Hi.
You don’t know me... Well, you might, but not under this
moniker. I used to
hang out here. I used to hang out here a lot really. When I found
Everything, I felt like a
kid in a candy store. It was... Everything! But then, like
Anakin Skywalker, I was lured to the
Dark Side. I feel for the
trap, I became hooked on the
level system, obsessed with
karma.
Everything was just a game.
At first I wanted to move up quickly. I wrote and wrote. I
noded short nodes and I noded some
long ones. Some were
good, some were
great; most were
mediocre, if
factual. I noded
a lot, I started moving up in the
levels. I wasn’t getting much
Karma at first though. Then I started
cheating. I created some
secondary accounts and leveled them up a bit. The extra
votes not only
eliminated my negatively
reputed nodes, but I got some
karma out of it everyday. And I voted, oh how I voted! I
burned all my votes on all my accounts
everyday. It wasn’t easy as I got
higher up; try burning hundreds of votes
everyday. In the end, it was hard to find things I hadn’t voted on. But I
digress. I kept moving up. One of my second accounts achieved
ching!’ing power. I started to
C! myself. Not everyday, I couldn’t be
that obvious.
I was playing a game, and it was one that required not only effort and perseverance, but also stealth.
So I worked and worked. I
toiled away day in and day out. Some of my nodes were really quite good. I wrote terrific
day logs. And I made it pretty high. I won’t tell you how high, because I don’t want to give away who I am, though I doubt it would matter anyway.
Then I got
busted. Someone killed a whole
slew of my nodes that were
cut&paste. I wasn’t
annoyed, I wasn’t
mad at the editor.
In fact I felt almost
relieved. She did me a
favor. Sometimes I was annoyed at some of the people whom I received messages from, critiquing my nodes for example. I felt
indignant since I’d been there longer than some of the
editors. But I realized that it wasn’t about that. I was just playing a
role that I’d created for myself. I was an
everything gamer;
no more or less. I never managed to fit into the
community that I visited
religiously and I realized that that made me
sad. I read nodes all the time when not noding myself. I came to feel as if I knew a lot of you. I read about the
gatherings, and how you’d get together and have a lot of fun. I saw friendships build up and followed the growth through
homenodes. I’d have given anything to “teach” at
Yossarian's School of Badassary.
I was jealous.
I was
jealous that no one even knew who I was, that I was never invited to the get-togethers. Sad that no one would be my
friend, that no one cared that I wrote a pile of nodes. No one cared that I was working up the level system. That didn’t matter. I wasn’t part of the community; a great community filled with
incredible and
interesting people, a community I’d watch
grow from its beginnings years before. I was just an
outsider trying to fit in the only way he could
think of and generally doing a bad job of it. Anyway, even though I seem to have rambled on a bit, there’s just one thing I wanted to say to everyone
I’m so sorry.
I miss you all, though I’m sure you don’t miss me.