Minecraft
Ah, Minecraft, the most influential game of the past decade, the best selling game of all time, and the game I could never get in to. I have had an on and off relationship with Minecraft for the better part of the last 10 years. Fresh into college, I remember playing a pirated copy of the game and enjoying the concept of Skyblock. My roommate and I would watch and emulate a lot of the scenes from a youtube series. But after a while, I gave up on the game.
Fast forward to about a year ago and I legitimately bought a copy of the game to play a bit with friends. I ended up doing a trial for a server and we goofed around and made a small hub area, but that was it. Our schedules kinda prevented us from playing together, and on top of that, I still wasn't getting hooked in.
When I first got my domain, I also tried my hand at hosting my own server. I used a guide to get everything hooked up to Google Cloud, and got it working. It was a learning experience more than anything, and was retired within a few days. But I really liked the idea of building up my own site with a few additional applications.
So this past weekend, I decided to take a bit of a plunge. A friend in a Discord server had a birthday recently. They constantly watch different minecraft vids and play with others in the server using Hamachi. So I splurged a bit and got a server started. And with this time, I'm actually enjoying playing. I've done a bit of exploring and light building and it's been a good time. Unfortunately, schedules have kept me from playing with a few people on the server, but they've been making good progress on their own. I hope one day soon we'll all be able to do a celebration of sorts together.