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All about Pevil

Lesstat

New member
Hi everyone! I figured I'd follow Tr1age's example and post so you all know to expect randomness, sarcasm and general weirdness from me.

First, the name. I came up with it in a Biology class, before the time of the internet (the year was 1998 and I was in a small rural town in England so the internet was still just a rumour at that point). I don't remember the ins and outs but we had to mush up peas for something and my friends and I came up with some story about peas from space getting annoyed at the torture of their earth brethren. So I became Pevil (said like Peevil), the leader of the evil peas, come to exact their revenge! The name stuck and once the internet became real it was a natural username for me. 90% of the time if you see Pevil or Pevil Lihatuh on the internet, it's probably me. Especially if it's tied to an MMO.

Gaming - big section coming up!

I wasn't really a huge gamer as a kid. I had a Spectrum ZX that my parents had bought in a classic "get it for the accounts" move before I was even born. I would drag it out maybe every 6 months and set it up for a week or 2 to play Demolition (basically Pong but you had to break brick walls whilst protecting windows from the ball), Magicland Dizzy and a couple of other games. When I was about 10 my best friend showed me her Amiga 1200 and Trolls. I had to have one. That was the same as the speccy; brought out for a few weeks at a time then packed away. I loved Zool 2 on it and one of my all time favourite games, Globdule. I still own both those machines but haven't been able to tune them into a TV for over 15 years and no longer have a tape deck to get the speccy working. One day they might go on eBay.

I got into PC gaming at the age of 16. My parents decided I needed one for my A Levels so we got one of those pre-built bundles (from Tiny, anyone remember them?). It came with a bundle of free software and I fell in love with Dogz 3. I love science and genetics, and animals are my favourite thing ever, so this game was ideal for me. I've still never seen a game with such advanced breeding as that one. It was perfect timing too; with the internet finally taking off and being allowed on every night for 1 hour once free calls had started, I became engrossed in the Petz community. Downloading outfits, playscenes and new petz and marvelling at the incredible websites people were creating. I started learning HTML and got my own site going.

My first 'real' PC game was Severance: Blade of Darkness. I played a demo and loved it, though I was rubbish at it. It was the first game I bought and it introduced me to my first forum when I got very stuck and had to find help. I still am on a spin-off forum after the original site went down in 2003 and a small handful of us decided to create our own community. There are maybe 5 of us that still chat over there. My best friend at school got me addicted to Diablo 2 and another friend introduced me to Baldur's Gate 2. Since then I've been obsessed with rpgs. I particularly love the more open ones, such as The Elder Scrolls series but do still love the more classic western ones such as The Witcher series and the Dragon Age series. (I am a serial non-finisher though as I get distracted by new games or different builds; I have yet to finish any Witcher game or DA: Inquisition).

I went to uni to do web design as I loved running my site so much. The course didn't work out though and I quit after the second year. In that time I honed my site design skills (all now lost as I haven't coded in years) and expanded my website to cover Black and White (one of my all time favourite games) and Sacred (at the time the only other game remotely like Diablo and another of my all time favourites). I had the only English fansite for a couple of years for that game (archived on the Wayback machine under www.pevilsplace.co.uk around the 2003 - 2006 mark - I still own this domain but it's my blog now). Looking back it was pretty terrible but I loved it at the time. I miss games having lots of little fansites instead of all just having one big fandom wiki and then the IGN/Gamespot walkthroughs. Sacred gave me a taste of testing and moderating too. I was so active on the official forums that I was made an official moderator and also invited to beta test the expansion and Sacred 2. That is an eye opener. A true closed beta test is nothing like the open/pre-order ones you get now. The constant updates to the build, having to play a very specific part over and over again to look for bugs, replicating them, documenting them... it's certainly not fun but it is rewarding. All the testers got their own graves in Sacred 2 as a thank you so if you ever play it check them all for Pevil's last resting place.

My first MMO was UO. My boyfriend at the time played on a free server called Fractured Shard. You could have all skills on one character and didn't need to eat power scrolls. My first time trying it I logged in, tamed a deer, then promptly got lost in the woods around Britain. Needless to say I got hooked. We played there for a few years until it went under. Everyone on there was great and we had some amazing times. I never managed to replicate that on OSI though I continually try. Now I'm on UOAlive and loving it already. Due to the aforementioned love of animals my main is always a tamer. I love crafting in games though and my boyfriend always ends up timing me to see how long it will take until I start mining in a new game.

