just droppin' a post in here to say hi to all these old faces. hi old faces!!
i've been active at gw/sw on and off since i was 6 years old (and made my current account when i was 6, and now i am 18 and i am still here #wow #woah
this place has been such a huge influence on me-- maybe more so than anyone else, due to my age. it's so hard trying to explain to others how much i have been impacted by growing up on these forums... how do i explain targ to my girlfriend? haha. GW/SW has challenged and shaped my values, my sense of humor, my intelligence, and my identity. huh, that sounds dramatic... but it's pretty true. i don't know what i would be like without the experiences i've had online. so much of who i am is based around conversations between people on the internet.
no lie i talk about this place in coded terms all the time. it gets super awkward when people are like, "oh, who was the friend?"
"ummm.... chef... boyardee..."
haha i have had this happen many times. what surprised me was when some friends actually recognized who i was talking about when i said "chef boyardee", and they were like WOAH YOU KNOW THE GUY WHO MADE BARKLEY SHUT UP AND JAM GAIDEN??! :O hahah. it's pretty crazy how that has come up in my real life! or rather, my in-person life... because GW/SW is definitely a huge part of my "real life", and the friends i've made here are just as real as any others. *sniffle* i love you guys !!! ;v; haha.
also-- others have mentioned this, i think, but-- a weird thing about forums is how personally connected you can feel to people who you haven't even seen or heard or necessarily talked to. just by reading people's posts and watching their interactions, you get to know people really well... often even without knowing certain things that would be considered "basics" in person, such as gender, height, race, etc... it's really interesting. like, i never even talked to steel very much in any sort of one-on-one basis, although we did have plenty of discussions (i.e. him yelling at me for being dumb) on the forums. but i ended up feeling so close to him, on the basis of our arguments, and his funny creations, and his posts during his battle with cancer... ultimately, he became someone i really looked up to and cared about, and his death hit me harder than i ever thought it could...
like, daaanng, guys. forums are deep. i don't think i'll ever really understand the extent to which i have been shaped by this place. :o
oh and since people are bringing up funny and shameful moments from the past: my 15 minutes of internet drama came from when chef impersonated me on AIM and wooed doktormartini and then posted the chat logs. and for some reason chef thought i lived in Hawaii, and so that's what he had said to dok. FYI, Sludgelord: even now, people ask me on IRC if i'm from Hawaii, even though i have lived in Michigan for my entire life. :P
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