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The poverty of language doesn't afford me the ability to fully express the regrets I have for the things I've said and the way I've treated many people from this forum. I cannot sit here and ask for a forgiveness as, even with the excuse of immaturity and the emotional turmoil that goes along with it, I would not forgive myself. I can only hope to reconnect with the few of you that tolerated me and show just how different I am, and maybe connect with those of you with whom we never quite synced up because my behavior repelled like Axe Body Spray.
I hope you all are doing well. I'm Phil. It's been a long time. I had some trouble with getting signed in but I figured it out. This place has been on my mind a bit lately, and if you care to read a bit, there's some backstory. You don't gotta read all this. And I'm intentionally leaving some parts out for the sake of brevity but this turd is still gonna be long, you might wanna flush halfway through.
(The below is kind of like one of those made-for-TV Hallmark movies, based on a true story, the time and facts a bit jumbled up, and without the charm of Andrew Walker or Lacey Chabert. But, hey, I'm the narrator, this is my story, I'll tell it however I **** well please.)
So I was talking with this friend, right? And I say to her that it's been a while since I was really happy, y'know? Like, yeah, I got the whole wife and kid and house and two cars in the garage and the dogs and a gorgeous view of mountains and 401k and all that jazz. Life is good. It's supposed to be happy. But call it a mid-life crisis, call it nostalgia, whatever you want, I didn't have that same feeling of "happy" I remember growing up.
I go on to explain that life is tough because the range of emotions you experience feel like they've gotten more and more narrow, you're not "allowed" to have extreme joy or depression. People say, "Hey, Phil, how are you?" at work, and you're not really supposed to say, "Terrible!" Because if you do say, "Terrible!" they go, "Aaawww, but why?" Why? WHY? The economy stinks, bees are dying, and movies are pretty much all sequels now. Why do I gotta justify having a bad day? Have you seen, you know, ALL OF THIS?! Why don't you tell me why your day is going so great, Andrea?! Then suddenly you're in HR and you have to explain to Sadie that you were making conversation. Then the next day, Stacy says, "Hey, Phil, why don't you just go do something that actually makes you happy?" and you go, "Hey, Stacy, why don't you just shut up?" and Sadie happens to walk by that exact moment and suddenly you're in another meeting and Stacy is there and she's laughing. "Oh, no, Phil and I have a great relationship, we're having banter." But it doesn't matter, Sadie puts you on notice. And a little while goes by and all is well and good. Then the company gets this guy, Bryan, and he starts talking about AI being implemented in your role and how it's going to help you be more productive but don't worry it for sure won't cause any loss of staff. Then you're told you gotta write people up, you gotta get aggressive, and if people don't start meeting some pretty absurd goals set by an AI bot, they're going to get fired. And if you don't do that, you're fired. So you do the thing and you start working through and you whittle your team of 15 incredible human beings (but objectively kinda bad at the job) down to 10 incredible human beings (but objectively only okay at the job). Then the management pulls you and ~3000 other people into a big meeting and says, "What's about to happen doesn't define you or your career with us, but as of today, January 28th, you are all no longer part of this organization."
All of that, it should have been groundbreaking, devastating, boom clap the sound of my heart but you don't make me feel good you make me feel like I've wasted 14 god**** years with this company, it should kill on the inside. But it didn't. I just... moved on to another job.
Then the friend told me to shut the **** up (SHE SAID THAT!, crazy, right? She didn't say that, but can you imagine?! Some friend.) and try to remember the last time I felt like I could have a range of emotions and think it was kind of acceptable.
And I then go on to explain that there was this time that started when I was like 16 and I was part of this group of dudes that all played Halo locally. We would all sit down in parents' basements and joke and kill each other then crouch over the body repeatedly and call each other slurs (none of us had the ability to comprehend the irony of calling one another a sexual epithet of a homosexual male while taking part in the action of having simulated male-on-male intercourse with a corpse). Then I also made friends with those people across the country. I moved from Utah to California to Virginia to New York to Virginia to Utah, I always managed to get in to a new local group of the Halo crew. Even after leaving the East coast, I'd occasionally fly out to LAN events or drive hundreds of miles to play and reconnect. From 2003 to 2016. But then... 2016 happened...
(Look, I know, politics gets people riled up, but I think it's important that we get this out of the way in today's day and age so you know where I stand. You don't gotta engage with me about it, it's fine. This my equivalent of the "COEXIST" bumper sticker.)
