You actually want me to respond to this? I'm pretty sure you don't.
Some of this may be out of sequence because it all took place a hell of a long time ago and there's a hell of a lot of stuff that happened.
It all began with a stone, or so the legends say. In ages past, a sentient jewel, enormous and beautiful banished the darkness. Its many-colored light filled the world with life and brought forth mighty Gods. Bathed in that light, the world entered an age of bliss. Until, after a time, the Gods fell into slumber. That world was called: Bastardly Productions.
It was due to Bastardly I originally discovered ezBoard. It didn't take long to form a desire to find a Final Fantasy message board. Eyes on Final Fantasy was not the first, but it was the finest. I originally found EoFF after being unofficially banned from another forum (I was not actually banned, but one of the mods had a massive stick in his rectum about my username containing the word "bastard" and threatened to leave, so I left instead)
To understand why I was so strongly drawn to EoFF, you have to understand that I was raised in a City of Assholes. Throughout my upbringing, I was always surrounded by assholes and thought that assholery was the norm. Thus, when I first started using the internet -- prior to even creating Bastardly -- I tended to gravitate towards forums that were...I don't want to say "filled with assholes," but certainly not the kind of place where you want to show any sort of weakness. Mind you, I still like that kind of place. PI was that kind of place, and it was funny as hell.
So. Enter EoFF. Found it by looking for Final Fantasy, and saw some FF content, and it looked like a few of the people might be fun. about:WesLYI started out immediately disliking WesLY because I thought it was lame to be named after a character from DragonLance, which I then thought of as considerably more kiddy than it actually is on account of the young age I read and comprehended it at, but that wasn't the fault of the material. I soon got over thinking that WesLY was a tosser because he was more fun back then than he is now.. What jumped out at me though was EoEO. Back then, EoEO was actually well named instead of being a glorified world events forum where people go to talk about politics without getting flamed. It was actually about each other in a way that isn't possible on a message board the size of today's EoFF. I created a new ezBoard account just for EoFF so that my piss-taking type of friends wouldn't follow me to EoFF and jizz all over EoEO. It was really something special back in the day, and probably why I felt closer to the oldbies that were around before EoEO turned into the monstrosity you see today.
So yeah, I joined up in February of 2000, not long after EoFF was created. I got on WesLY's nerves. I used to think RSL was a hostile arsehole. I made friends with Cid, Dan Walkie, and Unne right away. I think I made another ezBoard about learning to speak other languages, which to this day I do not speak. Unne got involved in that. I wrote Frig7, which I enjoyed immensely at the time but have been regretting for the last 10 years or so. EoFF got me involved in a couple of other boards, including Jojo's "nuthouse sock brigade" (I still do not understand the name of this place. Please do not explain it), FF:ID, Heaven's Well, and FFLegend. I'm pretty sure I was staff at FFL before EoFF left ezBoard forever. Somewhere around this time, Quigoni -- a former admin at EoFF during ezBoard days, registered eyesonff.com and put pornography all over it, which is why in the early days, this site's domain was eyesonff.net. Which later became a porn site, if I recall.
I was out-of-province with no internet access for the ezBoard->UBB switchover. I hated UBB immediately, I still think that ezBoard, munged up as it is in the present day, is superior to UBB. That was the phase BoB was talking about where peoples' avatars were force-changed on them. I think it was in the UBB era that I got Knighted, and I was super psyched about that. I accomplished nothing of note as a Knight. I accepted the switch to vBulletin because I realized ezBoard was never coming back, vBulletin was non-trout, and ezBoard was rapidly turning to trout. This was back in 1.x days when message boards didn't have much more functionality than a big corkboard and a pile of post-it notes. With avatars.
EoFF was sort of my safe haven during this era. I got involved with a lot of internet drama at FFL, and Bastardly started fading away on account of having no real purpose when there was no demand for savestate editors. I made friends with Phoenix from FFL at the time and this was a Bad Idea with capitals. I was a self-absorbed wanker at the time, and she was a control freak; self-absorbed wankers and control freaks should never ever mix. The self-absorbed wanker loves to show things off and wants everyone to ooh and aww and spout about how great their favorite thing is. The control freak is easy to coax into checking something out--the problem is they want to take over. I was staff at FFL with her at the time, and couldn't stop talking about how great EoFF was. She either got sick of hearing about it or wanted me focused on FFL whether I liked it or not and started subtly trying to pry me and EoFF apart. She knew me well, and knew just how to introduce turbulence. This was the beginning of the end of my glory days as an EoFFer.
It was the release of vBulletin 2 that got me promoted to Admin. Cid just wanted to show off how cool it was, and I did a couple of tweaks that I guess he hadn't thought of, so he decided to keep me around as a "temp admin" that became permanent at some indeterminate point that nobody in the galaxy can pinpoint exactly. This is when I did a lot of the junk that people remember me for. What I remember is mostly failure. I made Magestar, and it was crap. I tried to write another FF parody, and it was crap. I tried to write serious fiction, and it was crap. I tried to temper Britt's Anti-Spam witch hunts, and I was crap at it. I tried to loosen up Unne's anti-swearing stance, and I was crap at it. I honestly don't know why so many people decided that there was anything great at me during my time as an admin. I was, as I've stated before, a self-absorbed wanker. (Still am, to a lesser degree, or why the hell am I still here typing 10 minutes after my shift ended at work? I'm not even close to being done here.)
