Possible Plague Outbreak from Russia

10:32 PM

Today has been mostly a normal day. I walked outside this morning, even though I felt a little bit like I had a cold. Right now I still have a cough, I have a runny nose, I am sneezing a lot. Yesterday it was much worse, I had that "flu-like" weakness feeling for a little bit yesterday morning after waking up, but today I felt mostly okay. I don't have sore throat feeling, even though I had it a bit a few days ago, it only lasted a day.

So yeah, I'm not feeling the best. It's been years since I last got sick, I think. At least, it feels that way. I don't recall the last time I was sick though, but yeah, it does suck a little to be a bit sick again. When I walk outside in the morning, it's quite cold. I have to wear a jacket and pants now, because I may have gotten sick from walking outside a bunch of times in just shorts and a shirt while it's under 50 degrees Fahrenheit and windy. Yeah, this might be why I have a runny nose now.

What's interesting though is I just heard in the news that there's a possible plague infection from Russia. I wouldn't be surprised if they were working on bioweapons, as they have been in the past. If the USA is working on it, it would be a top secret operation, and I don't doubt they are working on such projects as well. I mean there's been a lot of declassified operations, and it's always operations no one can believe were actually happening. So yeah, it wouldn't be surprising to find that the U.S. has been working on bioweapons this whole time.

If I were to create a bioweapon, I would create something to infect farm animals, to just wipe out nearly all of them. It's just a shame what humans are doing to them, perpetually mass breeding them just to harm and kill them, it's the most horrible industry on the planet, tens of billions of animals mass bred and slaughtered per year needlessly, such insane violence.

Anyway, I don't actually know if today was a good day or not. Other than walking, I don't think I did all too much. I didn't watch any anime today, nor did I read any manga. They just didn't interest me. Instead, I watched a lot of educational content. Those are really the only kinds of videos that I watch. The ones I recorded in my log a while back, I really don't watch a lot of those kinds of videos much or at all. I don't watch any TikTok or any shortform content videos. I do remember I clicked on some kinds of entertainment kind of video to watch at that time, but it's a rare thing.

Speaking of Rare, I watched a few Perfect Dark videos last night. It was just this game on the N64 that I profoundly remember. One of my cousins had it, and I didn't even play it much. But the multiplayer mode for it was the most fun. I miss my childhood, this was in the early 2000s, back when the N64 console was new at the time. I think this was even before the Gamecube came out, maybe a few months before it came out. A month in childhood felt like an eternity.

I remember there wasn't an easy way to play music back then, so I'd download some midi files and that was some of my music collection. Yeah those were the days. I'd rock out on my cousin's parent's desktop PC with the CRT monitor in their office, and play Neopets. Those were the days.

I mean yeah I'd graduate from Neopets, and played Habbo Hotel, then Coke Music, then Runescape (in 2002 or so), Fake Town, and then Diablo 2, Gunz, MapleStory, Survival Project, FlyFF, Dragon Gem, Ghost Online. Okay, some really interesting events happened during this time period. How I found Fake Town was I typed in FakeTown.com and it turned out to be a game exactly like Coke Music and Habbo Hotel. It's kind of crazy right? Back then Google searches were not that popular to do.

I was chatting on Yahoo Instant Messenger as an 11 year old with my 17 year old friend _Raven177, that was his username on everything. I also know his real life first name and last name, because he shared these details with me. When I search them up, it's an obituary of a 32 year old back in 2018. The dates and ages line up to what _Raven177 would have been at that time, but I don't know if that's truly him or not.

Anyway, I was chatting with him on Yahoo Instant Messenger (YIM) for short, and it had a bunch of awesome chat features. Honestly, back then the chat features were so much better than what we have today. Yes you could change the themes and colors, to a bunch of awesome ones. But best of all, there were games. That's a feature that even chat programs today don't have. It had this BUZZ! feature as well, where it would shake the YIM window and make a buzzing noise. But yeah, the games were so much fun. Fully built-in games like pool/billiards and even some fighting games. I mean it was top tier, you get to play with the other person in real time. I see there's this "Nostalgia" video POV of YIM from 2010, but it was honestly peak back in 2004.

