Thank you john for thinking of me I do appreciate it. I hadn't realized how much i actually missed CoH. I watched the City of Heroes Remains. It was beautiful and heart wrenching.
I didn't actually realize how narrow my world had become. I've had tough times before, I just didn't think losing CoH would trigger one.
But, I am trying. I'm involved in The Phoenix Project, which I do enjoy. I have started reading comics again I am trying to get the gray out. 
But again, thanks for thinking of me. It helps restore my faith in the basic goodness that I believe exists in people.
Aww, Man, you are so very welcome! While I applaud Mercedes, Larry, Rae, Quinch and all of Team Wildcard as well as the other Titans here in their/our diligent efforts to get CoH restored, my focus has been elsewhere. Truly, I never expected to know the sort of personal misery I knew during the three months leading up to CoH server shutdown nor in the weeks and months that followed. I started playing M.A.R. Barker's
Empire of the Petal Throne at age 14 and quickly added D&D, miniatures and SPI/Avalon Hill board games etc. when the "cool kids" aka college students at the local University permitted us high schoolers to join them on gaming night at the old student union. I learned checkers and chess the same week at age 6 when home sick with mumps, and loved all card games eager to be old enough to learn bridge (mom said she'd teach us kids when I was 14 and did) and of course I grew up playing Monopoly, Risk, etc, back when cardboard, paper and dice was all games were. (My Monopoly board game had metal player pieces, and my Risk game had painted wooden pieces not plastic.) For "electronic" games there was Hasbro's Lite-Brite where we kids used the pegs as Star Ships and imagined space battles rather than making pictures in the 1960s.
Gaming campaigns came and went; I and many of my friends "invented" our own gaming systems and created maps, based loosely on D&D and I "borrowed" (read: stole virtually wholecloth all of Ursual K. LeGuin's "Wizard of Earthsea" series for my own tabletop game for the amusement of gaming friends when a sophomore in high school, trying to create my own languages, even as Tolkien had, tho LOL that was long before I considered how silly that was for me at 15 when he published after being an Oxford scholar and professor of Old and Middle English.)
In my late teens and early 20's gaming was my social life, introducing me to people who've become lifelong friends (yeah we still email and phone but almost never game together, while others i lost contact with long ago but still think of them upon occasion. BTW a couple of them met success as pro fantasy authors.) My mid-twenties was mostly about work and dating, but I got into social and even briefly tournament bridge (Susan and I took 3rd place in the open 49'ers at the St. Paul Winter Carnival; not bad for our first year). Besides bridge and the collaborative storytelling of gaming provided hours of cheap entertainment. My life path was such I dropped out of college, tho I tried to reboot it a time or four, but eventually lucked into a job and promotion that utilized most of my skills and I was "home" as staff assisting faculty and an academic dean, honored to be permitted to help in some small way the work I so admired. (I'd had dreams of being a professor and/or novelist and even had "delusions of pre-med" my first couple of years, but frankly I lack the aptitude for math and science when there are others so much better gifted.)
Late 20's I needed a fresh start and left my beloved twin cities for a fresh start in Colorado. I had but one friend when I moved there, a dear lady still a friend (Misty knows her) who introduced me to her circle of gaming friends who not only played home-rules modified AD&D but they'd also invented LARP (IFGS or International Fantasy Gaming Society), and thanks to my involvement in the Minnesota Science Fiction Fan Club and our annual regional convention (Minicon) was home once again and gaming. LARP gaming in IFGS was very different from tabletop campaigns or the 1990's World of Darkness LARP campaigns of Kindred and Garou (dark fantasy was never my personal cup of tea and it took my IFGS pals into it over 3 years to get me to try it, tho naturally not long to embrace it (pun intended) once I had.) The point is, see, I had seen all sorts of games come and go, even those I had loved. My friends and I (i visited by phone with 2 just tonight) still regale one another of the fun times we had in this or that game, remembering this or that occurrence, characters we'd loved playing, etc., so even with
City of Heroes sunset impending, I just didn't expect it to get to me and certainly not to the extent it did. I literally wept off and on for two weeks, until Salli, one of my MMORGP-savvy buddies told me at her apartment 1. how she'd have felt had the first Guild Wars MMO gotten pulled before she was done with it; and 2. that I was a wreck and to pull myself together. Unlike some, perhaps many here, I have gotten really great outside support from loving friends, even LOL at age 52 from my mom who doesn't get it exactly, save that it's loss and even so she's sympathetic and moreso from S-F friends I didn't game with but who knew gaming, e.g. my friend Peter who told me the night before our last 24 hours in-game in CoH to just stay up - we'd both pulled all-nighters at S-F conventions - and he'd "sleep for me" and to game. (Man, i love my friends!)
