Uncharted Territory
Monday, September 16, 2013 - Saturday, August 2, 2014
Synopsis
Uncharted Territory takes its name from two places: my romantic environment at the time, as well as from the server's expansion internationally.
On the morning of September 16, 2013, I was sitting in a designated testing room as we were logging into computers to take a campus-wide standardized test. Due to the fact that we were all logging in to the same account at the same time, the domain controllers were having trust errors and preventing the login from working correctly. The school called off the test. That being said, I was already feeling a bit ill that morning, so I went home early.
Since the incident of October 17, 2012, my love interest had been focused on the girl who'd been forced to talk to me by her friends. Because of how quickly the event lasted, I wasn't completely sure what she had said to me, but I decided to try and contact her that evening. I did, and we talked for about three hours over Skype that evening. After the call ended, I told her I liked her, and she was thrilled to see her interest in me had been reciprocated. It was the start of the first romantic experience I ever had that wasn't a one-sided crush.
Running parallel to all of this, the Nosiphus server had entered a new period. After Nosiphus Mansion Video, the feeling of the "First Golden Age of Nosiphus" was petering out. The last major summer 2013 anniversary was the fifth anniversary of Nosiphus on August 24, and by September 16, that era was over. A new feeling had taken hold as the server's direction changed. We started looking outward, and in September 2013, we launched a vanilla server alongside the modded one. For much of late 2013, the vanilla server overshadowed the modded server as we gained a lot of new players. We decided to rein it back in late 2013, taking a few of the players to the modded server, but most of them were gone.
A second vanilla server was launched in February 2014 that was more Doctor Who-inspired, and it was here that we had the inspiration for what evolved into the PremdogPlays Doctor Who series. After my breakup on April 29, 2014, the rest of the academic year went by more slowly than expected. Unlike sixth grade, where my year had ended a week early, an incredibly snowy winter in early 2014 pushed back the end of seventh grade into June.
On June 8, 2014, the Nosiphus website got its first complete facelift, and we started a third vanilla server soon thereafter. This server, by far, would be the most successful in terms of player counts. Still, this server only lasted a couple months. The modded server took back its crown permanently at the end of summer 2014, and to this day, we rarely run vanilla servers.
Notable Songs
When I first saw Smokey and the Bandit in 2011, I loved every second of it. That was in the era of Music, Movies, and Machines, well before Minecraft had entered in my life. When I rewatched the films in 2013, the server existed, and we decided to build a road connected a brewery to a bar. I built it just perfectly, so that it took the length of West Bound to get to the brewery, and the length of East Bound to get back to the bar. I would do this so often on the server just to hear the songs.
For those of you who haven't seen Smokey and the Bandit, here's a quick overview. The premise of the film is rather simple: due to the inability for it to be properly refrigerated in transport at the time, Coors beer was unlicensed for sale east of Texas in the late 1970s. As a result, transporting it across state lines for commercial reasons was considered bootlegging. As the result of an $80,000 bet, the titular Bandit runs blocker for his friend Snowman's truck to distract law enforcement from the illegal shipment. They have to make a roundtrip between Atlanta and Texarkana in fewer than 28 hours to get the money. I highly recommend it if you haven't seen it.
As most of us do, I have a list of songs I consider to be "guilty pleasures." Most of the songs on mine were released after 1989, which is generally the point that I stop listening to mainstream music releases. Lovefool is at the top of that list, a song I hate admitting that I love as much as I do. I was sitting in the living room one day with my parents in late 2013 when I first heard it, as they found and watched the music video for it.
This has been my favorite song since the moment I heard it, a title it has never lost. On the night of July 2, 2014, Wyatt and I were working on the tenth NosLabs on the NosPack server. I remember I'd often sit back and listen to the entirety of the Selected Works 1972 - 1999 album, and I remember grooving to it in-game as I played it, dancing in the pink/orange hall next to the lounge. I also began to collect records in 2014, and this record was the second one that I spent months hunting down until I found it in January 2015.
I'd just discovered Fleetwood Mac when I started to collect records in 2014. As a result, Rumours was the very first album that I spent time actively hunting down. I never found one in stores, but it turned out my grandmother had four copies of it, so she gave me one of them. On July 6, 2014, a cloudy, uncomfortably warm and humid (but not outright hot) day, we visited the Bass Pro Shops location. As we approached it, I had Dreams playing on my iPod touch.