I'm sure you remember, 2016 was the rise of MAGA and Trump. I hate to just come outright to y'all here with politics, sorry not sorry, but, it sucked a huge swath of the Halo community in. Now, we never talked politics, those friends and I. We talked sports and we talked families and we talked about where life was going, but never politics. Maybe because "people that are different from you are still humans and they exist and you should share the planet and resources with them because they're still humans worthy of your empathy" didn't used to be a political topic. But now they were all on board. Like an amateur surfer, I couldn't get on board. Even as a somewhat-that-way leaning person, politically, it just hurt to see people I considered friends start to say derogatory things about OTHER people I considered friends and loved ones for literally no valid reason. I remember, specifically, being at an event and some guy named Tyler saying, "Yeah, when this guy gets in office he's going to get all of those (slur) off welfare, those (slur) out of our military, and those (slur) in Hollywood out of the country." There was an agreement among the dozen or so people there, including the person with whom I carpooled. That person was not willing to leave. So I left. It was Friday, 6 PM, December 16th, 2016. I got home at about 5 AM, walking 30 miles in 25° weather. This is the one moment I remember specifically, to the date and time, because I realized I didn't fit and didn't want to fit in with these people.
"Well, that's good of you to step away from people with whom you don't connect. Was there any time prior to that, or any time since?"
Since? No. It's kinda hard to be overly emotional around family. You scare your family. When the baby's sad? Baby's sad, and we're all going to work to help her. When mom's sad? Mom's sad, and it's going to be a little hard, but we're all going to work to help her. When dad's sad? Oh **** oh **** oh **** oh **** why is dad sad are we all going to die is the house on fire did they discontinue Oreo O's? (They did. But then they brought them back. And they're not as good. Whole big thing.)
BUT PRIOR!
Yeah, because I was a dork that only made friends sparingly, I could go on the Internet on various places and just... let loose. And the stuff I said was ****ED UP, it was wrong then and it's wrong now, but I let out that weird part of me. I got to really express who I was... Now, granted, that person I was is LOOOONG gone. Dead and buried. Decomposed to ash. I'd like to think that age and experiences and such has helped me become a different, dare I say better? person. And those spaces are gone. The messed up corners of the Internet - the Chans - either disappeared or remained degenerate spaces while I grew up. The discussions had now all turned to Reddit, which is now 75% bots posting the same content across all the primary subreddits. Twitter is an alt-right shell of its former self (Although I have kept an account used for spamming "dicksdicksdicks" daily at Elon Musk for like a year when he announced the removal of the block feature. You gotta keep a little bit of whimsy!) And vBulletin boar...d...s... Oh hey!
VGC?! Hey! You guys are still here!
I said to the friend that I should probably refrain from going back to VGC, though. I was a kid (and only kinda), I was a jerk, and I said some things I'm not proud of and I possibly traumatized some people. Then she said, "You think you're important enough to these Internet strangers that you actually could have hurt or traumatized them?" I was like, "MOTHER****ER, HEY!... Well, ****, I didn't think of it that way." Then I go down this mental spiral.
Was I as bad as I remember? Was I worse? Do I deserve forgiveness? Is there anything to forgive? Do I even forgive myself?
Well, by then, my friend, to whom I've turned for advice these past years (and she to I) had gone to bed. I sure as hell was not going to sleep with all that on my mind, so, like a dog without a horse, I ran wild.
I tried to recover my account but the email was tied to an old email that I didn't remember so I tried to recover that email but it was linked to another email that I didn't remember and didn't use so I had to go through this annoying rigmarole of verifying through Google to verify through Yahoo to get into the account. Then I got signed in and started turning knobs and pressing buttons in the profile to update stuff and saw this avatar and had a chuckle and a pang of regret*. And I sat here for an hour to type all this out and editorialize. *Look, I know that this avatar was hilarious in 2004, but, like the Washington Redskins, I gotta get with the times. Call me "woke" or whatever, but I gotta align the message and the human, here, and a mass-murdering dictator laughing just ain't it.
By the way, if you read all this, cool. I appreciate it. Thank you tremendously for giving me any amount of time for which have certainly not earned lately nor deserve from earlier exchanges. The narrative of first person to third person to the friend perspective was just my train of thought and I know it's giving David Foster Wallace with a millionth of the talent but maybe equal in self-doubt. I can't make promises that I'll even remember to come back after all this. And if I did, like Cogsworth said, they're only *promises I don't intend to keep*.
Even before that conversation with the aforementioned friend, I've sat and talked with a member of this board a couple times in the past years (not gonna name names, I'll let them come around if they feel like it), waxing nostalgic over the people here and the connections we made. I've had conversations with people in my life and talked about what a great time it was to be alive and on the Internet from 2003-2010, and mentioned many people from this forum by their screen name and funny or interesting moments we shared. I look forward to the possibility of speaking to anybody that may still be hanging around.