Anyway, during these chats, there were two pretty wild incidents. One is that we were looking for a new game to play that were similar to Habbo Hotel and CokeMusic. I told him let's visit FakeTown.com out of nowhere. No one told me about it, and back then Google was not that popular, and I wouldn't even know what to search for to find FakeTown. Yet, it worked, it was a real and working website, and an exact game like Habbo Hotel and Coke Music. Crazy.

The next incident, I swear on my life it is true. There used to be an MMORPG similar to Dragon Gem, MapleStory, Ghost Online. When you search for Dragon Gem or Ghost Online, they come up with some results and videos. These game's eras didn't last very long, but there's at least some evidence that they existed. What is impossible to find now, is Pirate King Online. I swear there was a game of that name. OH, I found it just now. WonderKing Online. Geez, after many years of trying to find it, it's finally there.

Now Dragon Gem (or DragonGem), is the one that's going to be hard to prove that it ever existed. There's only 4 videos I can find on the entirety of YouTube about that game. But also let's see, I also played Lunia, Survival Project, Grand Chase, and who could forget? Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. I played WoW before playing Warcraft 3, and I started World of Warcraft back in 2004, like a week after the game came out. Good times. Even 2010 is just long ago history now, and back then 2010 was the latest year, everything felt present and futuristic, back in 2010.

Another event that I remember, is that I downloaded MapleStory back then, and it was a 70mb file. I had dial-up, and so I left the computer on for like 3-4 hours for it to download, while I went out to Tae Kwon Do class. Yeah, I played all these games on dila-up, on a computer that had 20gb of total storage. I remember I had to use Disk Defragmenter a lot. I had no idea what it did, even now I only have a vague notion. But back then it felt like it freed up storage to me, so I kept running it a lot. Also there was Download.com, I use to visit that site pretty much every day, that's where you downloaded anything. I also played Dungeon Siege 1 and I downloaded mods from there.

There was a Yoda mod for Dungeon Siege. I don't even know who or how people did this at the time. Some random awesome people just made 3d models of Yoda and the light sabers, and animated them, and added this mod, for free too. Just crazy. Anyway, the Yoda character had these crazy animations like jumping around to attack, and looking like he was using the force when he casted a spell. But the most hilarious part was when you gave Yoda a bow and arrow. He would hold the bow with one hand, and the arrow in the other, and he would just throw the arrows. Too bad there is no evidence this ever existed.

Everything back then was handmade by humans, the ingenuity of humans. I think we are in a decline right now, especially with AI. Back then people were extremely resourceful, and intelligent. To actually create something, you had to put in a decent amount of manual effort. Now AI can just do it. It's really going to dumb us down a lot. That's my worst fear with AI, not that it would end humanity, but that it would just make us considerably dumber and kill off our potential and capabilities by relying on AI.

I don't know how long it took them to make this Yoda mod for Dungeon Siege, but I bet it took a while. And they must've had years of training and knowledge to even apply it. I am 20 years older and even I don't know how to do that, nor would I be able to by hand, and I have the latest tech and software at my finger tips. I mean sure, with AI I could do it, but I'm talking about manually. And my model wouldn't look as good. I'm brainstorming ways to do it now, and I can start the process of making that mod, but man it would look really bad.

Anyway, I'm going to probably watch some videos on WonderKing Online, and then go to sleep. I know it's just entertainment, but it's night time anyway. I'm not going to be working or doing anything like that right now. It's time to relax.

11:32 PM

WonderKing Online came out in 2007, so I don't think this was it. I swear there was some pirate game 2d scroller mmorpg... Maybe I'm just getting my memories mixed up and I was playing or browsing the site for it back in 2007. I never actually played Pirate King or WonderKing Online. I don't think I mentioned that I played it, just that I found it and that it existed. But yeah, I could have sworn it occurred while I was chatting with _Raven177. But maybe my memory is wrong in the timeframe of all this.