Don't look-it until I send in the server please, thank you a lot! :)

content/Lore/Portalmaster18 Lore/Locations/Sarahs Timeline/Tech/Totally Secret Folder/A rock and an idea.md

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+>[!NOTE]
+>This is about a real life event, I just had no idea where to place this document within the website lol, if somehow you're discovering this before it's october 18th... look away >:(
+
+As of the start of writing this, it is October 2nd, 2024.
+It's of no short statement to say this year so far has been a wild ride of ups and downs, it's been one of experimentation, and thankfully this entire year I've only been gone for a total of maybe a month from Resonite, maybe two at most.
+
+While it's not exactly a big deal, the day that I send this to the rest of the neolanders, it will be **October 18th, 2024**, my birthday!
+I turn 18 this day, and I wanted to write about a story, a real one, about how a random, completely random choice to press a single button was a real life butterfly effect that led to me being here today.
+
+--- 
+
+For me, everything started with a game called [anyland,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M4XBe5GqFM) as honestly did for a good lot of us. On a complete whim of being bored, I was searching through my Dad's VR library, and for some reason it just stuck out to me. So, I pressed start!
+
+...I instantly got bored, the UI seemed unintuitive, there was nobody in any worlds anywhere, and the farthest I got was making a table out of five little cubes. It was but another game that didn't have a player base, nor was interesting enough on it's own to have fun, and so I promptly turned it off.
+
+The same day, I was close to going to bed, and I spotted a video in my recommendations from an... anyland creator! Albeit a quite old video, it was a tutorial on how to construct a hand within the game. The avatar in general, the functions it showed and the style, it was a major improvement to anything I had seen in the actual game, and it was inspiring and looked fun! I spent that night basically watching every anyland related video on that channel, and the next day I just knew I had to play the game again, to give it another chance.
+
+I put on the headset once again, and booted it up. Using an in game browser, I followed the exact hand tutorial and hand a really weird floaty red hand out of about... 5, maybe 6 cubes and nothing else. Such a simple item, and I only remember it for one reason, and it's quite the good reason.
+
+I spent a lot of time years before trying to find a way to express myself, the only good way I've ever done before had been writing, but this showed me one thing. ***I could create,*** and create I did. Throughout a single years span of time I climbed the rungs of anylands creation system, the simplistic modeling could get quite complex with vertex editing, when put in complex arrangements scripting could get quite compact and do a LOT of stuff, a friend of mine now as a part of the neolanders today even mentioned how they were actually jealous at first that I had climbed up so quickly in my ability to create, I ended up hitting the ceiling of anyland by time it was 2021, and the only way I could really get a lot of it is if I continued creating things that were simply way too complicated for the game, meaningful puzzles were hard to design without hours of thought and scripting put into it, and with maybe 2, at most 3 hours being played each day it was simply impossible for me to get there with my creations.
+
+But in the end, that's really not what I remember about anyland, it's simply what I know happened. What I remember? The interactions and the people. Each person who actively played that game was so unique, we had basically every last individual part of any regular big 'fanbase', for better and for worse, but thankfully mostly for the better. There's still multiples of people who I saw once, maybe twice EVER, I don't even remember their username, but their memory is stuck in my brain because they were just such interesting people the people who put effort into that game.
+
+I remember a particular night specifically, I was in a world where me and a couple other friends were working on it for a lot of hours in total, the plan was for it to be a sort of narrative world where we would act out our own characters as part of a play of sorts on a stage, but if you looked around further than our act or just hanging around you could find puzzles and pieces and fun little easter eggs, it was a whole theater with an outside area and a maze.
+
+That project I sort of consider to be my last project within anyland, because that project in particular, the last night we really spent any meaningful amounts of time in that world we just starting talking and messing around, and it's that type of memory that you think back on and there's just a *feeling* to it that you can't explain very well. Even if I did go on to continue making until my eventual leave of anyland, that night felt like the last time I really made anything in that game, and I didn't even finish my puzzle unfortunately enough.
+
+After that there were a few events, I think I even made a couple avatars, but even when I first joined the game I joined around it's end, the 'downfall' of sorts as the community slowly started becoming quieter, or restless from the lack of updates and the lack of communication from the creator. I think sometime around 2021 is the last time I properly played anyland, as a new game would be introduced and a new server would be made around it!
+
+But, that's closer to the present, and that's a story that's still unfolding today, even if it was still many years ago, and in fact a story spanning on for many more years than my time in anyland.
+
+So... what was the point of this 1,000+ word document? Well, at the start of 2024 I had an idea, for my 18th birthday I wanted to make a big project, a world talking about my experience with anyland, with screenshots and examples and stories even before anyland, but I didn't really have the ability to do so back then and it got delayed... and delayed to the back of my projects, and now my birthday is in 16 days, and I realized I didn't really need it to be this whole giant project that takes me months to complete and upload for others to see.
+
+This is all to explain, that if I appreciate that singular year of creation, idea making, brain storming, janky as all heck avatar creation, the fact that I appreciate a game and it's memories so much with something that I had so many hours in?
+
+I want to thank The Neolanders, all of you. Wholeheartedly, genuinely, you guys mean the absolute world to me. You've all made the difference in my life that not many things have, and those things that have usually haven't been even half as positive.
+
+If anybody, there's two people I want to thank in particular.
+
+Rustybot, thank you, you're genuinely inspiring, your work and ideas and creations are the things of most in both Anyland and Resonite that I aspire to reach the quality of, you really do try your best to be a great friend and personally I think you succeed more than most, you are genuine and you are caring and I'm glad to be your friend.
+
+Amplified, you are the one who has sparked so much of my eventual originality, you with your own experience back in Anyland came up to me to sit there and essentially tell me how dumb it was that my entire story and character was entirely based on Portal 2, to come up with my own ideas. My entire process of creation stems from that moment, the question put in my head, "How do I come up with my own ideas?", and maybe that's an obvious question, but it was one I never thought about until then. Thank you a lot, you've been there a lot for me and my dumb questions that had blatantly obvious solutions, and you've been there for a lot more.
+
+\
+
+I hope no matter what day or time someone may be reading this, that their day is amazing and that they have a wonderful sleep tonight
+
+I once again say: Thank you all, and assuming that my family threw another possible 'surprise' birthday party, I'll see whoever's online tomorrow! ^^