I love you. Goodnight. Sweet dreams.
I hope you all are doing well. I'm Phil. It's been a long time. I had some trouble with getting signed in but I figured it out. This place has been on my mind a bit lately, and if you care to read a bit, there's some backstory. You don't gotta read all this. And I'm intentionally leaving some parts out for the sake of brevity but this turd is still gonna be long, you might wanna flush halfway through.
(The below is kind of like one of those made-for-TV Hallmark movies, based on a true story, the time and facts a bit jumbled up, and without the charm of Andrew Walker or Lacey Chabert. But, hey, I'm the narrator, this is my story, I'll tell it however I **** well please.)
So I was talking with this friend, right? And I say to her that it's been a while since I was really happy, y'know? Like, yeah, I got the whole wife and kid and house and two cars in the garage and the dogs and a gorgeous view of mountains and 401k and all that jazz. Life is good. It's supposed to be happy. But call it a mid-life crisis, call it nostalgia, whatever you want, I didn't have that same feeling of "happy" I remember growing up.
I go on to explain that life is tough because the range of emotions you experience feel like they've gotten more and more narrow, you're not "allowed" to have extreme joy or depression. People say, "Hey, Phil, how are you?" at work, and you're not really supposed to say, "Terrible!" Because if you do say, "Terrible!" they go, "Aaawww, but why?" Why? WHY? The economy stinks, bees are dying, and movies are pretty much all sequels now. Why do I gotta justify having a bad day? Have you seen, you know, ALL OF THIS?! Why don't you tell me why your day is going so great, Andrea?! Then suddenly you're in HR and you have to explain to Sadie that you were making conversation. Then the next day, Stacy says, "Hey, Phil, why don't you just go do something that actually makes you happy?" and you go, "Hey, Stacy, why don't you just shut up?" and Sadie happens to walk by that exact moment and suddenly you're in another meeting and Stacy is there and she's laughing. "Oh, no, Phil and I have a great relationship, we're having banter." But it doesn't matter, Sadie puts you on notice. And a little while goes by and all is well and good. Then the company gets this guy, Bryan, and he starts talking about AI being implemented in your role and how it's going to help you be more productive but don't worry it for sure won't cause any loss of staff. Then you're told you gotta write people up, you gotta get aggressive, and if people don't start meeting some pretty absurd goals set by an AI bot, they're going to get fired. And if you don't do that, you're fired. So you do the thing and you start working through and you whittle your team of 15 incredible human beings (but objectively kinda bad at the job) down to 10 incredible human beings (but objectively only okay at the job). Then the management pulls you and ~3000 other people into a big meeting and says, "What's about to happen doesn't define you or your career with us, but as of today, January 28th, you are all no longer part of this organization."
All of that, it should have been groundbreaking, devastating, boom clap the sound of my heart but you don't make me feel good you make me feel like I've wasted 14 god**** years with this company, it should kill on the inside. But it didn't. I just... moved on to another job.
Then the friend told me to shut the **** up (SHE SAID THAT!, crazy, right? She didn't say that, but can you imagine?! Some friend.) and try to remember the last time I felt like I could have a range of emotions and think it was kind of acceptable.
And I then go on to explain that there was this time that started when I was like 16 and I was part of this group of dudes that all played Halo locally. We would all sit down in parents' basements and joke and kill each other then crouch over the body repeatedly and call each other slurs (none of us had the ability to comprehend the irony of calling one another a sexual epithet of a homosexual male while taking part in the action of having simulated male-on-male intercourse with a corpse). Then I also made friends with those people across the country. I moved from Utah to California to Virginia to New York to Virginia to Utah, I always managed to get in to a new local group of the Halo crew. Even after leaving the East coast, I'd occasionally fly out to LAN events or drive hundreds of miles to play and reconnect. From 2003 to 2016. But then... 2016 happened...
(Look, I know, politics gets people riled up, but I think it's important that we get this out of the way in today's day and age so you know where I stand. You don't gotta engage with me about it, it's fine. This my equivalent of the "COEXIST" bumper sticker.)
