I apologize for the complete tl;dr this is going to be. It's been a whirlwind, my almost-three-years here at PC. :]
Okay so this whole thing began back in like 2007. I had just gotten into junior high/middle school or whatever you want to call it, and I was beginning to do that whole "grow up and find your niche" thing. I had a couple of friends, a couple of closer ones, and one really good one. I'm not so close with him any more and I really regret how we've drifted apart... but we were best buds back then. As y'all should know, Diamond & Pearl came out in 2007 - and that was probably the year I was most into Pokemon. Me and my friend, DJ, would actually bring our DS(es? how do you pluralize this) to school and battle Pokemon after classes and stuff, despite the risk of being taunted by people who are determined to be an ass to everyone. We never really did get noticed though, and we had our fun sitting there playing Pokemon and battling with wireless stuff. It was awesome.
And then, one day at home, I was playing with Legos and I found one really cool piece. I have no idea what it was now, but I know it was one of those newfangled Bionicles things. I think it was like a wing. It was pretty badass. Anyway, I was just fiddling with it when I was like, damn, this would look like an amazing Pokemon. And I got to thinking about it more and more. It was a legendary Pokemon, of course. Only legendaries get random badass Lego-piece wings. And then it should definitely have like some amazing power so it could be like the title legendary for a game. I was totally into morbid things at the time so I was like "ohhhhhh it should be able to control dead things! no other pokemon can do that!" and I kept thinking of things it could do and moves it would have and how the player would interact with it. Gradually, I came up with a cute little storyline with my zombie-dragon with a Lego piece wing. And I was like, how do I take my ideas (which obviously were amazing because they were mine!) and make them into a real game??
I spent ages trying to figure out how the hell I was going to make a Pokemon game. Gradually I forgot about my zombie-dragon legendary's specifics, but the big idea was still there and I still wanted to make my own Pokemon game, with my own rules and my own Pokemon and my own stories and my own people. I talked to my dad, who is a computer programmer, about it, and he directed me to some very good resources for professional game designers... but I was twelve, so um no can do good sir! I got a book on the computer programming language Python but aside from the print command that basically took what you said and spat it out (i.e. print "hello world!" and when you run the program it goes "hello world!") I had no idea what was going on in that book. This didn't prevent me from still trying, though - I kept constantly looking for a new way for me to bring my ideas to life.
And one day, on YouTube, I came across something brand new to me - someone hacked a Pokemon game! I watched in awe as the player went through an introduction that involved Professor Birch spout derogatory terms without a care in the world, male genitalia growing on trees just outside of Oldgayle Town, and May asking the player for various... things. Oblivious to all of the, um, childishness going on there, I was still amazed at how they took the game and made something fresh out of it. (and I mean fresh)
So my next action was to figure out what the hell they did. I googled "Pokemon hacking" to get a lot of similar results - people crediting AdvanceText. Curious, I googled the program and learned that what they were doing was called "ROM hacking" - and I was totally into this. I stopped a few days in after learning that ROMs weren't exactly legal to have, but then I was like what the hell and progressed forward regardless. Naturally, the biggest (and only) place that dealt with Pokemon ROM Hacking was PC, so I found myself here.
Oh and I found my first post ever on PC. I never really went through the "noob" phase like a lot of our really good members have gone through. I was always Mr. Perfect, I suppose. ...I've degraded since then, haha. :(
Anyway, I worked as a loner for a long while. I tried to do something, messed it up, got pissed, downloaded a new ROM, tried again, messed it up, and just stopped trying. I couldn't do anything right, except work AdvanceText. Maybe that's why those awful YouTube hacks existed. But after a month or two of getting nothing done, I just left PC. I hated everything to do with hacking.
A couple of months later, I was cleaning my room for the first time in like six months (I was your average preteen boy okay) and I came across a sheet of paper I had printed out. It was a copy of thethethethe's scripting tutorial. That single piece of paper brought back all of my attention to PC, and I had a renewed interest in everything again. I actually worked for a solid amount of time on my hack, and I got the attention of some other new hackers like me. I started making new friends and relationships with people. And gradually, I realized that everything we were doing was noobish and trolly and young and immature and so I found myself finding new friends and leaving old ones behind. That's how it has to be, I suppose. People change. I don't really feel like talking about the people I've met and have known for a long time - if you want to know more about that, you can check out my two
awful blogs about people who have been awesome to me and/or changed my life,
here and
here. I've met a lot of awesome people, haha...
Anyway, I got a thread for my hack, Rebirth, up. It was bad.
Here's a link. Watch out, because blue does not go very well on black. Just sayin'. BUT THE BEST PART OF THAT THREAD WAS THAT I GOT A VOTE FROM ZEL FOR HACK OF THE WEEK AAAAH right before he left PC for the longest time, haha.