As well as MMOs and RPGs I'm often found in survival craft games. Ark is my latest big addiction. I have Valheim but barely touched it yet. Minecraft is the classic of course. I like the more open ended games these days, where I can just do what I want, when I want, how I want. I recently had a rare disease (horse and dog owners may have heard of it, Cushing's disease, as they can also get it) which caused a lot of physical and mental issues. As such I have good or bad days and rarely have the reflexes for competitive type gaming anymore. A shame, as I used to love raid healing back in Wrath of the Lich King. These days I'm more likely to get booted for not getting out of the fire quick enough. Red Dead Redemption 2 is way up on there on my favourite game list too (top 3, order depending on my mood is RDR2, Black and White and Globdule).

I even worked for Game for 7 years. I loved that job, getting to chat to staff and customers about games, talking to the reps (the Ubisoft rep knew I was obsessed with Assassin's Creed and got me the rare black Ezio statue that I'd missed out on) but the company went from small, fun place to work to insanely greedy and overbearing with targets (with no incentives for us to hit them other than if you don't, we'll make you do training). I still miss it sometimes as the staff were amazing but Christmas at Game... no. Just no. The stories I could tell too, as can any retail worker!

Ok, gaming stuff over.

Aside from gaming I love to read and draw, though both have become less important as I got older and I'm trying to get back into them properly. My all time favourite author is Terry Pratchett and I try to get to the Discworld Convention in the UK every 2 years when it's on. I also love Stephen King and Anne Rice but will read almost anything. I'm not a huge fan of film and TV but I still have my favourites and my boyfriend drags me to virtually all the super hero films. My drawings and paintings are usually animals and landscapes. I used to do a lot of pencil sketches of horses but have also dabbled in pastels (both oil and chalk), watercolours, charcoal and pen. I took advantage of Prime day this year plus my bonus for working at the same company for 10 years and got a drawing tablet so I'm attempting to learn digital art. I haven't yet looked at any tutorials but am just making it up as I go along. My avatar is my go at a dog nose. I also used to ride horses but it's tough to find somewhere round here to ride and when you do, it's so expensive! Physically I don't think I could now anyway. I also spend some time blogging about my Cushing's as there isn't much info out there about it, not from a patient's perspective and it has helped me come to terms with things. I also help admin a Facebook group for it which acts as a support group for other UK patients with it.

I do have a pet (we're not meant to, we're in a rented flat but ssssh). We have a degu called Scrat. Pictures will be posted later. We sadly lost his brother, Diego, in June this year. Until a couple of years ago when they moved away, we used to cat sit for my friend when they went on holiday, a beautiful British Blue called Poppy. My boyfriend and I are saving to try and get our own house so we can become overrun with dogs and cats. I also love walking in the countryside; I grew up in Yorkshire and spent my teenage years hiking instead of shopping or going out. I've now moved to the Midlands and am stuck in a load of concrete, I hate it. My parents however have retired to central France, the middle of nowhere with only 13 people in their hamlet so I get plenty of nature when I visit. I dislike the heat though so only go in early spring or autumn. My ideal place is Scotland and I've had a spot picked out since I was 12 to retire to. Everyone needs a dream!

If you managed to read all that, well done! I look forward to getting to know everyone and just enjoy chatting and gaming with you all.
 
I just looked up what a Degu was and immediately told my husband that we need all of them. Need pictures! :)
 
I'm on it! Honestly they're the best. Most people have no clue what they are and they are classed as exotic pets. I'd never heard of them until 2010, I saw them in a big chain petstore and thought they looked interesting so I made a note on my phone as to what they were. 6 years later I'm fed up of having no pets in my life since 2003 and decided I needed something, even a rodent. They live longer than most rodents (6-8 years, they've even reach double figures) and are actually active in the day. They're intelligent but lack common sense, just like people ;) We taught ours the command 'cage' so they would go in when we let them out for play time (mostly obeyed) and I'm currently teaching Scrat "hopsy" which means to jump up to a certain ledge for a treat once he's gone back in.

Scrat makes us laugh as he sometimes chews the bars and gets told off with a sharp "oi!". He knows he's not supposed to do it so we can watch him and he'll walk up to the bars, get on his hind legs and look at the bars. Then glance at us. If he sees we're watching he'll casually walk away from them. If he doesn't spot us he'll very slowly do a test nibble to see if it gets an oi or not! The one we lost, Diego, used to have a thing about the plastic caps over the screws in my boyfriend's chair. Every time he climbed up there he'd pull one off to try and chew it. One time we didn't even tell him off, I just held my hand under him and he dropped it right into my hand like a naughty toddler would. They also do incredibly stupid things though like run around with toilet roll and instead of taking it from A>B to build the nest, they take it via C, D and Timbuktu.

They really are addictive. When we get our own place I am all for having a ton of them in a degu-proof room that they can just free roam in.
 
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