Okay, I'm guilty. Victoria Victrix may pin my ears back. I wrote and mailed only TWO letters to Disney. I still haven't written Colbert Nation. I have commented and Thanked the Media every chance I saw (Thank you, Rae, Quinch and others.) I do post regularly to SG's guildportal pages where former CoH colleagues/friends still check in. One SG has moved on to DDO, but I just can't get into it. I mean, I
could but I just won't let myself. It's not that the game's rotten, it's that I don't wanna go thru MMO shutdown again. The other SG is scattered, each off playing his or her own new MMO or nothing at all. Myself, I've opted for nothing. For me, baby, it's CoH or nothing! (at least for now) So, I've gone back to reading, picked up my old LiveJournal blog (old RL friends are still there as well as internet friends I met there, kinda picking up as if I hadn't gone into a "MMO Coma" as one pal put it describing his return to LJ after his MMO got nixed.) I still cannot derive any enjoyment from gaming -
tho I hope you do - instead I'm back to my email grassroots political activism, signing e-petitions, writing or telephoning my State reps and Senators and even on occasion the White House (yeah, I have CREDO mobile, and yeah, I am a Socialist-GREEN.) I've taken the little bit of money I spent on CoH and added a tiny bit to it to contribute to what I consider the most worthy of all worthy causes asking for money (for me that's Sierra Club and Save the Children.) I still have not heard back from Melissa Bianco, but maybe the ether ate the one e-mail I sent her. I've tried Facebook twice (I can't keep up; I can't stand it) and joined Twitter one weekend so as to Tweet to Charlie Sheen that looked to be in the midst of a bipolar manic episode. (See, i also have friends, dear gentle loving people, who also have scary sounding diagnoses like schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorder, bipolar, ADHD, etc. but been friends with them for years and thus know their characters (not toons))
Maybe Ms. Bianco didn't write me back 'cause I sounded looney (or eep maybe was). Sorry for unloading all this here on you, DevilYouKnow and Titan Network friends, but just last Friday an old IFGS gamer buddy passed away and he was only 60, a really good guy who separated in-game from out-of-game really well (some don't), his politics (he's a Nixon Republican and attorney so you can imagine if you will our intellectually impassioned discussions on politics. Long story short: similar to identical values with opposite ideas about how society might achieve them. We'd not only gamed together but given years of volunteer service to the not-for-profit LARP club.) Thus the old circle of IFGS LARP friends, the IFGS family as Kathy calls us, will gather this Friday at 2 p.m. Colorado Mountain Time for his memorial service - and your prayers for his family are most welcome.
Meanwhile I have become LOL a "silver surfer" loving that term for referencing Marvel's Noran Radd, catching up on technology most of you already know quite well, e.g. Skype and surfing youtube videos and lately have been grooving on stuff (imo) far superior to commercial and cable TV;e.g. TED Talks. Here's a couple of links:
Let me introduce to you a kid who I think will be a new Stephen Hawking or even Albert Einstein; in his own words, Jacob Barnett:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq-FOOQ1TpE OMG! Soon to be Dr. Barnett is diagnosed with autism?! His video sure changed the way I thought about that condition. (I hear that Temple Grandin's story is equally amazing tho I have not yet seen either Claire Dane's portrayal or Temple Grandin's videos.)
One probably can't tell it from how I spout off here that I'm any sort of Introvert, but check out this lady, Susan Cain's "the power of introverts"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4And for anyone who's ever questioned their own unique sexuality/gender/preference (raises hand) check out Tillett Wright's video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAJ-5J21Rd0 (tho I suspect 50 shades isn't enough but more like 100 million or more)
Again, apologies for spouting off and taking up a lot of space. I was school taught to use 500 or more words, not 500 characters, so you can imagine how it is when I attempt to comment on youtube vids! LMAO
Anyhow, I think it's great you're doing the Phoenix Project. I have twinges of guilt for not assisting that or Heroes & Villains. I can't even get my own 72 year old mother who has the funds to buy a second computer just so she can see TED Talks etc. because she's afraid of the internet, and Identity Theft, etc., tho her younger women friends have shown her Kindle and smart phones etc. I also have a real appreciation now at my age of 52 for how my grandparents felt when the world and technology changed around them; ditto for the professors I worked with at a teaching college the semester they all had to divert their attention three times away from teaching to learn some new technology to make their lives "easier" and if any here remember the debacle called Windows 95 they'll know why the profs wanted to hurls those computers at out the window. (I still chuckle remembering Monica a Math Prof. who during a supposedly open collegial discussion wherein the VP for I.T. was presenting a slick PowerPoint demo, steered towards his goals, switching on the lights in the classroom where we met, grabbing a piece of chalk from the blackboard and saying "we're going low tech" so as to have a truly open and not funneled group discussion.)
Well this is likely more than enough rambling, the point is there is a WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD we are each part of. Sure the internet is great! I love how I.T. brings together and creates communities of people from around a once-distant globe. Honestly kids, go climb some trees, or grab a ball, or a stick and twine, use your imaginations! I'll close with my memory of an old New Yorker magazine cartoon (maybe by Booth); in it there's a young suited well-groomed TV salesman to whom the little tiny lady of the house replies (and this is the caption) "Thank you, young man, but I don't need that. I already have a fireplace." If you don't get the joke, you need to spend some time in nature on an overnight camping trip (imo.) Peace out. Sorry for the Walls o' Text.