Here's a link to that too. I swear, I squealed for ages about how the most famous Pokemon hacker ever liked my bad hack. I was so proud of that. :(
So yeah. I got involved in the community more, and I started posting around a lot more. I was all over the place in Emulation - one of the more notable times that I can remember off the top of my head was when I semi-flamed some guy... BrokenRoses was the name, I think. Hmmm.... here we go,
this thread right here. I was so elitist back then... this really opened my eyes to watch out what the hell I was saying. I knew that I was right, but I didn't need to be an ass and try to impose that onto people who wouldn't accept it anyway. That was around the time that I met probably the best friend that I've had, online or not;
this gent right here. I've been working on a condensation of our VM conversation to post in a blog someday probably. Honestly, I hope all you guys meet a person that's as good of a fellow sometime in your life. :(
Oh, yeah, PC history. After I established my one half-flame of all time, I soon figured out that that really wasn't the way to go if you wanted to get peoples' attention. I soon tried to join the ROM Hacking Newsletter (RHN), ran by the moderator of Emulation at the time, Thrace. I got in (because of my flawless grammar obviously ;D ) but the newsletter kinda flopped. This is where I feel like the generations that I've known kinda split - most of the guys I knew before were beginning to die out and leave, and I began to meet new faces that I'd never known before. I met Goodies (who is now known as Manipulation), Chibi Robo, and a lot of other guys that I had never really associated myself with before. With all of the oldies cycling out, I really feel like this is when I began to step up in the community and I tried to take a bigger role in everything that I did. After RHN had been picked up by two other people (Darthatron and ~Teh_Panda~, each flopping within two editions), Manipulation and I tried to pick up ROM Hacking ourselves. This new crowd that I immersed myself in gradually became the face of Emulation, and we tried to represent well.
Thrace and Blazichu, two people who had basically been mods the entire time I had been at PC, suddenly both stepped down, leaving only Christos to do the duty. A new mod had to be elected... but I had no idea what was going on. See, right around then (I think it was April 2009) I was having some irl troubles and stuff so I took a break from PC. Of course, my main man colcolstyles kept me up-to-date on all of the latest happenings when I could access PC, and when I got the chance I checked PC to find out that they had elected destinedjagold as the new moderator of Emulation. I didn't really know him, and I still wasn't really around much. I gradually got back into it, though, and I picked up activity fast. After a little while, destinedjagold stepped down as well, and for a while it was just Christos having to cover the whole Emulation section (which is a pretty rough job, let me tell ya). Manipulation and I quickly realized that we were basically the only candidates for mod in Emulation at the time - everyone else just... didn't seem like they could do the job. We spent ages telling each other that they'd get the job. I knew I was probably on the worse end of the deal, too, because Harry had all of his staffy connections and I really didn't know anyone on staff.
And it was August 13th, at one o'clock PM on the dot. I got a nice little PM from everyone's favorite assistant admin, Mork - telling me that I was banned for posting a ROM on some guy's profile... not, haha. No, I got a request to moderate the Emulation section. I happily accepted it, then rushed over to MSN to talk to Harry about it.
And then I found out he got the same PM too. And he also accepted the call of duty. Manipulation and I became what I think was one of the first dual-moddings at PC. The job was amazing - you got so many privileges (though I hear some have gone away recently, heheh) and all the tools were neat and you got to feel the complete POWER of being able to say "hey, lucario_master44, you can't bump month-old threads." and then be able to say in
BOLD CAPITALIZED WORDS, "LOCKED".
It was fun, I'll admit. And then it got long. And then it got tiring. And then more and more noobs kept posting "The Revival of SHINYGOLD! I added a new map and you can get level 89 Raikous now!!". And then my schedule filled itself up. I was a member of my school's sophomore football team - meaning that I went to the sophomore game each week, I started the junior varsity game each week, and I watched the varsity game each week, essentially taking away three nights a week that I needed to do homework and things on. Including that with school, homework, chores, whatever tiny social life I actually had, and the basic necessities of living like eating and sleeping, I really had no time to mod. This intense pressure to get everything done really kind of broke me down, and I pussed out and asked to resign two months after being modded. Way to go, Vrai. :|
I took a break from PC for a while after I quit. I needed a break. And when I came back... everything just felt different. I found it hard as hell to post in Emulation. I just couldn't. I had no interest any more. I kept trying, but nothing good really ever came out. I accepted that and decided that I was going to move on from Emulation, really.
...so I got into a different section of PC, Strategies and Movesets. I had actually shown interest in being a part of S&M back when I was on staff - they had a "revival" thread where they were talking about bringing up tutoring people for competitive battling. I was interested, and I was partnered up with Wolflare (who is a total boss you guys should all talk to him all the time. tbh he deserves his modship more than most of the mods at PC we have right now, I think.). Of course, this is when my internet went bonkers and I left PC for a bit...
But I came back, with interest in S&M still. I met a cat named Vance, or .. Yeah, his username was ., but I'm going to refer to him as Vance because there is no need for extraneous punctuation that can lead to total confusion!!!?!?!
...yes well anyway I got into the competitive battling scene. I met guys like Dark Azelf and Anti and Luke and Syndrome (who was totally a jerk to me when I was a noob and had only been there for like a day but who is also a total boss if you get to know him). Competitive battling gradually became my "thing" and it became what I spent the majority of my time online doing. And that's really where I am today. There's a little bit more to it than that, but my days of competitive battling never really held as much drama as Emulation did, haha. I talk to a lot of people all the time and I like to think that I have several strong friendships at PC. I still spend my days trying to make quality competitive teams, but I think that I'm actually getting better at it, rather than not doing so like I usually do... Here's to sticking around for a little longer!
...and if you made it through all of that I commend you. :(
someone else should post a tl;dr history so i don't feel like the only noob who has spent so much time on this
