international nut of pastry - I think this lines mostly filler.

As years go by, friends will drift in and out of your life. It's inevitable. We're just not the same people we are during our younger years. This comes from growing out of your younger ways, and growing into the person you will be for some time to come. Or because you move on from old hobbies or ways of spending your time and come to realise you have little else in common. There's probably a third reason but someone smarter than me can mention it.

Back in my high school years, I met some friends (or some friends found me?) because I used a laptop (PowerBook 190cs) for my school work. As far as I can remember, I was just sitting in the library one lunch time, when a couple of people a grade above came up and we started randomly talking about computers. A couple of them just happened to be Mac users as well, a few others were Windows people all the way. Some fun was had over the years because of this.

of all night gaming...

At some point, we started meeting up outside of school and doing the nerdy LAN party thing - that term had not been coined at this point yet, and we actually called them Wake Overs, coming from the fact that we'd all get very little sleep due to caffeine, sugar and all night gaming. This started off with my LC 475, PowerBook 190cs and an LC III playing the Marathon demo, but as we kept having Wake Over's, we it eventually grew to an LC 475, PowerBook 190cs, LC III, PowerMac 7600 and a PowerBook G3. All of this in my cramped room with network cables going everywhere. I remember one night having to crawl out of a corner because we had hooked up cables across where I would normally walk.

There was other games we played too; Spaceward Ho! was a simplistic turned based game that we would usually start the day/night with and have a game that went for several hours with all of us teamed up with impossible odds and try to conquer the universe. Bolo, an odd little tank based that had one network mode, but the unusual ability for players to make a copy of the application, launch it and run it as a "bot". So, we would do this, and even had an archive of the max number of bots we could have, so we could get a full game happening all the time, each with their own unique name too. There was even a Bolo match that went for almost an entire day. Yes, nearly 24 hours and we had made a Pepsi can pyramid by the end of it. Unfortunately, I don't think any photos were ever taken of the Pepsi pyramids we made.

The day I bought Marathon Infinity, well that was a great day for our little event. Suddenly we could all make our own Marathon maps and bring them along with us to enjoy. I still have archives of hundreds of game films that will probably never be watched again, but I just have to keep them around for some reason, along with the many maps we each created and the ones we downloaded from many places on the Internet.

then there was...

Computer games weren't the only thing that we did. Watching movies (my discovery of the Evil Dead trilogy came from one of these events) until all hours of the morning while sitting on enough air beds to cover the lounge room floor, heading off to see a movie at the cinemas, or just walking around town talking. This was all before we were old enough to be drinking alcohol.

Numerous times a few of the Cheech and Chong movies were on the list for us to watch at these events, and I can still to this day remember the "now ain't that a peach" gag.

As all of our high school studies increased and some graduated, these events hit their peak and became fewer and fewer until we'd realised they were no more. When most of these friends graduated high school, for some reason we found it difficult to keep in touch. While sometimes I hear about what they're doing now days, we've still not managed to keep in touch. A few times over the years, when we've bumped into each other at one party or another, we've often spoke of having one more WakeOver to remember the old days, though we never have.