Into this cascading crap circus, I let my guard down. It's a short step from self-absorbed wanker with power to raging egomaniac. I became convinced that Phoenix was so jealous of EoFF's hold on my attention that she wanted to destroy it. Thus, when Raf (present username: Endless) was nominated for admin, I lost my perspective. I told everyone that adminning Raf was as good as adminning Phoenix and that she'd be another Quigoni. The moment that happened, my departure from staff -- and for several years from EoFF itself -- was inevitable. Nobody ever really trusted me again after they saw me turn on Raf. It finally ended my friendship with Phoenix, which looks like it was the better thing for both of us in the long run. From that moment on, any time I spoke with any heat or passion whatsoever, it was just Bleys being a drama queen again. I still had a lot of fun as an admin after that in the lulls between blowouts, but more often than not EoFF's staff forum was hostile ground for me.
I took a few leaves of absence after that when the hostility in EoFF staff got to me; this is how I came to join a lot of other communities, including tGA, AO, LiveJournal, Aiyon, and a few others that no longer exist and I can't remember. For over a year, I was mainly just looking for a good time to quit staff without anyone linking it to any specific dramafest. A lot of bad feelings erupted in those years. I specifically remember catching someone pretending to be me at another forum and I made a thread about it here, intending to link to it at the foreign forum and use to to prove that the interloper was not me. To this day, I feel the same way. It's as Iago says:
In a series of events that hurts and puzzles me to this day, Majken attacked me for it; I can't remember specific things that were said, but I think the general gist was that I was a big baby for caring about someone stealing my identity, and the. entire. staff. took. her. side. BoB deleted my thread over my objections. Not closed. Deleted. So I couldn't link to it to unmask the villain who'd stolen my name. I will never understand why anybody reacted the way they did. That ended my friendship with Majken, and almost with BoB. It was still quite a while before I could speak to BoB without rage, and as for Majken, I don't think I spoke to her until she wasn't a her anymore, in 2009ish.Originally Posted by Iago, Act III Scene III
I think it was during this period that I think I initially decided that I didn't like Shorty or Freya. I can't remember why, though, so it couldn't be important. I've only really got to know them for real since I came back to EoFF this year and got exactly the opposite impression of them that I formed way back in the day. Maybe it was a while after I quit staff. Dunno, the years run together.
So, it was mostly marking time for a while; I was still an admin when I finished my first college diploma, started and ended the only relationship I've ever been in, and moved away from my home in Halifax. It was a while after moving to Moncton I saw that the timing was right to finally leave staff, and I started missing it pretty much immediately. It was pretty fun in between meltdowns. But, I stuck to my guns. I'm pretty sure everyone was expecting me to ask to be let back on staff pretty much right away. Then for a time, I think people started thinking that the only reason I wasn't asking to be let back in was because the answer would be no, so they started prompting me to ask. I think I made a private feedback thread that basically said "stop smurfing hinting I should come back on staff, it's pissing me off" before it finally stopped. I think that's about when people realized that I wasn't coming back at all.
The next big event I remember is what is being termed the "monumental breakdown in staff protocol" in 2005 which is the most assholish thing that EoFF staff has ever been involved in; I don't believe I've had a civil conversation with Shlup since then. That's when and why I officially left EoFF and stopped thinking myself of an EoFFer.
For the next few years, I occasionally poked my head in for things like anniversary threads and when somebody linked me to EoFF because someone had posted something Bleys-related in a meme like manner. I think I had to bitch and moan quite a bit to get the 2 Bleys smilies removed from EoFF -- it wasn't really appropriate for a forum who'd stomped on meh nuts to be using my face as a smiley.
When EoFF got sold the first time, it was to a name I recognized, and not in a good way. The same douchecannon had bought and destroyed AnimeOnline, which was a really great place back in the Gig/Ewdi/Tych era. The one good thing to come of it was that I was finally able to get Frig7 removed from EoFF hosting -- instead of being a friend hosting a friend's troutty little story, it was a commercial entity using my intellectual property without my permission or authorization. Huzzah to that!
After Señor Douchebag sold EoFF to a neutral party, I started getting occasional nostalgia attacks and coming back to EoFF every now and then. EoFF, however, consistently found itself making me feel extremely unwelcome within a couple of weeks each time I tried to come back, so I never stuck around. The exceptions to this were Miriel, Del Murder, and misfit, who played FFXI with me. I felt a bit tense around Murder at first, since he was involved in April Fools 2005 and I thought he might try to start trout, but he didn't and I didn't and we got along fine and the healing process could begin. *orchestra music*
Until now. This time I came back to EoFF expecting to be made to feel unwelcome and exactly the opposite thing happened. This, I think is the best EoFF has ever been -- certainly the best that it's been since before I went staff. I've learned that I actually like a couple of people I thought that I didn't like (Freya and Shorty), that some people I thought were mediocre and forgettable were actually quite cool (Hi Quin and Vivi22) and some people who I thought were adequate are actually awesome (Jiro, Psy). Pats on the back to everyone who's been active at EoFF since June, not just those name-dropped in this thread.
You realize of course that if I hadn't stayed after work to type this up, I'd be home right now? BTW, I don't drive, I walk. And I live 6 kilometers away from work. I hope you're happy.
