was a learning experience). When I first made my arcaneguardians site it was basic and connected to a free forum. From there we went to Yahoo groups and got a mailing group.

And here I am today. Webmaster for three domains, admin for 2 Yahoo groups, and still playing D&D as well as MMOs. I work for a major internet company teaching people methods to make money on the internet.

So what games I have played on the World Wide Web?

* Everquest
* Everquest II
* Earth & Beyond
* Asheron’s Call
* Anarchy Online
* Vanguard
* Star Wars Galaxies
* Yohoho Puzzle Pirates
* Pirates of the Burning Seas
* Dungeons & Dragons Online
* City of Heroes / City of Villains
* World of Warcraft

I’m sure there are others I have forgotten.

MMO RPG, tabletop gaming, Wordpress blogging, affiliate marketing, SEO, Girl Scouts, homeschooling