I'm sure you remember, 2016 was the rise of MAGA and Trump. I hate to just come outright to y'all here with politics, sorry not sorry, but, it sucked a huge swath of the Halo community in. Now, we never talked politics, those friends and I. We talked sports and we talked families and we talked about where life was going, but never politics. Maybe because "people that are different from you are still humans and they exist and you should share the planet and resources with them because they're still humans worthy of your empathy" didn't used to be a political topic. But now they were all on board. Like an amateur surfer, I couldn't get on board. Even as a somewhat-that-way leaning person, politically, it just hurt to see people I considered friends start to say derogatory things about OTHER people I considered friends and loved ones for literally no valid reason. I remember, specifically, being at an event and some guy named Tyler saying, "Yeah, when this guy gets in office he's going to get all of those (slur) off welfare, those (slur) out of our military, and those (slur) in Hollywood out of the country." There was an agreement among the dozen or so people there, including the person with whom I carpooled. That person was not willing to leave. So I left. It was Friday, 6 PM, December 16th, 2016. I got home at about 5 AM, walking 30 miles in 25° weather. This is the one moment I remember specifically, to the date and time, because I realized I didn't fit and didn't want to fit in with these people.
"Well, that's good of you to step away from people with whom you don't connect. Was there any time prior to that, or any time since?"
Since? No. It's kinda hard to be overly emotional around family. You scare your family. When the baby's sad? Baby's sad, and we're all going to work to help her. When mom's sad? Mom's sad, and it's going to be a little hard, but we're all going to work to help her. When dad's sad? Oh **** oh **** oh **** oh **** why is dad sad are we all going to die is the house on fire did they discontinue Oreo O's? (They did. But then they brought them back. And they're not as good. Whole big thing.)
BUT PRIOR!
Yeah, because I was a dork that only made friends sparingly, I could go on the Internet on various places and just... let loose. And the stuff I said was ****ED UP, it was wrong then and it's wrong now, but I let out that weird part of me. I got to really express who I was... Now, granted, that person I was is LOOOONG gone. Dead and buried. Decomposed to ash. I'd like to think that age and experiences and such has helped me become a different, dare I say better? person. And those spaces are gone. The messed up corners of the Internet - the Chans - either disappeared or remained degenerate spaces while I grew up. The discussions had now all turned to Reddit, which is now 75% bots posting the same content across all the primary subreddits. Twitter is an alt-right shell of its former self (Although I have kept an account used for spamming "dicksdicksdicks" daily at Elon Musk for like a year when he announced the removal of the block feature. You gotta keep a little bit of whimsy!) And vBulletin boar...d...s... Oh hey!
VGC?! Hey! You guys are still here!
I said to the friend that I should probably refrain from going back to VGC, though. I was a kid (and only kinda), I was a jerk, and I said some things I'm not proud of and I possibly traumatized some people. Then she said, "You think you're important enough to these Internet strangers that you actually could have hurt or traumatized them?" I was like, "MOTHER****ER, HEY!... Well, ****, I didn't think of it that way." Then I go down this mental spiral.
Was I as bad as I remember? Was I worse? Do I deserve forgiveness? Is there anything to forgive? Do I even forgive myself?
Well, by then, my friend, to whom I've turned for advice these past years (and she to I) had gone to bed. I sure as hell was not going to sleep with all that on my mind, so, like a dog without a horse, I ran wild.
I tried to recover my account but the email was tied to an old email that I didn't remember so I tried to recover that email but it was linked to another email that I didn't remember and didn't use so I had to go through this annoying rigmarole of verifying through Google to verify through Yahoo to get into the account. Then I got signed in and started turning knobs and pressing buttons in the profile to update stuff and saw this avatar and had a chuckle and a pang of regret*. And I sat here for an hour to type all this out and editorialize. *Look, I know that this avatar was hilarious in 2004, but, like the Washington Redskins, I gotta get with the times. Call me "woke" or whatever, but I gotta align the message and the human, here, and a mass-murdering dictator laughing just ain't it.
By the way, if you read all this, cool. I appreciate it. Thank you tremendously for giving me any amount of time for which have certainly not earned lately nor deserve from earlier exchanges. The narrative of first person to third person to the friend perspective was just my train of thought and I know it's giving David Foster Wallace with a millionth of the talent but maybe equal in self-doubt. I can't make promises that I'll even remember to come back after all this. And if I did, like Cogsworth said, they're only *promises I don't intend to keep*.
Even before that conversation with the aforementioned friend, I've sat and talked with a member of this board a couple times in the past years (not gonna name names, I'll let them come around if they feel like it), waxing nostalgic over the people here and the connections we made. I've had conversations with people in my life and talked about what a great time it was to be alive and on the Internet from 2003-2010, and mentioned many people from this forum by their screen name and funny or interesting moments we shared. I look forward to the possibility of speaking to anybody that may still be hanging around.
I love you. Goodnight. Sweet dreams.
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