Ode to MyRealms pt 1
“What color were Eloise’s eyes?” I asked Pashen on the phone. October 11, 2018.
She couldn’t remember, maybe mahogany. The answer would be easy to find, “Just go look at her chambers.”
Duh, I thought, stupid to have to be told this. But, I hadn’t gone looking around character chambers in forever. “Right.”
After a little more chatting about kids and life, I hung up and went to my computer to look up Eloise’s chamber at MyRealms.
This is what welcomed me. See that little Database Error?
After a little digging around, a familiar panic took over. This was not good.
After some emails to the tech support, it was time to identify another feeling:
Hello, The server will not boot. It is unable to read one of the partitions. That partition is the one containing your website and email data. The only way I can imagine getting the data off of the server is to send it to a data recovery service. Let us know if you need assistance doing this. -- --- Best Regards
Best Regards. Not sure how this news could be followed up with Best Regards. Whatever.
Thankfully, I had been backing up everything. The hard drive is about 15 years old, and has been acting up for a few years. If I were honest, I’d say she was always acting up. There was always something that I had to fight off using the power of WTF and a hard headed attitude to not let some asshole across the globe keep us down.
Unfortunately, I was taking my time while backing up multiple worlds. Through everything we had been through, there was always that reboot. And on the far side, she would come back up again. Time after time.
Not this time.
What waits for me now is an odd blank frame:
I know I tend to settle into a romantic mood at times. Like now, I can envision the worlds past that page. Worlds that are no longer accessible. Worlds that are saved on my home machine in chips and pieces, a bit here a fragment there. Saved but not the same. So I slouch. Think. I have to consider what to make of the uninteresting remains of the past 17 years. In my heart, I wished MR would have remained on the internet forever. But, that’s obviously not going to happen. Not in the state that it was anyway.
It’s Friday Night. October 12, 2018.
This weekend, a rarity, nothing much is planned. It’ll give me time to raise a glass to my old server. She was a universe, holding whole planes of existence. Will I be able to obtain physical ownership of her? Maybe. I’ll find out in the upcoming days. Until then, I’ll play with Wayback Machine. Search for lost pages. Remember. Then contemplate where to go from here.
Rest in Peace, NewDream.
You were …. everything.
