Anti
return of the king
- 10,818
- Posts
- 16
- Years
- Kobe's Reality
- Seen Mar 6, 2022
Please don't lock or delete this thread.
Hello friends. I used to pop on the server periodically to check back in on everyone, but I haven't seen a single one of you there in months. Maybe I just don't check often enough, I don't know. As it has become tiresome trying to track down everyone and I don't want to send a bunch of VMs, I figured I'd just consolidate the effort here.
I was hoping for a no bullshit, more sincere version of this than I've done in the past. It seems this community has died, and that's fine, but if that's the case I do worry there won't be many more chances to do this. So I'm going to do it now.
If you know who I am, you've been here a long time. Three years, ten years, doesn't matter really, that's a lot. I'm 26 now, so I spent something like a quarter or a third of my life as an active user here, which usually meant hours a day talking with strangers. Maybe there's an exception or two I'm missing, but I think this is true of most everyone I regularly interacted with who is (or appears to be) still around. I hope it doesn't sound too weighty--and I don't think it is at all--to say PC and its various social offshoots have been a significant part of our lives, and really our development as people. For many of us, we grew up here. A lot of us met significant others or lovers here and at least made a friend or two we still keep in touch with somehow. My siblings have met PC users I knew in my time here. My real-life friends know about many of you, by both username and name. PC doesn't bleed into my real life like it used to, but isn't it something that it ever did?
I'm sure everyone has their little pockets where vestiges of this community exist, maybe on Discord or whatever people might be using now, but as I am not aware of them and was only scarcely part of them when I was here, I am going to pry and ask everyone some things to fill in that gap for myself.
How is everyone? How are your lives going? What are you doing now? Do you feel happy and fulfilled? What are your struggles? How has this community affected your lives? How are things here? What feels relevant to share that doesn't address any of these questions?
While I want to withhold much of what I want to say to spare myself the potential embarrassment of posting this to an indifferent or dead community, I still want to share something myself. I left PC after returning for my senior year of college, and the two years that followed graduating were very unsettled for me. It's hard to achieve material security, especially when you spent your free time here and not developing marketable skills. But I did begin to self-teach Python a couple years ago at the recommendation of a friend, which eventually branched out into other programming skills. This eventually became a job. I appreciate the irony, though, that after years of deriding excessive CSS in RMTs or battle logs or wherever else it might have popped up, it suddenly...became my career? I don't know how that happened. Two years ago, I wrote a command line Pokemon battle sim--basically some poverty-ass Pokemon Showdown, to still be much too charitable to what I produced--and looking back on that I realize how bizarrely instrumental my time here was in letting me do "adult things" like developing skills and getting a job, moving into my own apartment, and spending embarrassing sums of money reliving the original spark for this hobby in the first place: the original WOTC Pokemon cards. Base, Jungle, Fossil, and parts of a few other sets, all displayed in my home. So in some sense I guess my time here is there for everyone to see, maybe hidden in plain sight for some, but most people important to me know that I was raised here, too.
I'm doing well. I hope you are too.
I'd like to hear from everyone, as the time between when I remember to check in here keeps getting longer, and I would really like to know how everyone is doing. And even if you have no idea who the hell I am but are or were affiliated with competitive battling on PC in a way that feels significant to you, I'd like it if you posted too.
And finally, to circle back on my plea at the start of this post, if I must justify the existence of this (definitely against the rules) thread, here, in "Strategies and Movesets", maybe we collectively earned an off-topic thread in our own community to process what the experience meant and continues to mean to us as individuals and as a community. PokeCommunity.
Hello friends. I used to pop on the server periodically to check back in on everyone, but I haven't seen a single one of you there in months. Maybe I just don't check often enough, I don't know. As it has become tiresome trying to track down everyone and I don't want to send a bunch of VMs, I figured I'd just consolidate the effort here.
I was hoping for a no bullshit, more sincere version of this than I've done in the past. It seems this community has died, and that's fine, but if that's the case I do worry there won't be many more chances to do this. So I'm going to do it now.
If you know who I am, you've been here a long time. Three years, ten years, doesn't matter really, that's a lot. I'm 26 now, so I spent something like a quarter or a third of my life as an active user here, which usually meant hours a day talking with strangers. Maybe there's an exception or two I'm missing, but I think this is true of most everyone I regularly interacted with who is (or appears to be) still around. I hope it doesn't sound too weighty--and I don't think it is at all--to say PC and its various social offshoots have been a significant part of our lives, and really our development as people. For many of us, we grew up here. A lot of us met significant others or lovers here and at least made a friend or two we still keep in touch with somehow. My siblings have met PC users I knew in my time here. My real-life friends know about many of you, by both username and name. PC doesn't bleed into my real life like it used to, but isn't it something that it ever did?
I'm sure everyone has their little pockets where vestiges of this community exist, maybe on Discord or whatever people might be using now, but as I am not aware of them and was only scarcely part of them when I was here, I am going to pry and ask everyone some things to fill in that gap for myself.
How is everyone? How are your lives going? What are you doing now? Do you feel happy and fulfilled? What are your struggles? How has this community affected your lives? How are things here? What feels relevant to share that doesn't address any of these questions?
While I want to withhold much of what I want to say to spare myself the potential embarrassment of posting this to an indifferent or dead community, I still want to share something myself. I left PC after returning for my senior year of college, and the two years that followed graduating were very unsettled for me. It's hard to achieve material security, especially when you spent your free time here and not developing marketable skills. But I did begin to self-teach Python a couple years ago at the recommendation of a friend, which eventually branched out into other programming skills. This eventually became a job. I appreciate the irony, though, that after years of deriding excessive CSS in RMTs or battle logs or wherever else it might have popped up, it suddenly...became my career? I don't know how that happened. Two years ago, I wrote a command line Pokemon battle sim--basically some poverty-ass Pokemon Showdown, to still be much too charitable to what I produced--and looking back on that I realize how bizarrely instrumental my time here was in letting me do "adult things" like developing skills and getting a job, moving into my own apartment, and spending embarrassing sums of money reliving the original spark for this hobby in the first place: the original WOTC Pokemon cards. Base, Jungle, Fossil, and parts of a few other sets, all displayed in my home. So in some sense I guess my time here is there for everyone to see, maybe hidden in plain sight for some, but most people important to me know that I was raised here, too.
I'm doing well. I hope you are too.
I'd like to hear from everyone, as the time between when I remember to check in here keeps getting longer, and I would really like to know how everyone is doing. And even if you have no idea who the hell I am but are or were affiliated with competitive battling on PC in a way that feels significant to you, I'd like it if you posted too.
And finally, to circle back on my plea at the start of this post, if I must justify the existence of this (definitely against the rules) thread, here, in "Strategies and Movesets", maybe we collectively earned an off-topic thread in our own community to process what the experience meant and continues to mean to us as individuals and as a community. PokeCommunity.
